I gave discussion a shot, moviefan2k4, but if you're not going to argue specifics, it's not worth my time.

And offering carefully mined quotations from various founders about their beliefs about religion, spirituality, God, etcetera is irrelevant. None of what these guys may have believed in their private lives is enshrined in the Constitution.

But I will say it was a kick to see you quote Thomas Paine.

I didn’t know this until now:

They didn't get you as many favors as a Hershey Bar, though.

Just finished Antony Beevor's book about the Ardennes Offensive, aka The Battle of the Bulge. Just as comprehensive as his Normandy one (which covered from D-Day to the liberation of Paris), including much discussion of the political wrangling between allies, the civilian experience while caught in the war zone, the destruction caused by the Allies in liberating towns and villages (often liberated and obliterated), things like friendly fire incidents that were hushed up, at the time, the shooting of prisoners by Allied soldiers and the death of farm animals caught in the crossfire. A lot of the works I have read from past authors downplayed the number of casualties caused by the Allies, via the use of artillery and aerial bombing, which was extensive. They also cleaned up some of the detail about how soldiers in the field sometimes acted around civilians, like pilfering houses for food and wood to burn, to outright theft. Beevor doesn't pull punches and uses civilian history sources from the villages, about their experiences, as much as other historians and military records. Plus, as a former officer, he understands both strategy and battle tactics and better understands why some decisions were made, compared to other historians. One of the things he brings up was the use of white phosphorus munitions, by artillery untis, which burned German soldiers alive, in tanks and fortified positions and also set fire to civilian homes and buildings. It also poisoned water sources, which killed animals and some people or created water shortages, due to contamination.

Beevor really gets at the human cost of the war, both in terms of physical damage and mental damage, discussing battle fatigue/PTSD and long term effects on people who were in intense fighting, for extended periods of time. Soldiers haunted by seeing crewmen pushing out supply bundles from burning transport planes, as they go down, tank crews cooked alive inside burning tanks, or mowed down when they come out of the hatches. People frozen to death at their posts, like images of dead German machine gun crews, still holding belts of ammo.

No sanitized Hollywood stuff in his works.

Bradley doesn't come off well in it, nor did Montgomery, in his Normandy book. Monty gets some praise here, in helping to stabilize things in the North, but at the expense of Allied unity when he can't stop himself from bragging that he practically saved the US Army, when he is supposed to deliver a speech praising the fighting of the US Army formations in the battle. After that, Eisenhower basically cut him off and Bradley and Patton refused to have anything to do with him. Churchill lost a lot of bargaining power in conferences, as he lost any support from Eisenhower. Monty's ego was his own worst enemy, in Beevor's estimation.

Bradley comes off as out of touch, as the Germans break through and his staff can't seem to get things organized. Bradley withdraws to his bedroom and it seems was having or on the verge of a breakdown, which, in part, led to Montgomery taking over some American units to secure the Meuse River bridges, while the fighting around Bastogne and other villages and strongpoints were pretty much American, with USAAF and RAF air support, when planes could fly.

He also gets into Operation Boddenplatte, the Luftwaffe's last ditch attack on Allied airfields, which caused greater destruction of German forces, as they sent survivors back to attack again and were caught by pursuing Allied aircraft and also shot down by friendly forces. Hitler's pulling of forces from the Eastern Front to bolster the attack in the Ardennes and to try to support it when it ran into resistance paved the way for the Red Army's break out, from the Vistula, into East Prussia and Hungary, and aided in their relatively rapid progress across Poland, towards the German frontier.

I was reading that across lunch breaks, at work and am reading his overall history of WW2, at home, at night. Just got up to Pearl Harbor and the attacks in the South Pacific and Malaya. Less detailed in the specific battles, but nice overview of all sides of the conflict, including the fighting between the Chinese and Japanese, before 1941 and the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, as well as the political maneuvering with the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union and the splitting of Poland, a similar agreement between the USSR and Japan and Stalin withholding intel from the US about Japanese plans to attack the US (though the War Department had been prepping for war with Japan, but believed it would center around the Philippines).

Doesn't go into those kinds of specifics, since it is an overall history of WW2 and mostly just talks a bit about Tojo and the milatarists pushing for the attack to cripple the Pacific fleet, to leave things open for their attack on the Dutch East Indies, to gain the oil fields there and the raw materials in Malaya and China.  Their intent was to build a security zone around those areas, to protect their empire and set up bases in the various island chains, to create a layered defense.

He does mention the rather well known fact that Yamamoto had been a naval attache to the US and had toured factories and seen America's industrial power.  He cautioned the Army bloc that he could run wild for about 6 months, before the US could then start to counter-attack.  His hope was that they would catch the carrier fleet at Pear and destroy it or damage it sufficiently to buy them that time to establish their bases, then strengthen them, before America could respond.  He was pretty accurate in his assessment, though they overextended themselves with the dual attack on the Aleutians and Midway.  Had they sent that combined fleet to Midway, they would have had a carrier superiority and possibly changed the outcome of the battle of Midway and then been free to move on the Aleutians, to establish closer striking range to the West Coast.

After the defeat at Midway, they immediately went into a defensive footing and they soon proved unable to adequately resupply their forces in the Aleutians.  They were not in good shape even before the US launched its offensive there, to retake those islands.

Midway represented both a midpoint to Hawaii and control of the sea lanes to Australia.  Had they taken the island, the US would have had to sail further south to bring troops and supplies to Australia and New Zealand.  By stopping the Japanese there, they kept that conduit to Australia open, to begin their counter offensive, beginning at Guadalcanal, to seize the airbase there and be able to begin attacking other Japanese installations with land based aircraft, rather than having to use carriers to bring in air power.

When I was in high school, I never quite grasped the strategy of the island hopping campaign, as my textbook never really dwelt on the strategic importance, just the events.  I got a better understanding by doing the historical background pieces for my All-Star Squadron thread, as I actually read summaries of the various landings and could see things on maps and follow it chronologically, seeing how they seized one island, built up an airbase and harbor facilities, to then supply further strikes towards the Philippines, on the southern end (securing the Solomons and New Guinea, to alleviate pressure on Australia and free the path to the Philippines) and the central, to move closer to aircraft striking range of the Japanese home islands.  I got to look at more isolated maps and wider maps and got a better sense of the geography of the South Pacific, than my textbook maps ever had.  we had a World Book set of encyclopedias, growing up, but even their maps were a bit limited.  That is one of the advantages of the internet, to find more detail on things...or at least references to point you to that detail.

The WW2 book gets more into the geo-political side of things, while also the wider strategies, showing how one affected the other, such as Stalin sing the treaties with Germany and Japan to secure his borders, for a time, then playing for time with the Allies, to keep a hand in Eastern Europe and prevent Churchill from getting his way of moving the Allies into Germany and to the borders of the USSR, to contain or destroy the government, eventually.

Getting back to the Pearl Harbor exercise, the US Navy had similar exercises that revolved around fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.  Ever since the Russo-Japanese War, they looked at Japan as a potential future enemy, as they had modernized quite rapidly and were the dominant non-US force in the region, as no other nation had the sea power, aside from the connections between the British and the empire and former colonies and even that was stretched thin, as the Navy was more concentrated in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, because of the rising political issues.  In my time, the enemy was the USSR and our war games revolved around the Soviet Navy and their activities in the Baltic, the Med and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, plus their subs in the Atlantic.  Since I was a midshipman and then a junior supply officer, I didn't get into that as much, since that is more of staff college activity, which would have been later in a career.  Still, we did computer games and fleet exercises were built around those scenarios.  Midshipman training built around recognizing Soviet military weapons and how they were employed, strengths and weaknesses.  For us, it was mostly their sub fleet, as their surface navy lagged way behind and lacked the experience and professionalism of the sub force.  Their best commanders and sailors were in it.  Still, we closely watched things like the introduction of things like the Kirov and also their developments of Naval air power, from their jump jet carriers to the construction of a fleet carrier, which was still ongoing, when the coup and collapse went down.

A lot of our scenarios revolved around Soviet activities with puppet states and spheres of influence, like the Middle East and control of the oil resources and their transport.  Our main clashes were with Arab states armed with Soviet frigates and destroyers, such as our engagements with Iran and Libya, in the Reagan years.

Similarly, in his Arnhem book, Beevor talked about how the capture of the bridges at Arnhem was a regular exercise at their staff colleges and Montgomery's strategy of the route from Belgium to Eindhoven and Arnhem was an immediate failure, in the exercise.  The route was too narrow and there were too many bridges to control.  The way to succeed was to establish a bridgehead across the Rhine and then capture the Arnhem bridge from both sides, after outflanking the German side.  That was proposed, at one point and shot down by Monty's people.  At no point did his staff consult with Dutch officers, who had conducted military exercises, including tank exercises, in that region and could have told them about the unsuitability of the terrain to support tank movements.  What could the defeated Dutch teach the British Army?  The US had similar problems with British command, early on, as the looked at them as rookies, ignoring that a good portion of our senior commanders were also WW1 vets, as well as other military adventures, not to mention pioneering air power, on land and sea, and manufacturing and technical capabilities.  We were a bunch of colonial rubes, to people like Monty.  Granted, some American commanders reinforced that view, with some of the mess in North Africa and Italy, especially.

One of the things Beevor emphasizes in the Ardennes book is how many of the divisions involved were filled with replacements and lacked experience, after Normandy and Market Garden.  Units like the 10st and 82nd Airborne had been brought in reserve, both due to casualties from Market Garden and because of the specialization.  that is why they were available to deploy to Bastogne and along the path to the Meuse.  The 106th was mostly replacements and green as grass and suffered the worst casualties, as they bore the brunt of the German attack.  The 29th, under Norm Cota, had been fighting through the Hurtgen and had suffered heavy losses and hadn't been rotated out, when they should have been.  You get a good feel for how troops were employed, then taken off the line to recover, re-equip and re-train, before rotating back into things.  The Germans had similar problems, as they had to piece together Panzer formations with untis that had all but scrapped tanks in advance of replacements, then had to put them back together for the offensive, to get the numbers up.  Fallschirmjager troops included a large number of recent trainees with no experience and the attempt to drop them in advance was a fiasco and they mostly hid out to wait for the armored forces to arrive, because they couldn't muster enough men to do more than reconnaissance, and lacked and Luftwaffe promises of resupply by air were worse than the attempts by the Allies, in Market Garden.

It was interesting to read the story unfold as the Germans pore across the Ardennes and drive the US back; but, they are able to move their reserves into key crossroads (Bastogne) and fight stubbornly on enough small villages to throw the German timetable out of whack, letting the Allies marshal more forces into their defenses.  Patton starts moving up from the South and the air cover stats hitting back just before Christmas and the US commanders fully expect the Germans to try an all-out attack on Bastogne, on Christmas, and are waiting for it and hit them with everything, including dwindling artillery ammo and stop it cold.  Little bits here, little bits there, which grow into bigger events, until Patton's advance forces reach Bastogne and open a corridor there and they start pouring in trucks with supplies  and prepare a counter-attack, while the air forces run wild on German supply lines.

Through it all, he never makes it just about the soldiers and battles, but the politics at play that directs the Army and the strategies, as well as the innocents caught in the middle and the real cost of the victory, on all sides.  For instance, with the fighting in the Ardennes and the heavy use of artillery, and the regular tactic of creating "treebursts," the trees in that region were heavily scarred with shrapnel and other components and it makes the timber unsuitable for industrial use, driving down the value of it and causing economic damage to the region, for decades.  The other major industry is agriculture, and thousands of livestock were killed in the fighting, leaving farms without their animals and their fields filled with landmines and unexploded ordinance.

Getting ready to start his book on the Spanish Civil War.  I also have his book about the fighting in Crete.  I still need to get his Stalingrad book, his book about the siege of Berlin and the one about Paris, after liberation.

Ernest Hemingway doesn't come across well either, both in the Normandy book and the Ardennes, since he basically acts like a drunken cowboy, out for attention and glory, when he is supposed to be a correspondent.  he also is romancing a mistress, while the missus turns up and is wined and dined by Allied generals.  he may have been a fine writer, but he was a major pr!@k.