rayban1 wrote:You're quibbling about the number dead or wounded. The medical treatment was so horribly lacking in those days most of the wounded died.
I'm not quibbling at all, when total casualties--dead, wounded and missing--equal the figure you put forward as the number of dead, you have made a gross exaggeration to support a vague point. Most of the wounded most certainly
did not die--the quality of medical services and evacuation services was so far advanced beyond any other war in history that hospitals in England were almost overwhelmed. Nobody was ready for the number of wounded who survived and the speed with which they were evacuated. I'd like to hear you try that line of burroshit with my mother, who landed at Normandy and served in a field hospital which not only kept the wounded Americans and Canadians alive, they kept the wounded teenagers from the
Hitler Jungen SS Panzergrenadier Division alive. Once again, like so many people who know a very little, but like to give the impression they know a lot, you just throw out statements you cannot back up.
Quote:Doctorow was making a point that we fought a war for suvival. I was making a point that if Roosevelt had not ignored the pitiful state of our military for the many years that he was in prior to the start of WW2 and had not ignored the threat posed by Hitler until it was too late, the war might not have been necessary and/or we would not have lost so many men.
In fact, it was not until the Roosevelt administration that America began to re-arm, because Harding, Coolidge and Hoover had neglected the military. The Boeing model 299, which became the B-17 Flying Fortress, the bombing workhorse of the ETO, was developed beginning in 1934. The other most commonly used heavy bomber in the ETO was Consolidated's B-24 Liberator, which began development in 1939. The most effective fighter aircraft used in the ETO was North American's P51 Mustang (Chuck Yeager, an ace in that aircraft, once said that what the Spitfire could do for forty minutes, the Mustang could do for eight hours; when asked when he knew the war was lost, Herman Goering said "When I saw the first Mustang over Berlin."), and the development of that aircraft began in 1940. The best high-altitude escort aircraft we had before the P51 Mustang was Lockheed's P38 Lightning, which began development in 1937. The best short-range escort fighter was Republic's P47 Thunderbolt, which began production in 1940; it was almost indestructible, and the United States Army Air Force purchased more than 15,000 of them--in the words of AviationHistory-dot-com: "P-47's flew more than 546,000 combat sorties between March 1943 and August 1945, destroying 11,874 enemy aircraft, some 9,000 locomotives, and about 6,000 armored vehicles and tanks. Only 0.7 per cent of the fighters of this type dispatched against the enemy were to be lost in combat."
That's just aircraft--i assure you i can do the same with infantry weapons, armored vehicles and naval vessels. In his monumental history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill compared
North Carolina to
King George V--and found the Royal Navy's battleship wanting--
North Carolina had a greater radius of fire and a greater throw-weight of metal with three guns each in three turrets, compared to
King George V's two guns each in five turrets. The keel of
North Carolina was laid down in 1937, the keel of
South Dakota laid down in 1939, as was the keel of
Washington. All of these are just a few examples of the efforts which Roosevelt made to prepare our nation for war long before we were attacked--and he did that despite the howls of isolationist Republicans in Congress.
Quote:Are you saying we did not abandon our weapons, reduce our military to a skeleton cadre of a few officers and non-coms, and stop all research and development of new weapons?
Certainly, all of the Allied powers did so in 1919--except the French, who had armies in Eastern Europe and Turkey. The electorate of England and the United States demanded it. In fact, the English disarmed so fast, and the French took on the chore of trying to stamp out the brush fires in Eastern Europe, so that the Americans took up, initially, the occupation of Germany. We only left after the French armies returned from Eastern Europe and took up the occupation of the Rhineland. The point which is notable, however, is that the military was reduced in size under conservative Republican Presidents, and the rebuilding of our military did not begin until Franklin Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, was in the White House. Because Roosevelt wisely foresaw war, the army was already rebuilding, new weapons and weapons systems were being developed and new destroyers, cruisers, carriers and battleships were coming down the ways, even before December 7, 1941.
Quote:How many years have we been fighting in Iraq......going on 3 years I think. How many men did we lose in WW2 during 3years. You need to keep things in perspective when we have vast weapons superiority, as now, vs when we had only parity of weapons during all other wars. You can retreat into denial and quibble about some of my casualty figures and it is controversial about who to blame but the general picture is clear in my mind if not yours.
Don't even know how long the war has been going on? That's rather pathetic for a cheerleader such as yourself. We lost just over 400,000 people killed in the Second World War, out of more than nine million in uniform--the best rate of casualty recovery in our history to that point. I'm not going to bother with a silly statement about "weapons parity," although one example will suffice. The Germans used to say that one Tiger tank could knock out ten Sherman tanks--and the Amis (which is what they called us) always seem to have at least eleven. During that war, the Germans produced fewer than 2,000 Tiger I and II model tanks--i believe the figures are 1350 of the former and 500 of the latter. We produced more than 50,000 Sherman tanks, which was not the only front line model we used.
Your statement sinks into incoherence. You're trying to make a case for a partisan slur of immense magnitude, suggesting that liberals leave us defenseless and conservatives are the guardians of our freedom. It's hogwash, and you've utterly failed to use history to support your silly claim.
Quote:Now I'm off to bed.......I'm very tired of trying to penetrate a large chunk of lead.
This is, i take it, an example of your mature, civil debating style.
