"D-Day New Guinea" - Coming in April

[Laurent Rizzotti]

While the subject of the book seems very interesting, the title end " the greatest combined airborne and amphibious operation of the Pacific War" seems rather unjustified IMHO. The landings in Leyte, Lingayen Gulf and Okinawa were bigger.

"The capture of Lae was the most complex operation for the Australian army in the Second World War. In many ways it was also a rehearsal for the D-Day invasion of France with an amphibious landing combined with the first successful large-scale Allied airborne operation of the war."
The landings in North Africa and Sicily were done before the one in Lae and include an airborne operation... OK, the latter were not successful, but the paradrop near Lae was on an undefended target, and certainly could not be compared to any paradrop done in Europe during the war.

Conditions of war in the Pacific and in Europe were so different that I doubt anybody uses an experience in the Pacific to prepare D-Day in Normandy, especially when 4 major landings (TOCH, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio) were done in MTO before D-Day in far closer conditions. Landings in MTO and ETO were bigger than most of the ones in the Pacific, and were only made some hundred or tens of km from friendly ports (except TOCH), while those in the Pacific were launched from bases thousands of km away (and from bases like Los Negros, Milne Bay, Ulithi, Majuro, Guadalcanal, ... that were built from scratch during wartime).