Selective Service

[Wolseley]

Like I said - everybody else did the donkey work.

If it hadn't been for us supplying the world, they wouldn't have been doing donkey work, or any other work, unless it was building more gas chambers for Adolf. My point being, they didn't win the war without us.

But you never "defended Australia from Japanese invasion" in the first place. The Japanese got as far as Darwin, and suddenly realised that the invasion of a country which consists of 70% desert is a logistical nightmare - especially when you've just landed at the top, and now have (x), 000 miles of wasteland to traverse before you even get a glimpse of the enemy. Japan simply wasn't capable of stretching her war front that far. It was this logistical problem which precluded Japan's halting attempt to invade Australia. America had nothing to do with it.

I disagree with you here. For one thing, the Japanese weren't stupid enough to attempt an overland invasion of Australia. Their plan was acquire enough island airstrips to provide air cover for a bypass of the empty sections of the country and make a naval landing on the southeast coast. Douglas MacArthur was in Melbourne precisely because John Curtin had begged Roosevelt for a tangible symbol of American commitment for the protection of Australia.

It must also be borne in mind that nobody except the Americans were available to defend Australia----outside of one brigade of the 6th Division, the bulk of the Australian troops were still in the Middle East.

You recall incorrectly. America didn't "liberate" anyone (except, perhaps, the Jews from the concentration camps.)

Oh, I'm sorry; my error. North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg invited the Nazis to occupy their countries, and when we came in and drove the Nazis out, we were meddling, since they all wanted the Nazis there. I stand corrected.

America suffered roughly 405, 399 casualties in WWII, not 1, 079, 162. Meanwhile, the Ruskies lost something in the order of 7.2 million, and the Chinese 2.2 million.

You'll have to take your numerical discrepancy up with the U.S. Department of Defense, which is where I got my figures from. As such, I stand by my total.

Mea culpa. I was thinking of WWI.

Your penance is three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys, my son; now make a good Act of Contrition and go in peace.

 

[fin]

"You'll have to take your numerical discrepancy up with the U.S. Department of Defense, which is where I got my figures from. As such, I stand by my total."

The higher figure probably includes all casualities, injuries and deaths. The lower figure is probably only deaths. Just a guess though.

 

[fin]

Here is a couple of interesting quotes.

Albert Einstein:

"There are two ways of resisting war: the legal way and the revolutionary way. The legal way involves the offer of alternatinve service not as a privilege for a few but as a right for all. The revolutionary view involves an uncompromising resistance, with a view to breaking the power of militarism in time of peace or the resources of the state in time of war."

Also Einstein:

"The conscientious objector is a revoultionary. On deciding to disobey the law he sacrifices his personal interests to the most important cause of working for the betterment of society."

Again Einstein:

"My pacificism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of people is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."

 

[Gunny]

 

[strathyboy]

Originally posted by Wolseley
If it hadn't been for us supplying the world, they wouldn't have been doing donkey work, or any other work, unless it was building more gas chambers for Adolf. My point being, they didn't win the war without us.

I dislike arguments like this; speculation on what would have happened if the past was different will never result in consensus. The facts are all that matter: the US helped, and the allies won.
However, the American involvement in WW2 (at least in Europe and Africa) was primarily an economic one; their armed forces, while certainly helping in the war against the Nazi's were not nearly as important as that economic contribution. The Soviets were solely responsible for roughly 90% of all German casualties during WW2, but by the end of the war, 66% of all vehicles they used were American, as well as 2,000 locomotives and 13 million pairs of boots. What the Americans couldn't provide were the sheer numbers the Soviets were able to bring against the Nazi's. In 1941, the Soviet Army was nearly 25 million strong.
If you really want some speculation, question what would have happened if Japan had elected to invade the USSR instead of the US.

 

[Wolseley]

Well said, strathyboy. Exactly correct, and well-researched. A lot of people fail to realize that the Red Army was nearly totally supplied by the United States, right down to shipments of wool cloth for their uniforms and raw steel for their tanks. If the US had not backed the USSR with massive amounts of materiel, they never would have stood a chance against the Wehrmacht. So yes, we can say that it was the Russians who walloped the Germans---but they couldn't have done it without the Americans.

 

[cenimo]

Evangelion

Meanwhile, nobody has succeeded in presenting a Biblical defence for a Christian's participation in war.

I guess you're not aware of the new book When God Says War Is OK

 

[Gunny]

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
--John Stewart Mill--

 

[fin]

Nice quote but war is still evil. Also, pacifists place their lives on the line often. Think of the Cival Rights movement. The marchers had dogs released on them and were sprayed with fire hoses. Many pacifists have been killed because of their views. Pacifism is not safety, it is sacrificing personal comfort for freedom. The goals of pacifism are peace, freedom, and equality. Many people have tried using war to achieve these ends but have failed. Many people have tried pacifism and have succeded. Statistically pacifism has a higher sucess rate then violence. Why do we still insist that war is necessary?

 

[cenimo]

fin

pacifism would work in a fantasy world where there are no aggressors...
a higher success rate than violence? in all of recorded history, there have been 247 years without wars, out of 5,000 + years...do the math

what's evil is to do nothing to defend yourslef and then when there is no one left to do it for you to start crying about, "How could this happen?"...

look up the story about the German priest in WW II.....

 

Wolsley

gee...there were some supply sergeants and officers in Nam that became very wealty...I can only imagine had they been involved in that WW II stuff ......     

ps

Ever read The Khaki Mafia? Quite a book, quite a story.

 

[Gunny]

The man who will go where his colors will go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in a jungle and mountain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome to sceptered Britain to Democratic America. He is the stuff of which legions are made. His pride is his colors and his regiment, his training hard and thorough and coldly realistic, to fit him for what he must face, and his obedience is to his orders. As a legionary, he held the gates of civilization for the classical world...he has been called United States Marine.

Lieutenant Colonel T.R. Fehrenbach, US Army in "This Kind of War"

 

[MSBS]

Originally posted by Evangelion
Two corrections:

• The Germans were never in danger of invading the US.
  
• America entered the war late (as usual), and arrived just in time to clean up the mess after everybody else had done the donkey work.

It's easy to play the conquering hero when (a) your country was never actually in the firing line to begin with, and (b) your contribution to the war effort consists of little more than pushing over a punch-drunk giant.

Oh, and just for the record, scooping the pool with an unconscionable theft of war reparations is not the same as winning a war.

If Germany was never a threat to the US then we must have been pretty stupid to enter the war with them at all. Why should we have spent our blood and treasure on a war that had nothing to do with us? On one hand you say we were not threatened and on the other you criticize us for entering the war late. Not very consistant with your logic, are you?

Secondly, while our combat troops where not engaged in Europe until after Germany and Italy had declared war on us, the US was supplying money and equipment to the USSR and the UK years before that. To top it off, US naval forces were engaging German u-boats in the Atlantic in 1940 and 1941, prior to formal declarations of war.

Our contribution was negligible, eh? We pretty much went it alone in the Pacific war-- Australia made for a great base, but the token forces they fielded didn't have that much impact. How do you want to measure the amount of work we did in the war? Number of soldiers that were killed? The US took more casualties in the battle for Okinawa then Australia did in the whole war. From the numbers I've just been looking at by doing a web search, US dead are equal to the dead of the UK, the British colonies, Australia, and New Zealand combined. We also spent more money on the war.

Lastly, after the war, we spent billions of dollars rebuilding the devastated countries of Europe and Asia, including those that had been our enemies, instead of, as the UK and France did after World War I, plundering the countries we had defeated for all that they were worth.

Yep, I guess we are just a bunch of jerks that took all the credit without doing anything. :

 

[MSBS]

Originally posted by Evangelion


America suffered roughly 405, 399 casualties in WWII, not 1, 079, 162. Meanwhile, the Ruskies lost something in the order of 7.2 million, and the Chinese 2.2 million.

America had 405,399 dead-- casualties are dead and wounded. Your numbers for the Russians and the Chinese are low, BTW. Post cold war document releases show Soviet deaths to be on the order of 20 million, and the Chinese probably lost more than 4 million.

 

[Gunny]

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

[Loved One]

Originally posted by Knight
I'm sure glad that these attitudes were not as common 60 years ago as they seem to be here.

That may be true, but my husband always says that it's not just about serving your country. It's also about the guys who are standing next to you. I wouldn't want someone who didn't believe in what he was doing to be the guy standing next to my husband.

 

[Wolseley]

If Germany was never a threat to the US then we must have been pretty stupid to enter the war with them at all. Why should we have spent our blood and treasure on a war that had nothing to do with us?

I guess if they were never a threat to the United States, then all those strategic bombers the Luftwaffe was building that could reach New York didn't exist, eh?

If we could build B-17's that could fly from here to there, they certainly could build Heinkels and Junkers that could reach here.

Our contribution was negligible, eh? We pretty much went it alone in the Pacific war-- Australia made for a great base, but the token forces they fielded didn't have that much impact. How do you want to measure the amount of work we did in the war? Number of soldiers that were killed? The US took more casualties in the battle for Okinawa then Australia did in the whole war. From the numbers I've just been looking at by doing a web search, US dead are equal to the dead of the UK, the British colonies, Australia, and New Zealand combined. We also spent more money on the war.

Lastly, after the war, we spent billions of dollars rebuilding the devastated countries of Europe and Asia, including those that had been our enemies, instead of, as the UK and France did after World War I, plundering the countries we had defeated for all that they were worth.

Exactly.

Yep, I guess we are just a bunch of jerks that took all the credit without doing anything.

Only in the alternative universe where America is the Great Satan who oppresses the world.

America had 405,399 dead-- casualties are dead and wounded.

Pretty much right on the mark. Again, the Department of Defense figures:

U.S. battle deaths: 292,131

Collateral deaths: 115,185.

Wounded: 671,846.

Total deaths: 407,316.

Total casualties: 1,079,162.

 

[Evangelion]

Wolseley -

If it hadn't been for us supplying the world, they wouldn't have been doing donkey work, or any other work, unless it was building more gas chambers for Adolf.

Agreed. This was never the point under contention.

My point being, they didn't win the war without us.

Agreed. I have never claimed otherwise.

quote:
But you never "defended Australia from Japanese invasion" in the first place. The Japanese got as far as Darwin, and suddenly realised that the invasion of a country which consists of 70% desert is a logistical nightmare - especially when you've just landed at the top, and now have (x), 000 miles of wasteland to traverse before you even get a glimpse of the enemy. Japan simply wasn't capable of stretching her war front that far. It was this logistical problem which precluded Japan's halting attempt to invade Australia. America had nothing to do with it.

I disagree with you here.

We'll see how far you disagree.

For one thing, the Japanese weren't stupid enough to attempt an overland invasion of Australia. Their plan was acquire enough island airstrips to provide air cover for a bypass of the empty sections of the country and make a naval landing on the southeast coast. Douglas MacArthur was in Melbourne precisely because John Curtin had begged Roosevelt for a tangible symbol of American commitment for the protection of Australia.

Thanks for the specifics. I don't take issue with any of this.

It must also be borne in mind that nobody except the Americans were available to defend Australia----outside of one brigade of the 6th Division, the bulk of the Australian troops were still in the Middle East.

...but an American defence of Australia was never required, because Japan just didn't get as far as she'd hoped.

Which was my point all along.

quote:
You recall incorrectly. America didn't "liberate" anyone (except, perhaps, the Jews from the concentration camps.)

Oh, I'm sorry; my error. North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg invited the Nazis to occupy their countries, and when we came in and drove the Nazis out, we were meddling, since they all wanted the Nazis there. I stand corrected.

Your cavalier use of the word "liberated" implies that the US cavalry saddled up and rode to the rescue of Europe, winning the rest of the war single-handedly. In fact, it was the Russians who defeated the Nazis on the Eastern front, the Brits who fought them to a standstill in the West (leaving them highly vulnerable to the eventual US offensive), and the Australians who were largely responsible for the knockout blow in the Middle East (particularly at Tobruk and El Alamein.) Here, the Allies were reliant on Australia's 8th Army, her 18th Infantry Brigade, and her 6th, 7th & 9th Divisions. Australia's success at Alam el Halfa was later described by the German General von Mellenthin as "the turning point of the desert war." (See The Six Years War by Gavin Long, published by the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, 1973.)

America entered Europe along with her allies; she did not simply waltz in all by herself. If she had done this, then yes, you could have said that she had liberated Europe. But to say "America liberated Europe" is to ignore the role of her allies, who (notwithstanding the incredible amount of work they had already done) re-entered Europe and liberated it along with the US.

So you didn't just "come in and drive the Nazis out"; what you did was to join forces with the people who had been fighting this war all along. Saving Private Ryan was just a movie, folks. It wasn't a documentary.

quote:
America suffered roughly 405, 399 casualties in WWII, not 1, 079, 162. Meanwhile, the Ruskies lost something in the order of 7.2 million, and the Chinese 2.2 million.

You'll have to take your numerical discrepancy up with the U.S. Department of Defense, which is where I got my figures from. As such, I stand by my total.

My stats were representative of death casualties only, which (again) was part of my original point. (When I say "casualties", I mean "deaths" - which is perfectly consistent with the use of the word at this Website.)

I certainly wasn't going to count every guy who claimed a purple heart after dropping a rifle on his toe.

 

[Evangelion]

cenimo -

I guess you're not aware of the new book When God Says War Is OK

Never heard of it.

Is this the part where I have to remind you that I'm not a pacifist?

 

[Evangelion]

gunnysgt -

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

--John Stewart Mill--

John Stewart Mill was a great philosopher and a fine Unitarian, but his patriotic sentiments were sadly misplaced. These sentiments are perfectly OK in their place - but that place is not here in the pre-millennial age.

The Bible leaves us in no doubt that the kingdoms of this world are not worth fighting for.

 

[Wolseley]

Your cavalier use of the word "liberated" implies that the US cavalry saddled up and rode to the rescue of Europe, winning the rest of the war single-handedly. In fact, it was the Russians who defeated the Nazis on the Eastern front, the Brits who fought them to a standstill in the West (leaving them highly vulnerable to the eventual US offensive), and the Australians who were largely responsible for the knockout blow in the Middle East (particularly at Tobruk and El Alamein.) Here, the Allies were reliant on Australia's 8th Army, her 18th Infantry Brigade, and her 6th, 7th & 9th Divisions. Australia's success at Alam el Halfa was later described by the German General von Mellenthin as "the turning point of the desert war." (See The Six Years War by Gavin Long, published by the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, 1973.)

I have no argument with any of this. I never claimed that the United States won World War II single-handedly.

But on the flip side, I never claimed that the United States sat on its behind for three years and did absolutely nothing while the rest of the world duked it out, and then merely submitted an ineffectual token combat presence after it did enter the war, which is the impression that one gets in reading some of the posts on this thread.

America entered Europe along with her allies; she did not simply waltz in all by herself. If she had done this, then yes, you could have said that she had liberated Europe. But to say "America liberated Europe" is to ignore the role of her allies, who (notwithstanding the incredible amount of work they had already done) re-entered Europe and liberated it along with the US.

My contention is the America came in and took up the slack that the Allies did not have any more by 1942. If we had not entered the war, things might have turned out rather differently. But the simple fact is that the UK, the USSR, and the Free European forces had just about run out of steam by the time the US arrived. The Allies took the brunt in the first half of the war, and we took up the slack in the second half.

So you didn't just "come in and drive the Nazis out"; what you did was to join forces with the people who had been fighting this war all along.

As I said.

Saving Private Ryan was just a movie, folks. It wasn't a documentary.

It was slightly more accurate than some others I've seen. However, I don't base my opinions on Hollywood movies, I base them on twenty years worth of research and two college degrees in Modern History with an emphasis on the Third Reich.
Es ist nicht ein Meister von Himmel gefallen, nicht wahr?

My stats were representative of death casualties only, which (again) was part of my original point. (When I say "casualties", I mean "deaths" - which is perfectly consistent with the use of the word at this Website.)

Can't speak for the website or its semantics, but in military terminology, "casualty" means any individual who is out of action, whether it's for battle death or sunburn.

I certainly wasn't going to count every guy who claimed a purple heart after dropping a rifle on his toe.

Neither would I, especially since you don't get a Purple Heart unless the wound is inflicted by the enemy.