It is hard to know from day to day what Trump is planning, but there have been many reports that he and US military planners are assembling resources to launch a ground invasion against Iran. It may be limited to Kharg Island and the Iranian islands in the Strait of Hormuz, or it may extend to the actual coast of Iran.
A friend of mine has compared a US invasion of Iran to ‘D-Day’. I have reminded him that D-Day involved around 150,000 soldiers, with over 4,000 killed on the first day. The number of troops the US is moving to the area is far smaller than that, and does not include any troops from allied countries. The Iranian coast is lined with mountain ranges, whereas northern France is famously flat. There was also some element of surprise to D-Day, whereas US intentions in Iran have been well telegraphed. The American public is not at all prepared for an operation of such magnitude.
Comparison with ‘Operation Downfall’ against Japan in 1945
I believe there is a better comparison between US plans for Iran and the land invasion they planned for Japan during the summer of 1945 (dubbed ‘Operation Downfall’). At that time Japan was in a seriously weakened state following a sustained bombing campaign by the US Air Force that resulted in the deaths of around 300,000 civilians from incendiary bombing. Japan’s defences and infrastructure were also seriously degraded by that time, but the Japanese military still held out. Meanwhile, the US and its allies had for some time been planning a ground invasion against Japan, dubbed ‘Operation Downfall’. The US would have been assisted by the UK and British Commonwealth forces, but the bulk of the invasion force would have been provided by the US. Predicted casualty rates were very high, ranging between ‘the low hundreds of thousands to over a million on the Allied side and into the millions for the Japanese’ (quote from Richard Frank’s book ‘Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire’, 1999).
In the end the US chose to carry out the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led directly to the surrender of Japan. The planned ground invasion was no longer necessary. Have we now reached a similar stage in the current Iran War?
Michael Ingle – michaelingle01@gmail.com
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Michael Ingle - Interesting Times 
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