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.

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and didn't the Mulberry Harbors get virtually destroyed via insane weather?

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Watched a show about that a while back. They said it was the worst storm to hit Normandy in like 40 or 50 years. Perfect timing.

In retrospect, the entire Italian campaign after the fall of Rome wasn't necessary. The thinking was we needed a southern front against the Alpine Redoubt, which we found out after the war didn't exist. It was a long, hard slog up the peninsula, and we only reached the German border as the Third Reich was collapsing anyway. I suppose we tied up a lot of German troops, but we could have done that with some feints and credible threats instead of hammering away at mountain fortifications for months.

The Ploesti Raid accomplished very little for the horrendous cost.

In the Pacific, we arguably would have been better of dispensing with the SW Pacific campaign and focusing exclusively on the Central Pacific. We didn't have enough ships and landing craft to do both at the same time, and had to alternate back and forth.