A reader, RS, with an obvious knowledge of WW II history writes regarding my D-Day post:

I've come to the conclusion, based on my study of military history, that when you look at the USA's involvement in WW2, it was a miracle that we were victorious. And I do not necessarily mean that providence was with us, only in that we stumbled our way to victory by sheer weight of material production.

We got our butt handed to us at Kasserine Pass in North Africa. Sicily was an unnecessary invasion that failed to capture the Herman Goering Division that fought an effective withdrawal. Anzio was an unmitigated disaster—a giant whale beached on land, as Churchill put it. The battle of Cassino was a meat grinder against numerically inferior forces, and we ended up saturation bombing a historic holy site. It took the Allies three months to break out from the Normandy hedgerows, again, against a numerically inferior army that had no air support. The Germans in 1940 took all of Western Europe in six weeks. It took us six months to get to the German border—and that's with the Russians attacking Germany from the east. Operation Market Garden went nowhere, with six useless bridges captured at great expense. We let the German army in France escape at the Falaise Gap, to fight us again. The British failed to prevent the German 15th Army from escaping from the Scledt River after the Brits captured Antwerp.

The US Generals unnecessarily got involved fighting the Germans in the Hurtegen forest, creating a mini-Vietnam that served no strategic purpose at the cost of tens of thousands of US casualties. Patton ordered a small US task force to rescue his son-in-law behind German lines. Task Force Baum was wiped out and captured for his vanity and pride. The Battle of the Bulge, hailed as a great allied victory, fails to take into account the Allied leadership failing to see the offensive coming, and the loss of two US green divisions—a defeat that resulted in more US POWs than those in the Philippines Bataan death march. The Brits tried to capture the Ruhr Valley by sending a mechanized army through the Reichwald Forest. It rained, and the Germans broke up dikes and flooded the area. By the time the Brits fought their way through against inferior German units, the war was all but over.

In summary, our citizen soldiers were lions led by donkeys. Read cartoonist Bill Mauldin's Up Front. It portrays the average US soldier fighting two wars—one against the Germans, the other against their own superiors’ grandiose plans. We should thank heaven, rather than to take pride in our country, to have survived the war as well as we did.