Thanks Slithy Tove.
No that was a nuclear physicist, his nephew, and two of his buddies, no casualties (well, except for the Nazis).
Exactly. I think the USMC is probably better at public relations than at fighting; you’d think from all the propaganda and movies and what-not, that the USMC suffered crazy out-of-proportion losses in the Pacific vs. the Japanese, when in fact, the casualties suffered by the USMC in the Pacific were only 13% of the losses suffered by the US Army in Europe.
That’s not to say that popular media is at all accurate; if you’ve seen “Band of Brothers”, you’d think that Easy Company spent a really long time half-starved and frozen outside of Bastogne. Two entire episodes and part of a third revolve around that period. How long was Easy Company actually cut off in Bastogne without supplies? Nine days (12/18 - 12/27).
So with that in mind, it’s easy to see how someone might not realize just what a grind it was in Europe.
Statistics can be a fun thing. I like to point out that the 8th Air Force suffered more casualties throughout WWII during the bombing campaign over Europe than the entire US Marine Corps did in the entire war.
Folks sometimes fail to take into account just how small the Marine Corps has always been compared to the other branches (of all the Armed Services, only the Coast Guard has fewer people)
A historian I knew claimed that Americans have different perceptions of the war based on geography, as most Americans from the west fought in the Pacific, and Americans from the east tended to fight in Europe/North African theater. So westerners are more likely to recall events such as the Bataan Death March or Guadalcanal and see Japan as the primary enemy, while easterners are more likely to look to events such as the Anzio Landing and Battle of the Bulge and see the war as a war against Germany. Did an east-west split take place? I don’t mean an absolute divide but a inclination to go to one front or another.
Interesting point. I have absolutely no idea about the states-of-origin of the servicemen who fought in the different theatres, or whether there was any correlation at all between where you came from and where you were likely to end up fighting. But it’s plausible, to put in no higher, to think that military and navy installations on the West Coast were mainly supporting the Pacific campaign, and those in the eastern states, the European campaign. So people in, say, California were close to servicemen being trained for, shipping out to, or returning from the Pacific, and their impresssions of the war and US involvement in it were shaped by this. And the other way round, over East.
Wisconsin and Michigan are east of the Mississippi, with their National Guard unit that was mobilized into the 32nd Infantry Division. They were waiting on the East Coast to be sent to Europe, but MacArthur snagged them for his own use in New Guinea.
Which is how all the jolly old men in my hometown who served fried fish at the VFW on Friday nights came to each acquire a bag of gold teeth.
One each coast vs. west coast convention that held: Marines recruited east of the Mississippi went to boot camp at Parris Island, west went to San Diego (the exception being Gomer Pyle, who went to the nonexistent Camp Wilson in Wilmington, North Carolina)