Is War II in the Pacific and the war in Europe similar?

Answer 1

Not really. In the Pacific the fighting was mainly on islands, some large, some small. Some of the Pacific battles lasted only a few days, others took a month or more. But once US forces landed there was no hope of reinforcement for the Japanese (with the exception of the first island landed on by the US, Guadalcanal). There could be no resupply for the Japanese, and none of them were getting off the island. Generally they had to be killed to the last man. Many committed suicide and saved US personnel the trouble. In the first few years the Japanese would fight for a while, and then often try a "Banzai charge", a suicide attack, with all men in the area running at the Americans simultaneously, to be mowed down. Often the Japanese got drunk on sake before making these charges. On Attu, in the Aleutian Islands the Banzai charge was actually somewhat successful. The Japanese broke through and killed over 300 men of the US 7th Infantry Division. On many of these islands the Japanese had artillery in pillboxes overlooking the beaches where they thought an invader might land, but little artillery elsewhere. The difficulty was in rooting them out, cave by cave, pillbox by pillbox, machine gun by machine gun. They would not surrender. Japanese tanks were rarely seen and they were ineffective little light tanks when they were. Across the Pacific few of the island battles saw more than a handful of prisoners taken, even though as soon as the US invasion ships appeared their situation was hopeless. The Japanese soldiers knew they were being abandoned to their fate and were expected to sell their lives as dearly as possible. In Japan the men placed on these islands were understood to be as good as dead, and were called "shattered jewels". Of the prisoners taken many were Koreans, taken from their homes and forced to labor on the Japanese defenses, and then forced at gunpoint to fight alongside the Japanese when the invasion came. US troops could not tell the difference between a Japanese and a Korean, and any who tried to give themselves up might get shot in the back by the Japanese, but a few might be lucky enough to live long enough to surrender. In the Pacific there were only two campaigns where the territory was big enough to deploy and entire field army - Okinawa and the Philippines. The US fought the Pacific war on a shoestring, because about 85% of the US war effort was devoted to defeating "Germany first".

In Europe the enemy was the Germans, who had the best army in the world. Frederick the Great had invented the concept of a General Staff and the German general staff had been the best for nearly two hundred years. Their officers were extremely professional and highly competent. The Germans were fighting on the defensive most of the time, and there was no one better at it than the Germans. The Germans had a much higher proportion of machine guns in an infantry platoon than the US. And the German machine gun was so good that the US basically copied it and used the US version, the M-60, until very recently. The Germans also had better artillery pieces, but were frequently short of ammunition for it. The German tanks were the best of the war, but their industry could never produce enough. The German Panther and Tiger tanks could knock out a US tank at a thousand yards. US tanks had no hope of doing any damage to either one until they got within one hundred yards, and then they had to try to shoot it in the rear, where the armor was thinnest. The German hand-held anti-tank weapon was the "panzerfaust", and the direct ancestor of the Rocket Propelled Grenades beloved by terrorists and insurgents today. This was a rocket-propelled, shaped-charge projectile, and extremely effective. Much better than the US bazooka. The Germans invented the assault rifle, but it was never built in large enough quantities to arm all their men with it. The Sturmgewehr 44 was the inspiration for the Russian AK-47, though they would never admit it. The Germans were extremely flexible in their tactics. As their units were chewed up survivors would fall back and combine together into ad hoc "kampfgruppes" under whoever there had the highest rank, and go back to fighting very effectively. The war in Europe was one of mass forces, fought on a massive scale. The western allies in France had eight or nine field armies in line from north to south, facing about as many German field armies. And, even after the US had sent the last divisions it had to France, the western allies never occupied more than about one third of the German war effort. Two Germans out of three were fighting the Russians on the eastern front. It took the combined efforts of the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and all the commonwealth nations to beat the Germans, and at that, it took years. The WWII Germans also invented cruise missiles, smart bombs, guided missiles, the world's first operational jet fighter planes, and if Hitler had not been such a maniac and ran off the Jews who could escape, the Germans would have had atomic weapons to put on their guided missiles. The captured German V-2 rockets became the "Atlas" rocket in the US and were the beginning of the US space program.