Lots to unpack.
Kasserine Pass: Do we blame it on inexperience or Fredendall being a swaggering, arrogant moron?
What he said(^^^).
Now for some MEAT.
Market-Garden is a pretty good case: had there not been confusion among the US airborne officers at Nijmegen the bridge that was there could have been captured very early on very easily, which could (depending on German resistance beyond that) have allowed the British 30th Corps to reach Arnehm and the British airborne troops in time and might have allowed the operation to succeed. That said better planning was still needed to make the operation guaranteed to succeed.
I did a thread on that subject; learned some Dutch hydrography and weather, tried to argue Montgomery knew what he was doing, and came to the surprising conclusion that even if MG had worked, the Allies were punching into air and had neither the logistics nor the road nets to exploit past Arnhem! The operation was POINTLESS. Reducing Antwerp, clearing the approaches to the port and preparing to lager over the winter and resume the push into Germany after better weather and the supply situation cleared up would have probably made more sense.
Anzio certainly was a questionable operation because the forces sent there simply weren't enough to reach the planned objectives. In general the Italian front could have been somewhat better handled, for example the Allies may have been able to capture more German forces in Sicilia before they escaped, and they should honestly have dug in when the important objectives were reached because the Americans were already focusing on Op Overlord by this point and simply didn't have any shipping to spare to land meaningful forces further North to flank German forces. I assume not doing it would mostly save manpower and resources, though maybe they could be used in more limited but more reasonable operations.
I generally agree that the sealift was not there. I have argued that crawling up Italy enough to secure the Foggia airfield complexes and then attriting the Germans in place was probably a better idea than the mess that was conducted.
There were opportunities to encircle German forces at Falaise earlier, capturing more veterans and officers which proved valuable for Germany in the Netherlands and likely the Bulge. Alternatively such an encirclement might have been achieved later during the Seine crossings with similar results. Could make Market-Garden more likely to succeed.
Possibly. The Americans and British argue over the boundary question and the Germans were desperate. Plus the probable Allied plug divisions were no damned good. So who knows? Might have laid on more 8th Air Farce and KILLED more Germans in the funnel, but that required some cold blooded allied generalship to ARCLIGHT own troops.
The first and third cases could accelerate the last phase of the war in Europe by allowing the Allies to get to the Rhine earlier and with possibly lower logistical issues due to more limited opposition. A successful MG would also help secure Antwerp more quickly helping with logistics and liberate most of the Netherlands by Autumn/Winter 1944 which would greatly reduce the suffering of the Dutch population OTL (no harsh winter under German control).
See previous remarks.
One could also argue that Normandy could have been better handled but it went fairly well all things considered and the Allies advanced faster than expected. But such things like a less difficult Omaha landing (better use of specialized vehicles, more accurate bombing possibly by changing landing schedules in that area or accepting a "danger close" situation) and more accurate airborne drops could help take important locations more quickly (however, a faster Normandy may end up saving the late German units from encirclement later on as they may be too far by the time the Allies break out of Normandy, so not sure how useful that would be overall).
Despite my heartburn about Caen, I am convinced that the Normandy campaign went better than anyone should have expected.
I'm actually curious about the possibility of taking some French Channel ports earlier, before the German garrisons could dug in them.
Shrug. That was siege warfare. I do not see it changing much.
(The enemy) must see that there is An alternative to death. —Sun Tzu
Give the enemy no opportunity to escape death, except to become slaves. --
Sitting Bull
Market Garden; Germans, radios, op-sec and the fundamental foul up.
They were not at full strength and being refitted. And there weren't that many.
There were enough of them and they had tanks.
What really screwed the paras over was that a glider with the operational plans crashed at Nijmegen and the Germans found it.
British op-sec SUCKED.
Also, most of the paras radios fucked up.
BRITISH radios. The Americans worked fine. Just their HQ situation was fubared.
They couldn't coordinate with each other and their relief force and were destroyed piecemeal.
Meaning the Poles were dropped in the wrong LZs.
MacArthur’s father led a bloody and mostly forgotten about anti-insurgent campaign there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with over four thousand Americans dead.
What about the 500,000 + Filipinos murdered?
Its not a big deal today, but it was an huge deal to that generation.
I wish the Vietnam generation had learned about it in school.
Dieppe wasn't what most people think it was.
it was actually a cover op for an intel raid on the Kriegsmarine HQ in a attempt to get ciphers, Enigma boxes, codes, etc., but it screwed up. BADLY.
Not that I was unaware but that op-sec thing, again?
1) Market-Garden. It's the obvious one, no thanks to the vanity of one Sir Bernard Law Montgomery and the lack of consultation with the Dutch (exiles and the Resistance). Antony Beevor's book on the operation is on par with Ryan's A Bridge Too Far, and goes into detail about the planning and the combat, along with the tragic consequences for the Dutch for the operation's failure.
Gavin had a monumental bolo at Nijmegen, but once again, where was the operation supposed to go after 30 Corps was fought out and the winter set in, even IF everything had gone right? No logistics reserve and no follow on exploitation forces existed.
2) Anzio: good idea, lousy execution by a Corps Commander who was way too cautious.
Out of 5th Army support range, a lunatic Churchill notion and NO SEA LIFT to get her done.
3) Hurtgen Forest: Fault there lies with First Army Commander Courtney Hodges, who rejected out of hand all suggestions to go around.
Where?
And in the PTO: Pelileu: the unnecessary amphibious operation. Bull Halsey was right in saying that the island could've been bypassed.
Bad intelligence. Not the first time. (Tarawa.). And it was SPRUANCE.
Especially for teaching William Childs Westmoreland everything he knew.
Damn him. He was another McNamara goof.
1) With hindsight, its easy to argue that the strategic bombing forces were very poorly utilized even in 1943. Had the allied commands known of its own post-war assesments of the combined bombing offensive, believed it, and used it as a basis for their strategy the strategic bombing campaign would have yielded much better results earlier and at lower cost. Probably a strong enough change to shave up at least a month or two from the war easily.
An air campaign being fought for the first time in history? Kind of hard to criticize the air farces for not knowing how. Now into 1945, Harris should have been relieved for all Ruhr all the time, but the USAAF did KILL the LW day fighter force which was absolutely necessary for Neptune/Overlord.
Failing to push on to Tripoli after Beda Fomm instead of stopping and sending troops to Greece.
I think Greece was a lost cause and another Churchill mistake. He makes a LOT of them.
The Dodecanese campaign, Sept-Nov 1943. As if planned to give the Germans a welcome victory.
Like that one...
Not targeting ploesti and the nazi oil industry from the get go.
Brereton.
Really? I’d argue that Op. Dragoon was worth the resources spent and more. While the 19th Army succeeded in escaping, the U.S. and French forces still dealt staggering losses to the retreating Germans (captured 131,250 German soldiers-40% of Army Group G), secured the ports of Toulon and Marseille in record time (supplying the US 6th Army Group and helping with Patton’s logistics), and secured Patton’s right flank. In fact, the 6th Army Group was arguably the only WALLIED army group to succeed in reaching the Rhine in November 1944 (after smashing the German 19th Army) and was ready to cross the Rhine until Ike called it off.
I agree with this assessment. Might have been worth the risk to cross the Rhine.
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Op-art lists... MINE.
1. Not making a do or die stand at Rabaul in 1942. Success there shaves off CARTWHEEL and means the fight shifts further north in the SWPOA New Guinea theater. Shaves a YEAR off of useless island battering in the Solomon Islands.
2. Drumbeat. DISASTER, but consider the situation. EVERYTHING that could be spared to stop the IJN was being stripped from LANTFLT. Harold Stark, not King was the guy who fucked up the LANTFLT by yanking destroyers and sending them to PACFLT and failing to supervise the formation of the intracontinental convoy system as he was urged to do IN !($)% !@#$ed 1940 by Ernest King among others. King came into that mess in March 1942, had the ABDA fiasco on his hands, PACFLT still in a shambles, still faced the utter RN collapse in the Indian Ocean in APRIL and had to anticipate losing the SLOCs to AUSTRALIA.
May and June, PACFLT proves she can fight and King gets a breather. Now King has to FIGHT FDR for priorities, Marshall for priorities, the British for priorities and the !@# !@#$ed local American politicians to get things like blackouts and Navy supervision of port traffic control. On top of this is PACFLT bleeding ships and planes and trained personnel like those are an inexhaustible commodity in a bungled WATCHTOWER.
Throw in a little torpedo crisis too.
Cut the man some slack. In all of this chaos he does manage to stand up 10th Fleet, get the Intracoastal convoy system worked up, gets an ASW program to bear fruit with homing torpedoes and sonobuoys that actually make HK groups viable and cleans up a lot of Doenitz's bastards by March 1943 WEST of Iceland. He also does what the British NEVER could do. He closes the mid-Atlantic GAP. Took Canadian help but HE got it done. He even manages to get the right people to look at the torpedo crisis so that it will get solved by mid 1943, something that his predecessor Harold Stark also personally FUCKED UP a decade earlier.
He also gets the Bu-Ord and Bu-Air cleaned up and straightened out. VERY busy year for that "son of a bitch".
One thing King could not do, which could have shaved months off the naval wars is get strategic bombers for the USN. RIKKOs kept the IJN viable long past their loss of sea control via warships.
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MacArthur...
Philippine Islands 1942. What a disgrace.
CARTWHEEL 1942-1943. What brilliance.
Philippine Islands 1944-1945. Every !@# @#$ed island? Do Leyte and Luzon. Let the Filipinos have the rest of the glory.
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Operational mistakes at sea.
a. Concentration of the submarine force as an arm of decision.
@phx1138 and I have disagreed about concentrating SUBPAC out of Pearl Harbor, but it is definite that if PACFLT had one COMSUBPAC with a good staff early, the torpedo crisis would have been 1 year instead of 2 and the subs would have gone into the flow strategy much earlier than the BULLSHIT mouseholing and special missions MacArthur, Halsey and even Nimitz wasted them upon.
b. Sealift. Sure the Americans achieved wonders, but it sure would have helped if another 500 LSTs got built in 1943.
c. On the army operations side a bit of 1942 lessons learned MIGHT have been that paying attention to the RUSSIANS about CAS and antitank warfare (Use mortars on the panzer grenadiers and those German 88s, DAMNIT!) could have made Kasserine a little less of a disaster.
