Resolved?

This is coolbert:

Okinawa and the Battle of the Bulge!

Once more from the isegoria.net Internet web site an extract. That original article as written by Professor Victor Davis Hanson.

"In War: Resolution"

"Perhaps the two costliest intelligence lapses of World War II [in the aftermath of 7 December 1941 from the American perspective] preceded the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa — both towards the end of the war, after radical improvements in intelligence methods and technology. Americans had no idea of the scope, timing, or aims of the massive German surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944, despite the battle-tested acumen of our two most respected generals, Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and British and American intercepts of Wehrmacht messages. At Okinawa, American intelligence officers grievously underestimated the size, position, and nature of the Japanese deployment, and thus vastly overestimated the efficacy of their own pre-invasion bombing attacks. Yet Okinawa was not our first experience with island-hopping. It unfolded as the last invasion assault in the Pacific theater of operations — supposedly after the collective wisdom gleaned from Guadalcanal, the Marianas, Peleilu, the Philippines, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima had been well digested. Yet this late in the war, over 140,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in the Ardennes and on Okinawa."

The German Ardennes Offensive of 1944 generally seen [and probably correctly seen] as a MASSIVE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE! Okinawa less so!

The field of intelligence gathering and analysis within the military sphere fraught with great danger and this should be understood. 1. Your adversary is attempting to hide things from you. 2. Your adversary is a quite deliberate manner feeding you bad information to fool and trick you.

In both instances [Okinawa and the Ardennes] it was not that the Americans were so good but rather that the enemy was so good?

coolbert.