Military cadence

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Well that's really the only way to attack a beach. The Army assaulted the beaches in the Philippines frontally, but it was the Philippines which are huge.. the Japanese couldn't defend every beach and they had to deal with partisans that were fighting for us against them. The Marine island battles which, at best, supplied small air bases and at worst cost lives needlessly (you don't need to take an airfield to deny it to the enemy if you can achieve the same by cutting it off--because its an Island, and you control the water and the Air). They are romanticized as episodes of valor, which is surely fair, but in that the fact that they were largely pointless is forgotten. The Philippine campaign never actually finished--it was considered a second front even though it was bigger, more costly, and strategically more valuable (you can control the Solomon Islands by controlling the Philippines but you can't control the Philippines with the Solomon Islands), and in the end there were more Army Soldiers on Okinawa than Marines.

I'd go as far as to say that Nimitz' Island hopping was almost bureaucratic completionism. A total refusal to allow these little islands to die slowly, instead insisting that they be stormed. You can't really blame the Marines for being used poorly.

I think the concept of the islands as bases for control idea was sound, but some of the ones they picked were really a waste. Tarawa's strategic value lasted a week. Half of the Solomons they bothered with they needn't have. So yeah, I concur, too many Marines were used wrong.