Straight from the horses’ mouth, can’t ask for fairer than that! If an enemy had time to dig in like the Japanese did on Tarawa, is there any fortified bunker that ordnance could not destroy and necessitate an old-fashioned storming? I’m guessing not, but that’s what they thought in '45 only for the machines guns to open up on them.
Those thermobaric bombs are insane, I can only imagine how useful the Marines back then would found them. Would have made the job safer and quicker for them, at least, rather than having to rely on flamethrowers to flush the defenders out like at Iwo Jima (NSF the squeamish); “Where we can’t dig 'em out, we burn 'em out”.
Allowed? Yeah, that MacArthur had a reputation for being a wuss for letting the Philippines fall. :rolleyes: FYI, he was ordered to leave the Philippines by the Commander in Chief (the President) and actually received the Medal of Honor for pretty much just acting bravely and boldly in his retreat (it was a propaganda award and he knew it).
I doubt a North Korean ballistic missile could even hit a island/atoll the size of Tarawa with a nuclear payload, much less a carrier battle group on the move.
The Army did a lot of good shit in the Pacific.
However looking at just the casualty numbers does not tell the entire story. The Army had 22 Divisions in the Pacific and the Marines had 6 Divisions. The USMC suffered almost half the casualties with a much smaller force.
Again I’m not talking shit about the Army. They saddled up just like the Marines did.
The 8th Airforce did lose an astonishing 26K. Overall, the US Military lost 416K. The Navy & USMC lost about 52K, not counting Coast Guard & Merchant Marine.
It wasn’t a matter of him being a wuss. And it wasn’t an issue of what he could have done by the time he was ordered to leave. MacArthur’s mistakes were made in earlier. He should have deployed his forces in a more defensive arrangement. Instead he left them all bunched up where they were easy for the Japanese to attack.
The worst part is MacArthur grouped his forces together like this so they would be ready to launch an attack against the Japanese - and then he lost his nerve at the critical moment and didn’t order the attack.
As it was, the American and Filipino forces were able to offer an hard albeit impromptu defense and held out for five months. If they had planned ahead and prepared for a defensive campaign, they probably could have held out for over a year.
In the long run, the Philippines were going to fall. They were too far away from America and too close to Japan to hold out indefinitely. But it would have made a huge difference to the course of the war if Japan had been forced to fight a major campaign in the opening months of the war to conquer the Philippines. Most of the Pacific war was fought to retake places Japan captured in the first six months of the war - if Japan had been held back in those six months, the war might have ended a year or two earlier.
I think I was thinking Navy was included, but I must have confused the numbers. At any rate, the 8th AF’s 26k does beat the USMC’s 24k, which is something that the USMC’s PR machine doesn’t mention at all. By the propaganda, you’d think the USMC suffered 3x the casualties of all other services, which isn’t the case at all.