I was watching the history channel today and they had a program about the only WWII campain fought on american soil.The alaskan Campain.The bad thing about this is I don't know the details I flipped the channel when it was almost over so,

any details, links, stories or briefings on the American/Japenese Campain in Alaska, 1943?

Hope this helps. It's from the U.S. Army Campaigns of World War 2:

http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/aleut/aleut.htm

Somewhere I read an interestinc fact about an Island that was Invaded by Allies (american&cdn)
AS I recall it read like this:

'A combined Amercian and Canadian division(s)
(??) attacked the Island(cannot remembre name) via Amphibious landing and in a day captured the whole island taking only 37 casualties.
The numbers would've been certainly higher if there were any Japanese on the island.,

quote:

Originally posted by gustave.jany:
Somewhere I read an interestinc fact about an Island that was Invaded by Allies (american&cdn)
AS I recall it read like this:

'A combined Amercian and Canadian division(s)
(??) attacked the Island(cannot remembre name) via Amphibious landing and in a day captured the whole island taking only 37 casualties.
The numbers would've been certainly higher if there were any Japanese on the island.,

You are talking about Kiska island in Aleutian chain. Attack happened in August '43 in dense fog during daylight. We expected almost 35,000 Japanese on the island so our boys were nervous and trigger happy. I believe 28 men were KIA with some 50 wounded. Not the first and certainly not the last time our intelligence screwed up big.

The ardennes was a huge intelligence foul up to

Market Garden being one of the biggest.

I just finished reading "An Army at Dawn" about US/UK effort in Africa (the best ww2 book i've ever read -- but i didnt read that many )and it shows that military intelligence is in fact a contradiction in terms.
They were almost never accurate in the assesment of situation or numbers and units of enemies in a particular location...the only good thing about that is that Germans nor Japanese were much better.
We still had the upper hand after cracking the codes of our enemies.
But mistakes continued throughout ww2, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada ... you see where I'm going with this, right?
And there are WMD's in Iraq. Say what? There are none....hmmm.
But I hope we are getting better at it

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lol, you got a screename at UBI?

The soviets did a good job at Kursk though even if it was by some german help.

quote:

Originally posted by Karabiner_409:
Market Garden being one of the biggest.

Market Garden didn't fail because of bad intelligence.
Everyone always points to German armor having moving into the area for rest and refit as being the one and only reason Market Garden failed.

Truth is, it failed because of Allied supply problems and Allied politics.
Montgomery simply didn't get what the plan required when it was needed.

quote:

Market Garden didn't fail because of bad intelligence

No that's true but intelligence did screw up, if they had indentified and judged the strenght of the German units in the area correctly perhaps they could have adjusted there battle plans, now they simply assumed that practically all the units were "Volkssturm". That means old men and 16 year-olds without decent training and weapons, most of them barely capable of hitting the broad side of a barn with the ever present Panzerfaust.

And talking about intel screw-ups: how about Pointe-du-Hoc, they send in about 225 highly trained Rangers to take out a couple of telephone poles. And the thing is that maybe even when not clear on aerial recon photos, a message was send to London from a resistance member to warn them that their were no guns. And still over 80 young men died over a useless piece of rock.

Ya at market garden was a big coincidence as well. Just before they jumped the 9th and 10th SS panzer move in to refit. Plus they jumped waaaaaaaay to far away from the bridge.

"No-one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good." Plato