[Bill Murray]

Evening Jon & Geoff:

Jon: I misplaced the PM but have now found it again and will respond a bit later. And, sorry your original thread sort of got hijacked but I guess that is likely to happen in the Sergeant's Mess.

Geoff: Thanks for your very well thought out and remarkably restrained observations. While I don't post often, I have been on this board and it's earlier variants for some years and have seen you wield a pretty sharp scalpel.

Regarding my time on your sites, you may remember me as the guy that lived in China/Sweden/Peru and Canada (Queensville not far from Zephyr). That body of experience and a certain amount of aging, sort of means that while I am still a patriotic American I do not see my country through the same rose colored glasses I did fifty years ago. I don't bash my country just because in some circles it is politically correct but I reserve the right to question and/or criticize things that my experience tell me are probably not being done right or whatever.

To comment on your observations sort of one at a time, I will re-phrase a little bit my thoughts on, for example, Normandy, which was the high point of firepower versus human assets in that conflict. The weaponry available was "dumb" weaponry in comparison to what is available today for sure. The technology was not radically different than a hundred years earlier or two hundred. Powder and fuses and barrels all of which could malfunction. Bombs fell where they were dropped and even the famous Norton bombsight (hope I remembered the name right) was far from infallible. Too much cloud cover, wrong map co-ordinates, troops in the wrong place and Bingo, fratricide.

Given that Britain and the Commonwealth countries were near to exhaustion in 1944 and that the ever impatient Americans wanted to get the thing overwith I can as an individual accept the decision to go for broke and use overwhelming firepower to break into Germany and to accept the potential casualties both from enemy as well as friendly fire. And do remember, Geoff, it is quite well documented that the Allies calculated on casualty rates from both causes.

As a side note to the above, remember too that Monty was severely criticized, wrongly so in my opinion, for proceeding at a rate that was deemed far too cautious by his American peers. Monty was no dummy. He lived with the knowledge that the First World War bled Great Britain and the countries of the then British Empire pretty much to death. Not only the Tommies in the trenches but the best and the brightest of the middle and upper classes who were the Officers of these units. Those losses were irreplaceable and were the beginning of the end of the Empire.
Monty knew that and he also knew that Officers in units of his forces led from the front and he took great pains to make sure they could take the objectives and still survive. A longer range perspective than some of my folk.

As to your thought or query "why does this seem to keep happening to Americans and not to others".

In fairly short strokes, I have three main theories. The Americans are by and large not a nation of warriors. Pretty much we go to war reluctantly although recently we seem to jump into such things a bit more quickly. At the same time, we are still imbued with the "frontier/cowboy/can do" attitude and we are still impatient as hell. That can have all kinds of bad results once we get into something really nasty.

Since we are not a nation of warriors, our various Armed Forces are, in my opinion but it is an opinion shared by many, not really very well trained in the general sense. To be sure and it is a bit of prejudice showing here, our US Marine Corps is probably trained as well as most elite units in any country and our other elite unites within the US Army/Navy/Air Force are either at the same level or maybe just a bit behind.

Try to follow me on this: Smart Bombs almost never miss, Abrams Tank rounds almost never miss, Tomahawk missiles almost never miss. Put that sort of weaponry into the hands of less than perfectly trained military personnel and you are going to have some "blue on blue" problems, guaranteed. From what I read in official and semi-official publications about the "state of training of our armed forces" we are not up to scratch in the sense of putting these incredibly sophisticated weapons in the hands of folks who are not 100% properly trained in how to determine what is and what is not a legitimate target. Sort of complicated but given our machismo attitude and these sophisticated never miss weapons it can sometimes become sort of a "live Nintendo Game" if you understand what I mean.

Some throwaway tidbits. According to Defense News Weekly and a number of other publications, the majority of AFVs/IFVs/APCs destroyed on the Coalition side in the first Gulf War resulted from friendly fire. On one occasion an Army Lt. Col. piloting a helicopter that he was not supposed to be flying in combat made a rocket attack on several British IFVs as I remember causing a number of deaths and casualties. That is perhaps a machismo issue, getting one's ticket punched.
Recently a sergeant received an award for trying to save his fellow soldiers in the famous "Jessica" incident. He tried to return fire and his M16 would not fire. He grabbed a fallen soldier's M16 and it would not fire. He grabbed a third M16 from another fallen comrade and it would not fire. This was a Vehicle Maintenance Unit and they did not undergo the same training and inspection regimen that Infantry units undergo regarding proper maintenance and proficiency with their weapons. It is so bad that the new Chief of Staff of the US Army had to weigh in and declare that from now on they would get that training.

Starting to get far too long here. One last throwaway. At the Chosin reservoir my Dad was CO of the 5th Marine Regiment. He had attached to that unit a Battalion of British Royal Marines and a Company of soldiers in the Turkish Army. To this day, he still lives, he maintains that if he ever had to go into combat again he would ask for a unit from each of the above to go in with him. Why? Not only Esprit de Corps but training. "Best damned trained troops I ever served with" Excepting his own Marines of course.
Bill