Thread: News Stories
View Single Post
Old 2009-04-09, 09:45   Link #2205
danin8r44
The King of the Insane
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Right next door to you..
Quote:
Originally Posted by SaintessHeart View Post
That is because US came LATE into the World Wars. They didn't deploy until after Pearl Harbor in 1941, in which the war had already went on for 2-3 years. And also due to the carriers being not present in the area, the US are able to have greater force projection in the Pacific, and subsequently one thing that won them the Battle of Midway.

Russia, of course, lost the most men due to Stalin's "not a step back!" tactic to push into the bloodbath.

Another thing to note is that the US are much better equipped than their Allied counterparts, given the fact that the Brits had to PURCHASE Tommyguns for firepower (the Bren gun is too heavy and only has a clip of 30 rounds, Tommy can chamber up to 100.) before coming up with the Sten, and the Russians and Germans had to copy the Garand's design to create a semi-auto replacement for their bolt action Mosin-Nagants.

One more thing to note about squad based firepower, is that the GIs had imba firepower compared to their German/Japanese counterparts, which consists of up to 2-4 tommyguns and a BAR per squad, PLUS the semi-auto Garands for successive fire and the M1A1 magazine-fed carbines for easier reload. The Germans have KAR-98s, MP40s (lower RPM) and occasionally a Gewehr/FG42/StG45 in which the last 2 were rolled out in late war. Since you have been through military training and should know something about contacts, I would just state that the group which has the most firepower in an initial contact usually wins.

Besides, the US had superior airpower, with the B-17 heavy bombers which can carry more bombs and is more mobile than the German Ju-88s. Also, US was out of range of the V2 and V1s, so their civilian deaths could be said to be 0. Only the Japanese manage to hit US (with a firebomb from a seaplane launched from a sub), but it only caused a small forest fire.

The US didn't exactly win or have less casualties by pure luck. They win and kill more by having bigger factories, superior firepower, and adaptable tactics (high buildings blasting, CQB, squad-based tactics and of course, that odd bayonet charge in Normandy).
Some that is true some of that isn't, but the gist of it is that if you are judging by how many men 5 Americans versus 5 Germans would kill, it ended up pretty equal.
The only soldiers who really couldn't hold their own 5 on 5 were the Japanese (after they had their initial amazing triumphs) and the Russians. America had lower casualty ratings simply because they walked in late and weren't ever fighting on their own land, let alone near their shores. In addition total American death tolls in WW2 didn't look much different from the British death tolls.
danin8r44 is offline