re: Spinoff: Was Pelelieu the Biggest Waste of a Campaign in WWII?

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How exactly did our logistics get spread so thin over there? Was it just the sheer numbers we had over there? Or was it just the fact that France had the only ports? Did we even try to get a logistic train through Italy?

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Well, it's a matter of port facilities and geography. We'd hoped to be able to use the port of Cherbourg which we captured not long after D-Day but the Germans did a fine job of wrecking the port to the point it was months before it was usable. In the meantime, virtually all supplies for the Allied armies on the Western Front has to come ashore at the Normandy beaches via the Mullberry Harbors we'd built as a temporary means of getting supplies ashore. While useful, these artificial harbors were simply never intended to be the main ports for the whole ETO. Then as the campaign progressed and the front moved further east away from the Normandy coast, supplies had to be moved further and further by means of what became known as the Red Ball Express. And even with all this effort, by late summer and early fall the allied Armies were still literally running out of gas.