Last man who prevented 500,000 Purple Hearts from having to be awarded - Thank you Sir - go peacefully into the night...

[Brant Gaede]

100,000 casualties? You are one zero deficient. More like 100,000 dead Americans for the base estimate. A million wounded or killed and wounded. My guess might be 50% too fat so we could say 50,000 dead Americans. If you add up the KIA in Korea and Vietnam and divide by 2 you get 50,000. That seems way too light to me.

The United States had hundreds of thousands of casualties in Korea and Vietnam--each.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

Although I am fully aware of the "after this, therefore because of this" fallacy, this one is clearly not a fallacy.

Additionally, there is clear testimony from inside Nippon that the two A-bombs were definitive in ending this disaster.

Taking those four islands would have cost at least 100,000 casualties.

The naval blockade would have presented countless naval vessels to Kamikaze attacks.

Can allegedly rational folks here possibly argue this?

I think not.

A...

An invasion of Japan would have been much more than 8.6 Okinowas. Just the invasion of the Southern Island Kyoto would have been the equivalent of 6 or more Normandy invasions. The Japanese were waiting for a Kyoto landing and they were there in force.

The Japanese strategy was to make invasion so bloody that the Americans would have to make terms with Japan. Not defeat terms but much softer than invade, occupy and rule terms.

[Selene]

100,000 casualties? You are one zero deficient. More like 100,000 dead Americans for the base estimate. A million wounded or killed and wounded.

--Brant

Come on Brant...I clearly stated:

at least 100,000 casualties.

I was attempting to give respect to the other positions with that statement.

Essentially, within that "so stipulated" number makes my argument stronger.

Let's see...day 2 after the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki...how many American casualties were recorded in the Pacific?

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[Brant Gaede]

Sorry, Adam, but at least 100,000 makes no more sense than at least 10,000. Not out of that context. The other positions don't deserve your respect. 100,000 implies only 20,000 or 30,000 KIA.

--Brant

[Selene]

Sorry, Adam, but at least 100,000 makes no more sense than at least 10,000. Not out of that context. The other positions didn't deserve your respect. 100,000 implies only 20,000 or 30,000 KIA.

--Brant

Point taken.

A...

[Brant Gaede]

Whew! That was close. We almost had an argument.

--Brant

our first?

[Selene]

Whew! That was close. We almost had an argument.

--Brant

our first?

Possible.

I think we are quite clear on a path of argument which makes it a lot easier for me.

Additionally, we have American Firsters in our background as well as NBI in the 60's, so, I am not surprised at all.

A...

[Selene]

Damn!

I had no clue that this was out there.

One of the things that most surprised me was your contention that the use of crystal meth was widespread in the German army.

The Germans routinely encouraged their soldiers to take what we would now call crystal meth before battle. It would whip them up into a fury and may explain some of the excesses they committed. It's a way of motivating scared young men. And some of the Germans are very young indeed. I found lots of evidence of 16-year-olds being put into uniform and sent into battle.

So I think you're reaching for every possible technique to exaggerate your soldiers' combat performance. This wasn't just an SS thing. The German army was not below stooping to use drugs to increase its soldiers' effectiveness on the battlefield.

Interesting author.

The Real Reason Hitler Launched the Battle of the Bulge

Among a new book's revelations: Crystal meth was the German army's drug of choice.

Concerning the reason for launching the attack, a military one, or, a political one, the author explains that:

I feel I was breaking new ground by asserting that the decision by Hitler to launch the Ardennes attack—and it's his alone—is a political one rather than a military one. The traditional view is that this is an attempt to turn around the military situation as it was at the end of 1944. (See a World War II time line.)

I came to the conclusion that this is rather Hitler's attempt to reassert his personal political control over the German general staff and the entire Nazi hierarchy. It's a reaction to the von Stauffenberg bomb attempt on his life on the 20th of July, 1944. After that, he hides away. He goes into shock. He doesn't know whom to trust. His health goes downhill. The genesis of Hitler's plans to launch the Bulge is his grappling to retain control of the direction of military affairs and prove to the Third Reich that he's still the man at the top.

Moving forward in his analysis, he works in Wagner, fog, mist, forest and other deep memes in the Teutonic/Germanic "DNA."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141214-battle-of-the-bulge-hitler-churchill-history-culture-ngbooktalk/?utm_source=NatGeocom&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=inside_20150101&utm_campaign=Content

Also some really nice black and whites, one of Paton's men moving along a ridge and driving on Bastogne.

A..

[Backlighting]

That was one hell of a read.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141214-battle-of-the-bulge-hitler-churchill-history-culture-ngbooktalk/?utm_source=NatGeocom&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=inside_20150101&utm_campaign=Content

[Selene]

That was one hell of a read.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141214-battle-of-the-bulge-hitler-churchill-history-culture-ngbooktalk/?utm_source=NatGeocom&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=inside_20150101&utm_campaign=Content

Yeah, as I went through the interview, my mental mouth dropped open.

A...

[Selene]

Okinawa's capture by the US military in 1945 began on April 1st. It lasted approximately eighty-one days.

US casualties were approximately 63,000, 12,000 of them dead.

Okinawa was sixty (60) miles long and three (3) and fifteen (15) miles wide.

You do the math.

Taking the four (4) main islands of Japan would have cost how many casualties?

A...

[Brant Gaede]

Okinawa's capture by the US military in 1945 began on April 1st. It lasted approximately eighty-one days.

US casualties were approximately 63,000, 12,000 of them dead.

Okinawa was sixty (60) miles long and three (3) and fifteen (15) miles wide.

You do the math.

Taking the four (4) main islands of Japan would have cost how many casualties?

A...

You can't directly extrapolate from Okinawa, a small island comparatively, to those much larger ones. There was no maneuver room on Okinawa. It would have been very bad. Horrendous. But no one could have known the data prior. Nor do we know if the Japanese would have fought to the last island. Finally they chose the devil they knew--the US--to the devil they didn't want to know--the USSR.

--Brant

[Selene]

Okinawa's capture by the US military in 1945 began on April 1st. It lasted approximately eighty-one days.

US casualties were approximately 63,000, 12,000 of them dead.

Okinawa was sixty (60) miles long and three (3) and fifteen (15) miles wide.

You do the math.

Taking the four (4) main islands of Japan would have cost how many casualties?

A...

You can't directly extrapolate from Okinawa, a small island comparatively, to those much larger ones. There was no maneuver room on Okinawa. It would have been very bad. Horrendous. But no one could have known the data prior. Nor do we know if the Japanese would have fought to the last island. Finally they chose the devil they knew--the US--to the devil they didn't want to know--the USSR.

--Brant

I agree that they chose the lesser devil...the US.

I believe that you could use Okinawa as a reasonable expectation taking the first of the main island would be the bell weather.

c. The decisive invasion of the industrial heart of Japan through the Tokyo Plain.1

On 29 March, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, working on the assumptions that the war in Europe would be over by 1 July 1945 and that the forthcoming Okinawa operation would be concluded by mid-August of 1945, set a tentative schedule for the invasion of Japan. The invasion plan was assigned the cover name "Downfall" and consisted of two main operations: "Olympic," the preliminary assault on the southern island of Kyushu, which was slated for 1 December 1945, and "Coronet," the subsequent landing on Honshu, which was scheduled for 1 March 1946. (Plate No. 112) It was proposed that forces already in the Pacific be used to the fullest extent possible in planning for the assault and follow-up phases of "Olympic." Reserve and follow-up divisions for "Coronet" would be obtained by redeployment, either directly or via the United States, of troops and equipment from the European Theater.2

.

http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/MacArthur%20Reports/MacArthur%20V1/ch13.htm

A...