<p>@Dionysus</p>
<p>The Wikipedia statistics are from the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth. The US suffered more casualties on D-Day than all other Allied nations combined. </p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered]GuidedTours[/url”>No.1 London Escorts Agency - Cheap Escorts London Agency]GuidedTours[/url</a>]</p>
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<p>Those numbers are troops on the ground, and they come from more than just wikipedia: </p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered]GuidedTours[/url”>http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered]GuidedTours[/url</a>]</p>
<p>Excerpt:</p>
<p>“On D-Day, the Allies landed around 156,000 troops in Normandy. The American forces landed numbered 73,000: 23,250 on Utah Beach, 34,250 on Omaha Beach, and 15,500 airborne troops. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed (61,715 of them British): 24,970 on Gold Beach, 21,400 on Juno Beach, 28,845 on Sword Beach, and 7900 airborne troops.”</p>
<p>Lookingforward: nobody has ever asked what I do or who I am. If it interests you to know, I am a student. Nitpicking is not a bad thing; it is good practise for an academic career.</p>
<p>If users are going to make silly and factually inaccurate jibes at the British (presumably because you have all assumed I am a Briton), then I will post to correct their mistake. I won’t apologise for anything I have said because it is neither offensive nor I believe inaccurate, if you don’t like it don’t read it.</p>
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<p>Here is a UK-based site with the same numbers: [url=<a href=“http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered#troops]GuidedTours[/url”>http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered#troops]GuidedTours[/url</a>]</p>
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<p>73,000 US
61,715 UK
22,600 Canada</p>
<p>You’re missing the point. I did not say the numbers were inaccurate, only that statistics often give a false impression of events. There might well have been more Americans than Brits in total, but the American soldiers were separated into smaller groups, often serving alongside (larger) platoons of British soldiers. </p>
<p>At any rate, it is ridiculous to assume than the difference of a few thousand soldiers meant the difference between Britain’s fall and her survival.</p>
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<p>The UK’s fall versus survival was somewhat different from defeating Germany. Germany has no realistic hope of conquering the UK (the Royal Navy could sink any German invasion fleet that tried), but the UK also did not have sufficient capability by itself to invade continental Europe (US troops made up nearly half of the D-Day troops landed). Germany’s best hope was the starve the UK into giving up the war, leaving Germany free to fight the USSR instead of worrying about both fronts.</p>
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<p>All of the above has nothing to do with fact and everything to do with opinion. You cannot state your opinion as fact.</p>
<p>Nitpicking is not a bad thing; it is good practise for an academic career.</p>
<p>Oh. It’s practice? But, some here have the advantage of having culled and processed info over longer periods of time, seen shifts in their own perspectives, maybe solidified some assumptions, whether or not they are pro historians. Some will tend to look down on the principle of simply dissing each new point we bring up. Bluntly put, it’s not fun. </p>
<p>DH is a historian. The nature of his own research work is to question accuracy, yes, but then explore more deeply (sometmes, more broadly,) and offer new perspectives for consideration. It’s this work that defines the productive aspects of an “academic career,” not the abilty to keep disputing what others do say or toss out blanket statements. Think about it.</p>
<p>Don’t mess with Betsy Ross! I am choosing to spend my second 50 years of life believing she sewed our first flag! :p</p>
<p>( It’s this work that defines the productive aspects of an “academic career,” not the abilty to keep disputing what others do say or toss out blanket statements. Think about it).
Thank you lookingforward, I have been reading this forum and actually found some of it quite amussing but very frustrating that Dionysus58 just cannot get past the fact that history in any country is taught with a slight and sometime not so slight tilt towards those that write it. Being Canadian I could also say things about both British and Amercian history as it pertains to us but is it worth it? NO!!! Get over it, move on and anybody who really cares about the history of any given event will research it, get all the information they can then form their own opinion anyway regardless of the facts they have found. I am a history buff but by no means a historian, I love reading others perspective on things that happened or supposed to have happened, that is what I learn from, that is why I can be a more tolerant person and really does it really matter if someone said something or not some 200+ years ago.</p>
<p>Your assertion that the Soviet Union was what saved everyone is not only oversimplistic…many in Eastern Europe and especially in East Asia would strongly disagree. </p>
<p>Regarding WWII, here’s the sequence of lesser known events which may clarify some points:</p>
<p>1931 - Imperial Japan’s insubordinate Kwantung Army initiates the invasion of Manchuria on self-engineered pretexts, turns it into a Puppet State of “Manchukuo”. Protests were launched at the League of Nations…but being ineffectual…they didn’t do much.</p>
<p>1932 - Imperial Japan sends troops and invades the Shanghai area over some pretexts really engineered by the Japanese themselves to justify their military actions. Included were indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas which received widespread international condemnation…but little else. </p>
<p>1933 - Imperial Japan leaves the League of Nations in protest after being condemned for its actions in Manchuria in 1931. Words…just words. </p>
<p>1935 - Mussolini’s Fascist Italy invades Ethiopia, uses poison gas, and brutalizes the local population. Some Italian-Americans participated in this operation and despite Emperor Haile Selassie’s eloquent speech to the League of Nations asking for condemnation…nothing really came of it…because they were ineffectual. </p>
<p>1936 - Remilitarization of the Rhineland by Nazi Germany. No effective opposition by France or Britain beyond verbal protests. </p>
<p>1937 - Imperial Japan launches its all-out “Pacification” of China starting the Second Sino-Japanese War. Prime Minister Konoe said something about the entire military operation being completed in 3 months. US and other nations widely condemn Japanese actions to little avail. Not only that…the USS Panay…a naval gunboat ended up being dive bombed by the Imperial Japanese Navy dive bombers creating a diplomatic incident which was hushed up…but furthering anti-Japanese suspicions in that period which wasn’t enough to overcome greater levels of Isolationist sentiment. </p>
<p>Most current historians on this war have said this ended up causing around 1/4 of the entire Imperial Japanese Army to be tied down by Chinese troops from 1937-1945. This was a major reason why the Americans were so eager to provide support in the 30’s and 40’s to “keep China in the war”…first clandestinely through outfits like the Flying Tigers…then actively once the US entered the war. Not bad for a society that has been wracked by decades of colonial encroachment, disunity, civil wars, and ill-equipped mostly infantry-only armies fighting against a well-equipped modernized army. </p>
<p>1938 - Nazi Germany initiates the Sudetenland crisis in Czecheslovakia, gobbles Sudetenland after Brits/French fears of war prompt them to force Czecheslovak government to give in(“Peace in our time”), and the Anschluss, their takeover of Austria. Most Austrians and Sudeten Germans strongly approve. A fact the former refuse to acknowledge after the war and caused the latter to be hated as traitorous 5th Column by the Czechoslovaks and thus, forcibly relocated out of Sudetenland after the war. </p>
<p>1938-39 - The insubordinate Kwantung army repeats its tendency to initiate military operations without getting the ok from Tokyo and starts up skirmishes at the Manchurian - Mongolian/Soviet border with the Soviet Union. Got their asses handed to them in the Battle of Nomonhan. </p>
<p>1939 - WWII was effectively started when Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany AND THE SOVIET UNION in a coordinated campaign thanks to the Hitler-Stalin “neutrality pact” agreed to a mere week and change beforehand. </p>
<p>1940 - France capitulates after strategic reversals and horrendously heavy casualties. Britain withdraws from Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain starts which causes an overconfident Luftwaffe to get itself trashed so badly that Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain ended up being shelved permanently. Soviet Union is happily remaining on the sidelines occupying its portion of Poland and continuing to carry out its series of Stalinistic purges in its military and civil service/party sectors. </p>
<p>1941 - Hitler in his infinite wisdom decides to invade the Soviet Union in against expert advice by Generals in the summer. At first, the German military operation proceeded well with much of the obsolescent Soviet Air Force caught on the ground, large numbers of POWs, and even coming within sight of Moscow. Then, furious resistance combined with Nazi brutality and the Russian winter combined to undermine German efforts to gain collaborators or to prevent Russian resistance to stiffen up. </p>
<p>Imperial Japan launches unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor which eliminates Isolationist sentiment and incites much anti-Japanese and anti-Axis feeling which carries the US through the war. US’ “Arsenal of Democracy” ends up openly supplying Britain, Soviet Union, China, and other allies fighting the Axis around the world until Italy, Germany, and Japan ended up literally drowning in an avalanche of mostly US produced munitions. </p>
<p>In the Pacific theater, with a few exceptions…most of the fighting was mostly done by US, ANZAC, and various East Asian/South Asian countries/nationalist movements. British/Dutch presence was effectively wiped out of East/SE Asia and Britain had little sources with which to contribute till the last few years of the war. </p>
<p>Due to the 1940 Soviet-Japanese neutrality agreement signed at the encouragement of Hitler and Japan’s military humiliation at Nomonhan in 1939, the Soviets waited until after Hiroshima and right on the same day as the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack to enter the Pacific war by tossing the vast majority of its armed forces in its invasion of Manchuria and Korea against a much depleted and disorganized Imperial Japanese Kwantung Army.</p>
<p>^^^^Yes, and also this: Cobrat has distant cousins who actually heard Patrick Henry say “Give me liberty or give me death,” so THERE!</p>
<p>Cobrat, I’m just ribbing you a little bit. :D</p>
<p>Well, people in Holland were certainly appreciative of the American effort in their country during WWII. When DH and I visited in 1989, several elderly people came up to us to express their appreciation. It blew us away! We weren’t even born then!</p>
<p>Cobrat has a pretty interesting range of knowledge, after we get past the anecdotes. Does this speak to your liberal arts education? Or just collective interests? Cuz I am thinking this thread- and many posters here- shows that oft-disputed value in studying humanities, after all.</p>
<p>Love the thread! How passionate!
Hard to believe how much I hated history growing up. It’s true. The textbooks were terrible and were so simplistic as to leave all the controversy on the cutting floor. The only thing the school did was try to get through the book by years end. Twice I started over with the SAME book and landed just at WWII by June. Never got past it. End of school year. Guess it was the times.
I did have a good HS teacher who was into politics (not my parent’s politics) which gave a fresh direction with class room debates on school busing and the Viet Nam war. At least it made you look around your world. She did try to stay neutral–only now do I realize how hard that may have been for her.
Now, with a H and S who are history buffs, I’m learning the bigger picture and appreciate history much more. History really does repeat itself. Half the tales at the dinner table during son’s HS years were history stories (what did you learn today?) (AP History classes) I am jealous that the richness of history got boiled down to a textbook that only gave names and some dates when I was in school. And yes, biased views of nearly everything.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, no. But I did have a much older black sheep uncle who died fighting the Japanese in WWII as a military commander, several older relatives including a grandfather who was involved in developing educational institutions in China in the early part of the 20th century, and an ancestor who fought the British in 1839-1842. </p>
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<p>Both. Was a history major in undergrad and have had a strong interest in WWII history…especially in the Pacific theater.</p>
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<p>In 8th grade, we were allowed to pick where we started in American history (yeah, it was a great private school :rolleyes:) and we chose to start with the Gilded Age (students voted). Next year I switched to a public high school where we got to learn American History part two (part one was in 8th grade) starting with… you guessed it… the Gilded Age! Same book. I still have never taken a proper full course in American history. So I’d say nope, not just the times :p</p>
<p>Now back to the thread. It’s fascinating.</p>
<p>I also hated American history- mostly because I grew up near Phila and it was rammed at us, in the dryest manner possible, in 3rd, 5th, and 7th. Moved and got the whole thing all over again in 11th. (The last teacher was great, but it was late for me, then.) Yeesh. Then, got interested in DH’s family history (mine immigrated around WW1, his goes all the way back.) It came alive. Absolutely, freaking came alive. Up until money woes, some U’s were uploading as much as they could to the web, from archives. All sorts of bits and pieces.</p>
<p>But, of course, same for families and any history topic: there are provables, probably trues, and utter nonsense. It all plays some role.</p>
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I can tell. Very much enjoying your posts in this thread.</p>
<p>The revolt was, in reality, about access to adequate dental care. Even considering the significant cost in terms human lives the war was, on balance, well worth it.</p>