You're being pretty flippant about some of your losses to date, CR. Those "speed bumps" you've thrown onto unsupported islands in the Gilberts may have gained you a week or two in the scheme of things, but I have a tough time seeing any RL commander so ordering the repeated extermination of thousands of friendly troops.
Well, I think this should read, "any RL WESTERN commander". The Germans and Soviets quite frequently sent troops into positions in which they were certain to be lost e.g. the Festungen along the Atlantic coast in 1944, the Festungen throughout Russia in late '43 and 44 ( weirdly enough Hitler was probably correct about the Festungen in 42 --- it just goes to show that a broken clock is still correct twice a day etc. So long as the strategic gains won by the sacrifice were commensurate with the sacrifice then those repeated exterminations were entirely justified.
To put it another way.... People often make a joke about the Soviets clearing mines by ordering men of the Penal Battalions to march through the minefield. Obviously this is a gross simplification since they didn't actually usually simply march through the minefield but they certainly didn't have equipment and were forced to clear mines far more quickly than was safe. The end result was that the Penal Battalions were a means of clearing mines very rapidly, by largely untrained troops without the use of any specialised equipment. In the absence of trained engineers with mine detecting equipment and/or if time was of the essence I would argue that the Soviet ordering of troops in to almost literally "march the mines clear" was perfectly justified. So long as clearing that piece of terrain in 20 minutes instead of in 3 to 4 hours of waiting around for engineers to arrive and clear them was worth the 50 or 100 dead then ordering them to march through the minefield was precisely the correct course of action and, indeed, NOT ordering them to clear it would actually have been negligent.
Western commanders mightn't think that way but Western commanders didn't conduct the majority of the ground combat during WW2. The majority of ground combat occured in China and the Eastern Front and in both regions the routine ordering of units into sacrificial redoubts OR into suicidal charges etc was not at all uncommon. Westerners make a joke out of the "incompetence" behind these charges etc but that's too easy an answer. Sometimes those suicidal charges were designed to use plentiful resources ( untrained, unarmed peasantry ) whilst protecting valuable resources ( trained engineers ) and, I would argue, they were precisely the right thing to do in many of those situations.
In this situation it is a pity that the invasions haven't stuck. CR should look into making them stick better next time but if the gain was, in his mind, worth the cost then he should continue ordering such operations in future.
