The Coalition of the Swilling

Interesting little note I just learned last night: One of the guys raising the flag was not a Marine, he was a sailor. As a promise to his parents, he joined the Navy to avoid combat.

Aside from the part about going ashore on Iwo, the irony of his choice was that in many of the later battles in the Pacific, the Navy took more casualties than the landing forces.

He was a Corpsman (medic in Army lingo) so he had a pretty good chance of seeing combat. He also was the father of the guy who wrote the book . Most of the Navy casualties were at the battle of Okinawa they took it on the chin from the Kamikazi pilots. The landing force for that battle (Marines and Army) met little resistance till they moved inland after a couple of days then all Hell broke loose, very bloody.

Thanks MD. I didn't see to much of the program and missed most of that info.

As I recall, though, Okinawa wasn't the only island battle that had more onboard casualties than onshore. But it was the kamikazes that caused the most.

The other big one was Guadacanal, but that was a huge Naval battle ship on ship. After the Marines landed the Japanese engaged the Navy in a night battle although we won the Navy left the Marines stranded, that caused some friction. Most of the island hopping battles the Navy got to sit back and blast the islands only the Canal and Oki were there significant enemy Navy forces ready to fight. Have to include the Phillipines but Marines weren't to involved with that one. I think Oki was the biggest for the Navy with something like 9000 plus casualties.

I had it in my head that Tarawa and Saipan were pretty heavy naval casualties too, but it's been a while since my readings.

Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian and Pelelu all had significant Navy casualties but for the most part these were the landing craft guys. The Navy got to sit off shore and hammer these islands with their big guns. Tarawa and Saipan had barely a tree left intact but the Japanese were underground. If I remember most of Tarawa's casualties were in the surf, Navy and Marines. Now I'm going to have to go research.

Yeah, it's been a while. I need to do some refresher reading too.

Mo-rons.

And here all this time I thought they were called Ma-rines....(ducks and runs.....)

(Someone's fixin' ta get thumped.)