Us & Then. . .

(Us & Them. . .)

Hope everybody had a Merry Christmas, or whatever tradition one observes. Hope everyone enjoyed all their gifts and all that food and one can only imagine that post-season antacid consumption is at healthy levels. Anyhow, December 26th. aside from being the day after Christmas, it is also the anniversary of the U.S. Third Army under the command of General Patton, broke through to the besieged garrison of the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne that had been surrounded for ten days with no re-supply. At some point, the troopers were down to one round apiece.

Now, some two years earlier, and about the same time of year, another garrison was also surrounded, the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, but its relief force, namely the German Fourth Panzer Army. had been stopped before its divisions even approached Sixth Army's outer perimeter. Now, Third Army's relief of Bastogne and Fourth Panzer's failure at the gates of Stalingrad are not exactly apples and oranges. Suffice it to say, that the Americans had the means, Third Army, and the will, Patton's, and the Germans in the Don-Volga corridor had limited means and the "will," was Hitler's.

The strategic campaign of World War II was that in the East. The campaign in the West was the Battle of the Atlantic. U-Boat "wolf-packs" would hunt and sink Allied shipping in the North Atlantic, in an attempt to starve the United Kingdom. The Atlantic was the longest contiguous engagement of the whole War and the Germans almost prevailed. If they had constructed more submarines instead of the two battleships that proved useless, the results could have been decisive. The tide against the U-Boat effort came in spring, 1943, when Allied countermeasures began to tell.

In the Pacific, in contrast with the German effort in the Atlantic, the American submarine force did indeed sever Japanese connections to its southern resources area and sending much of its merchant fleet to the bottom. An invasion of the Home Islands had been considered but Gato-Class boats roamed the Western Pacific at will and sent its fair share of the Imperial Japanese Navy into Davy Jones' Locker.

So, what is the point here ? Americans/Allies succeeding when the Axis failed ? That is just a history lesson. Any larger context needs to come from the audience. That would be appropriate the Day After Christmas.