Belleau Wood

A few posts below, there is a letter from a Marine that refers to Belleau Wood. My knowledge of military history is pretty modest so I did a Google search and found this article. Excerpt:

Rejuvenated by success first at Cantigny (at the end of May) and now at Chateau-Thierry, General Bundy's Second Division forces followed up Chateau-Thierry two days later with the difficult exercise of capturing Belleau Wood.

Second Division's Marine Corps, under James Harbord, were tasked with the taking of the wood.  This perilous venture involved a murderous trek across an open wheat field, swept from end to end by German machine gun fire, a fact that continues to generate controversy today among some historians.

As a consequence of the open nature of the advance on the wood, casualties on the first day, 6 June, were the highest in Marine Corps history (a dubious record which remained until the capture of Japanese-held Tarawa in November 1943).

Fiercely defended by the Germans, the wood was first taken by the Marines (and Third Infantry Brigade), then ceded back to the Germans - and again taken by the U.S. forces a total of six times before the Germans were finally expelled.  Also captured were the nearby villages of Vaux and Bouresche. 

The battle ran from 6-26 June and by its end saw U.S. forces suffer 9,777 casualties, of which 1,811 were fatal.  The number of German casualties is not known, although some 1,600 troops were taken prisoner. More critically, the combined Chateau-Thierry/Belleau Wood action brought to an end the last major German offensive of the war.

Will the current battles in Iraq be the pivotal ones marking the end of the beginning of a new free Iraq or just the beginning of the end of a failed US invention?

Am obviously hoping for the former.

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Side note: the news media knows nothing about history. As sad and horrible it is to lose ANYBODY in battle, what is happening is NOT anywhere on the scale of what we saw in WWI, WW2, Korea or Vietnam.

Instapundit has a bunch of links to put what is happening in some historical perspective.