December 2004 Newsletter
“Spinning” the Casualties: Media Strategies During the Roosevelt Administration
D. M. Giangreco
U.S. Army Command and General Staff
College
In the fall of 1944, questions concerning current and future American casualties
and the duration of the war were generating a great deal of discussion within
the Pentagon. Commencement of large-scale operations earlier that year in June,
with the invasions of the Marianas in the Pacific and Normandy in France, had
produced the long-expected “casualty surge.” This rapid increase
in combat casualties turned out to be beyond what the U.S. Army anticipated(1)
and was so politically sensitive that the War Department changed how it reported
Army losses not only through the civilian press, but to its own troops as well,
principally through the Army publication Yank, which distributed up
to 2.6 million copies weekly to soldiers and airmen starved for reading material.
This essay examines the casualty data the U.S. Army presented to its troops
(plus any civilian willing to pay the price of a subscription); the methodologies
it used to produce the inflation, then deflation, of cumulative casualty figures
from June 1944 through the end of the war; and the Roosevelt administration’s
effort to prepare the American public for steep increases in the draft during
1945. A secondary issue — but one of some significance in light of the
recent controversy over the display of the Enola Gay — is that all this
activity occurred within the public arena.
The claims of veterans that they remembered being told of massive casualty projections
for the invasion of Japan were dismissed as a “largely fictitious, comforting
story”(2) by former National Air and Space Museum Director Martin Harwit
and many in the academy when they defended the institution’s proposed
Enola Gay exhibit script. However, Robert Newman, who was one of the few academics
to defend veterans’ claims publicly, notes that while the xenophobia of
some veterans groups can often distort judgment about foreign policies, in the
Enola Gay context, “any account of this argument should acknowledge the
basic accuracy of what veterans ‘knew.’”(3) Indeed, servicemen
had been regularly exposed to huge casualty figures in both Army and commercial
newspapers since the middle of 1944, and the numbers moved from past tense to
future tense early in 1945.
The War Department, through the Office of War Information or its own Bureau
of Public Relations, seldom released cumulative casualty data during the first
year and a half after Pearl Harbor, preferring instead to present such information
at the conclusion of individual campaigns or operations such as those at Guadalcanal
or in North Africa, the Gilbert Islands, and Aleutians. A fairly comprehensive
account of casualties through the third week of June 1943 was published in mid-July
and listed four principal loss categories — killed, wounded, missing,
and prisoners — and their totals by theater of operation. Army casualties
from all these categories totaled 63,958. That number included 12,506 Philippine
Scouts, who were among the nearly 32,000 personnel lost when the islands fell.
Navy, Coast Guard and Marine casualties in these four categories increased the
total number by nearly a third to 90,860.(4)
Not included in the tally were other categories that were even then draining
the U.S. Army of manpower. “Nonbattle” losses among troops in the
field were omitted, as were losses from administrative attrition such as separations
from the service due to age or infirmity. Most apparent to commanders overseas
were the destructive effects on unit combat strength of nonbattle losses from
disease and, to a lesser degree, the psychiatric breakdowns popularly known
as “battle fatigue.” For example, the destruction of Merrill’s
Marauders in Burma by disease and fatigue is recounted in a number of works,(5)
and in New Guinea, the 32d Infantry Division attained a rate of 5,358 cases
of malaria, dengue, and fevers of undetermined origin per 1,000 troops from
October 1942 to February 1943.(6)
Naturally, the war’s other belligerents also lost great numbers of men
from “noncombat” factors. The Germans in particular were painfully
aware of the debilitating effects of disease on the successful prosecution of
combat operations. Disease among German forces in North Africa regularly sapped
a stunning 40 to 50 percent of their front-line strength in 1942 and 1943.(7)
What would Afrika Corps commander Erwin Rommel have been able to do with a force
twice the size of the one he had? U.S. forces in that theater later found that
approximately nine of every ten admissions to field hospitals were not the result
of combat.(8)
Excluding soldiers who recovered enough to return to duty, the U.S. Army would
ultimately discharge from the service some 50,520 men for nonbattle injuries
in combat zones (such as loading accidents), 312,354 for combat-related psychiatric
breakdowns, and 862,356 soldiers for diseases contracted during the war.(9)
There was little public interest in these numbers after the close of hostilities,
and the mounting losses they represented went essentially unreported during
the war except for a seven-month period in 1944, when they were released somewhat
obliquely.
There were two very good reasons for never releasing figures for sickness among
deployed troops. First, unlike the periodic accountings by the Army Medical
Corps of personnel discharged in the United States because of ailments like
heart defects or mental disabilities, these numbers came principally from the
overseas theaters and thus would provide the enemy with a much fuller picture
of the U.S. Army’s effective fighting strength. Just prior to the invasion
of France, totals for wounded troops were omitted as well, undoubtedly for the
same reason.(10) Second, the American public was understandably focused on the
cost of combat operations. There was no crying demand for collateral
information — no squeaking wheel.
The exclusion of figures for both the sick and wounded, however, created other
problems, not the least of which was that smaller, more selective loss figures
were reported to the public at a point in the war when, many Americans already
believed, to varying degrees, that the United States was making less of a contribution
to the war effort than its allies. This was a very sensitive subject, often
raised by the media and the government itself. Discussing what the Roosevelt
administration did to manage this perception, and what effects it had on everything
from congressional elections to global war-planning with Great Britain and the
Soviet Union is beyond the scope of this article. We can, however, examine how
it affected what the public was told about the U.S. Army’s “losses.”
The last-released U.S. Army casualty figures before the 1944 casualty surge
were published at the beginning of June and totaled 156,676 from the categories
killed, missing, prisoners, and wounded through April of that year. (11)The
Army publication Yank, which was published by Brigadier General Frederick
H. Osborn’s Special Services Division of the Army Service Forces and had
a circulation of millions, contrasted this number with the nearly 670,000 men
lost by the British Empire,(12) and had earlier editorialized on the Soviet
loss of some six million troops in battles against the Nazis. Other Special
Services products such as Frank Capra’s The Battle of Britain
(1943) and his Oscar-nominated The Battle of Russia (1943) reinforced
this contrast. Moreover, stories of the huge sacrifices made by the United States’
allies were not limited to mass-distribution military publications and films,
but were common in civilian newspapers, radio, newsreels, and feature-length
Hollywood films as well.
As noted, the cumulative figures for wounded through April 1944 were dropped
from casualty totals released just before the invasions of France and the Marianas.
This should have resulted in an even greater disparity between U.S. and Allied
casualty figures. However, the Army now established a policy to disseminate
virtually the entire administrative flux and flow of manpower not periodically,
but on a monthly basis through public relations channels to the press and through
its own organs to its troops. By adding the categories “honorable discharges”
and “other separations” to the totals for April 1944, released in
late June, published Army losses almost immediately jumped from 156,000 to 1,163,000
even before the casualty surge began to show up in the figures.(13) For those
who did not look too closely at how the number was constructed, the clear implication
was that most or all of these losses were combat-related.
This new accounting method produced figures that seemed to be much more in tune
with the combat losses of the British and Soviets and ostensibly demonstrated
to the public and to allies and enemies alike that America’s commitment
to the war was unequivocal and its resources were enormous. These figures also
implied that America was already pulling its share of the load against the Axis.
Releasing the artificially large monthly totals, which lumped together losses
through purely administrative matters with battle and nonbattle deaths, prisoners,
and missing while still withholding figures for the sick and wounded, would
also prove useful for the Roosevelt administration because doing so inadvertently
provided a way to soften the potential blow to America’s war resolve when
the sudden upsurge of major ground operations beginning in the summer of 1944
caused real casualties to skyrocket.
Through this month-by-month release of figures combining administrative separations
with selected combat-related categories, soldiers, airmen, and the public at
large became conditioned to seeing steadily growing million-plus loss figures
months before it became apparent that American troops were now experiencing
the frightening attrition of manpower that had been commonplace among the other
antagonists for several years. For example, in August 1944, after the standard
seventy-five days it took to collect, collate, vet, and publish the data, the
War Department released an inflated “total Army losses” figure of
1,234,000 for December 7, 1941, through May 1944.(14) As noted earlier, however,
it was department policy not to indicate how many of these were casualties directly
related to combat. By this time combat-related casualties numbered no less than
194,000 men, and that figure did not include the appalling losses to sickness
in the disease-ridden overseas theaters.(15)
The June 1944 reporting period, which covered the first three weeks in Normandy
and two from Saipan, was added to the total made public in September and was
handled in the same manner as the other recent releases. The 1944–45 casualty
surge had begun that month and was clearly visible in the marked jump in the
number of “total losses” reported. That figure, still minus the
sick and wounded, suddenly spurted well beyond the roughly one-and-a-quarter
million mark to 1,279,000 in the space of just one month.(16) If the War Department
had not taken certain measures, such as putting an almost complete halt to administrative
separations, the figure released for the August 1944 reporting period would
have soared to approximately 1,407,000.
The total-losses formula had certainly produced much larger numbers that were
seemingly more in sync with the casualties suffered by the United States’
principal allies, but the problem now had to be considered from a different
perspective. At what point did the numbers become too big and start to become
a hindrance to the war effort? The Army was set to release the August figures
in November, and one can only speculate as to whether or not there was now,
after only six months of using the uniform new system, an apprehension that
the upcoming tally would constitute a psychological crossroads for the American
people. It was clear that attrition alone could push “total Army losses”
past the million-and-a-half mark in the December release.
The American public, already uneasy over the lengthening name-by-name casualty
lists appearing in nearly every hometown newspaper, would be sure to notice
such huge figures. The release of loss figures in the million-and-a-half range
would not only provide a long string of zeros guaranteed to command the attention
of news writers and pundits but would also coincide with fresh combat along
Germany’s western frontier and in the Philippines. Additionally, the release
of these loss figures and the intensified fighting would occur at precisely
the time the Army was formulating both the following year’s steep increase
in draft quotas for the planned invasion of the Japanese Home Islands and the
“points system,” which would allow some soldiers to be released
after a specified amount of time in combat combined with length of service.(17)
Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and
President Franklin D. Roosevelt were already contending with the political fallout
from their decision to withdraw 110,000 men from college under the Army Specialized
Training Program (ASTP) and transfer them and others from the Army Air Forces
to the Army Ground Forces (AGF).(18) Later, during the uproar over the transfer
of Army Service Forces and even more Air Forces personnel to the AGF, largely
to compensate for severe losses among the infantry, an exasperated General Marshall
wrote: “I think I heard from the mothers of most of these men who were
taken from the other branches, and from every father whose son I was forced
to take out of college.”(19) The artificially high casualty listings would
serve only to aggravate a worsening situation.
Of course, the War Department had put itself onto this path the previous summer
by releasing total-loss figures that included the full range of the Army’s
administrative separations. But the department could minimize or delay this
fast-approaching public relations bombshell, which was likely to explode at
the worst possible time, immediately before Selective Service inductions were
scheduled to be nearly doubled in preparation for the 1945 and 1946 invasions
of Japan, by returning to some form of narrowed criteria for publicly released
casualty figures.
The War Department did not publish figures in October. In November 1944 it publicly
experimented with various formulas that distinguished casualties from total
losses. One listed a narrow range of specific combat-related casualty categories
— a complete reversal of the policy of presenting total losses. This format
restarted the base-line numbers at a far lower level and resulted in a figure
of 384,395 “Army battle casualties” through October 6, 1944. The
category “wounded” (208,392 men) was displayed for the first time
since April, but those incapacitated by disease were still not included. [CHART]
Once reinstated, however, the listing of wounded could not easily be dropped.
When the monthly total-losses figure was released two weeks later, it glaringly
excluded wounded in action from the total of 1,357,000 through August 31, 1944.(20)
Although the respective figures represented end points five weeks apart, the
number of wounded was a subject of intense interest to soldiers and civilians
alike and all could do the math. Adding wounded to the equation pushed total
Army losses to far beyond one-and-a-half million.
The casualty surge had rendered the policy of releasing total losses politically
unacceptable only seven months after it had been initiated. Yet the battle casualties
formula was not completely satisfactory either, particularly in how it was presented.
The War Department’s January 1945 release of figures, which stopped short
of Germany’s December counterattack in the Ardennes, used the same formula
as the revamped November listing and displayed a cumulative Army casualty figure
of 483,957. The department also stated that “some 55,000 enlisted men
from the Air Forces and 25,000 men from the Service Forces are being transferred
to the Ground Forces” by the end of January.(21)
When figures next appeared in the February 2, 1945 edition of Yank,
it was apparent that total losses listings had finally been completely abandoned,
but the narrowly constructed Army battle casualty listing, which incorporated
the first week of the German counteroffensive, had nevertheless climbed to a
whopping 556,352 through December 21, 1944. Moreover, instead of continuing
to list the numbers in easy-to-read column form, they were now buried within
a lengthy paragraph that included Navy casualties, limited comparative analyses
for weeks in mid-December, estimates of German losses for the same period, and
a warning that “the number of returned sick and wounded is now so large
that the Medical Department can no longer make it a policy to send patients
to hospitals nearest their home towns.” Further down the column was also
a reminder that the United States still had not experienced the grievous human
cost incurred by its stalwart British ally. Under the headline “British
Losses” was a breakdown by country of the 1,043,554 casualties within
the British Empire. It stated that “the United Kingdom suffered most heavily
with 635,107 military casualties,” a figure far larger than the U.S. total
to date.(22)
Manipulating the way casualties were reported, however, could only go so far
to mask the fact that roughly 65,000 young American men were now being killed,
wounded, injured, or declared missing in combat theaters each and every month
during the casualty surge, and that figure did not include the sick and psychological
casualties. Postwar tabulations for November, December and January put losses
at 72,000, 88,000, and 79,000.(23)
The Roosevelt Administration and military chain of command tried to soften the
blow that these losses represented. Their efforts ranged from the nonsensical
to the well-considered and straight forward.
European Theater commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent out a directive
to use the term “reinforcement” for individual soldiers sent to
units at the front instead of “replacement,”(24) which had a cannon-fodder
ring to it. This order went essentially unnoticed and unenforced at lower command
levels since a young rifleman sent forward from what was now called a reinforcement
depot was nevertheless understood by all concerned to be a replacement for another
soldier killed, sick, missing, or wounded.
General Marshall, however, took a very different tack. In a public address on
December 9, 1944 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, shortly before Germany’s
Ardennes counteroffensive and the announcement of increased Selective Service
inductions, he stated that:
" [w]e are daily confronted with the bitter human cost of this great
struggle. We do not have the destroyed homes of England or daily casualties
among our peaceful civil population as they do; but because of our expanding
battlefront our military casualties are steadily increasing. . . . The great
battles now in progress must be kept going, every front must be kept blazing
until we break the Nazi control of the German Army and people. . . . [It is]
far better to accept heavy casualties for a brief period than the much greater
total which inevitably accumulates from the daily attrition of prolonged periods
of inactivity on the battlefield."(25)
Passions ran high during the winter of 1944–45, and in a March 5 letter
Marshall assured Congressman William E. Hess that “I, and others in responsible
places in the War Department, are keenly sensitive to the daily casualties we
are suffering.”(26) The next day, he wrote to General Eisenhower in Europe
that there was “a terrific drive on against the use of 18-year-old men
in combat which has been fulminated by a speech by Senator [Robert A.] Taft
on the floor of the Senate.”(27) Although casualty information was made
available to members of Congress by Marshall and Stimson in numerous closed
sessions at both the Pentagon and on Capital Hill,(28) the Roosevelt administration
felt that continued publication of the cumulative totals was inflammatory, and
during its intense negotiations with Congress over the sensitive manpower issue
the Army abruptly went from running monthly listings to running no listings
at all.
The last U.S. casualty figures ever displayed in Yank were in its March
9, 1945 edition. The final published casualty figures through February 7 totaled
782,180, including 693,342 for the Army alone, and were displayed next to a
tongue-in-cheek cartoon depicting a lone pup tent flanked by a campfire and
swaying palm trees under a starry sky. From inside the tent in this idyllic
scene comes a voice: “So I says to the captain, ‘Where are all these
guys to send overseas?’ ”(29)
What was this cartoonist getting at? A soldier certainly wouldn’t know,
if Yank was his sole source of information. The last time that publication
had run anything on the draft was nearly a year before, when it printed comments
from Selective Service Director Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey and informed
readers about the War Department’s announcement that the Army had reached
its planned strength of 7,700,000.(30) Beyond the pages of Yank, however,
the Roosevelt administration and commanders of both the Navy and Army were putting
the publication’s future readers — young men who had yet to enter
the armed services — as well as the rest of America on notice that the
war was far from over and that additional sacrifices were necessary.
Months before public demand peaked in May 1945 for what was essentially a partial
demobilization in the middle of the war through the “points system,”
the Roosevelt administration and the Army struggled with how to juggle America’s
dwindling reserves of eligible manpower. Secretary of War Henry Stimson continually
pressed for better legislation to support manpower needs and stressed to Congress
that “Selective Service calls are now confined almost entirely to combat
replacements.”(31) Fortunately, a short-term personnel crisis caused by
unexpected and extensive troop losses during Germany’s December counterattack
in the Ardennes was solved, although less by the arrival in Europe of Army replacements
already in the pipeline than by the draconian culling of excess support personnel
in the European Theater’s rear areas.
With the invasion of Japan less than a year away, Stimson hoped there might
be some benefit to be derived from Hitler’s last throw of the dice. He
believed the Battle of the Bulge would help soften congressional resistance
to a variety of manpower proposals to tighten draft deferments on such groups
as agricultural workers. He also wished to expand the categories of those to
be inducted, although one proposal in particular made no headway: the Senate,
with Harry S. Truman as its presiding officer, balked at a House bill to draft
women nurses.(32) On January 4, 1945, Stimson was pleased to write in his diary
about “[t]he general excitement in Congress over the German attacks making
it possible for us to get legislation which would give us more individuals from
the draft.”(33)
A telegram sent the day before from Selective Service Director Hershey to the
state Selective Service directors got to the heart of the matter. Although Congress
and the public were understandably focused on the Ardennes fighting, this January
3 message tied proposed or directed changes in various draft deferments to the
long-term needs of the coming one-front fight against Japan rather than to a
passing crisis precipitated by the German counteroffensive. In his message he
quoted a letter from the director of the Office of War Mobilization, Truman’s
future secretary of state, Jimmy Byrnes: “The Secretaries of War and Navy
have advised me jointly that the calls from the Army and Navy to be met in the
coming year will exhaust the eligibles in the 18 through 25 age group at an
early date. The Army and Navy believe it is essential to the effective prosecution
of the war to induct more men in this age group.”(34)
The following week, on January 11, Secretary Stimson held a press conference
to announce that the Army’s monthly Selective Service call-up, which had
already been increased from 60,000 to 80,000 in January, was to be raised again
in March to 100,000 per month.(35) The total draft calls actually climbed to
over 140,000 when the Navy and Marine calls were added.(36) One week later,
President Roosevelt, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations
Adm. Ernest J. King sent letters outlining the military’s critical manpower
needs to House Military Affairs Committee Chairman Andrew J. May. Those letters
were released to the New York Times on January 17, 1945. The public
was informed in front-page articles that “the Army must provide 600,000
replacements for overseas theaters before June 30, and, together with the Navy,
will require a total of 900,000 inductions by June 30.”(37)
In the winter and spring of 1945 the administration had thus moved from discussing
official published cumulative casualty numbers in the past tense to discussing
them in the future tense. Interestingly, briefings and motivational addresses
held by the Army at such diverse locations as the U.S. First Army Headquarters
in Weimar, Germany, B-29 training bases in the southwestern United States, and
the Pentagon all utilized a uniform figure for expected casualties that was
somewhat lower than the ones released to the New York Times —
just 500,000.(38) Frank McNaughton, an early Truman biographer who had worked
on Truman’s Senate Investigating Committee, also noted that interservice
politics of the day led to the Navy leaking casualty figures that were somewhat
larger.(39) Those figures showed up in some very public places.
Kyle Palmer, the Los Angeles Times’ long-time political editor,
had traded in his editorial desk for a position as the paper’s war correspondent
in the Pacific. Attached to the headquarters of Central Pacific Commander Admiral
Chester A. Nimitz, he covered the first aircraft carrier strikes against Japan
and the costly U.S. invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, then made a brief return
to Los Angeles for a medical checkup. Before he shipped out again, Palmer hammered
away at the need for additional manpower in both articles and appearances before
civic groups. “It will take plenty of murderous combat before our soldiers,
sailors and marines polish off the fanatical enemy,” he declared.(40)
Under the headline “Palmer Warns No Easy Way Open to Beat Japs,”
the Los Angeles Times quoted one of his speeches: “We are yet
to meet the major portion of the ground forces of the Jap empire. They have
5,000,000 or 6,000,000 under arms and it will cost 500,000 to 750,000, perhaps
1,000,000 lives of American boys to end this war.”(41)
At this point it is worthwhile to mention again that veterans of World War II
have been roundly dismissed when they claim to “remember” being
told that the invasion of Japan might result in a half-million or even a million
casualties. Although these men failed to take detailed notes for the benefit
of future historians on where they had seen the numbers, they had in fact been
regularly exposed to huge casualty figures in Army and commercial newspapers
since the middle of 1944, as the imperatives of both politics and maintaining
morale led the War Department to first inflate, then deflate, numbers of casualties
through statistical manipulation.(42)
By early 1945, similar figures for the upcoming fighting in Japan were beginning
to appear in daily newspapers, and although the Army stopped running casualty
figures in Yank, the paper nevertheless quoted a series of unnamed
“War Department strategists” and “military experts”
who warned veteran troops and new draftees alike of prolonged fighting ahead.
They repeatedly estimated a year and a half to two years as the minimum time
it would take to “get it over unless there is a sudden collapse.”(43)
This was not good news. Many years later an old soldier named Paul Fussell would
need few words to sum up his feelings over the “sudden collapse,”
which came unexpectedly in August 1945: “Thank God for the atom bomb.”(44)
1. Even before the advent of the casualty surge the U.S. Army struggled to
keep combat units up to strength, and Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was
convinced that there was insufficient Army manpower available for the American
field armies that would conduct the final drive into Nazi Germany. Events during
the Germans’ Ardennes counteroffensive of December 1945 would prove him
right. See Henry L. Stimson diary entries of May 10 and 16, 1944, in Larry I.
Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, eds., The Papers of George C. Marshall,
4 vols.to date, (Baltimore, 1996-), 4: “Aggressive and Determined Leadership,”
June 1, 1943–December 31, 1944, 450-51 [hereafter Marshall Papers]. Also
see Marshall’s “Memorandum for the President – Subject: Strength
of the Army,” ibid., 556–60.
2. Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of the Enola Gay
(New York, 1966), viii.
3. Robert P. Newman, The Enola Gay and the Court of History (New York,
2004), 133.
4 . “Our Casualties,” Yank 2 (July 23, 1943), 11.
5. A useful synthesis of these works is found in The Medical Department:
Medical Service in the War Against Japan by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall and
Albert E. Cowdry, (Washington, DC, 1998), 302–11.
6. Ibid., 130-41.
7. Colonel Ronald F. Bellamy and Colonel Craig H. Liewellyn (Ret.), “Preventable
Casualties: Rommel’s Flaw, Slim’s Edge,” Army, May
1990, 52–56.
8. Dr. Michael E. DeBakey (Colonel, ret.) and Captain Gilbert W. Beebe (ret.),
Battle Casualties: Incidence, Mortality and Logistic Considerations
(Springfield, IL, 1952), 14; see also 31.
9. Frank A. Resiter, ed., Medical Department, United States Army: Medical
Statistics in World War II (Washington, DC, 1975), 13–14, 43.
10. The Allied deception campaign aimed at Nazi Germany, Operation Bodyguard
— and specifically its component Fortitude South — was geared to
creating the impression that the Allies had considerably larger forces massing
in England than they in fact did. While it is true that the Allies were leading
the German intelligence agencies around by the nose at this point in the war,
they had to presume that the Abwehr and other agencies had some very smart number
crunchers within their ranks. A detailed analysis of the casualty figures in
conjunction with demographic information, shipping data, etc. might have severely
complicated the invasion of France if it led the Germans to reassess the manpower
actually available to the United States. See Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard
of Lies, 2 vols. (New York, 1975), 1: 511; 2: 532-33, 549, 559-60, 691-92;
Charles G. Cruickshank, Deception in World War II (New York, 1979),
87-88, 177-185. For a useful summary of deception operations during this period
see Major James R. Koch, “Operation Fortitude; The Backbone of Deception,”
Military Review 72 (March 1992), 66-77.
11. “Casualty Lists,” Yank 2 (June 2, 1944), 17.
12. “They Could Have Been Worse,” Yank 2 (July 23, 1943),
17.
13. “Army Separations,” Yank 3 (June 23, 1944), 17.
14. “Total Army Losses,” Yank 3 (August 25, 1944), 17.
15. Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II, Final
Report, 7 December 1941-31 December 1946 (Washington, DC, 1987), 6.
16. “Total Army Losses,” Yank 3 (September 29, 1944), 17.
See also Army Battle Casualties, 6.
17. The finely tuned “points system” was structured in such a way
that public demand for a return of troops after V-E Day might be satisfied but
the Army would still retain a sizable core of veterans for the upcoming series
of campaigns in Japan, which were expected to last at least through 1946.
18. Marshall Papers 4, 285–89, 308–11.
19. Marshall Papers 5, “The Finest Soldier,” January 1, 1945–January
7, 1947, in press, 225.
20. “Army Casualties,” Yank 3 (November 17, 1944), 17;
and “Army Losses,” ibid., (December 1, 1944), 17.
21. “Army Casualties” and “Transfers to AGF [Army Ground Forces],”
Yank 3 (January 12, 1945), 17.
22. “Casualties,” Yank 3 (February 2, 1945), 17.
23. Army Battle Casualties, 6. This information was made available soon after
the war, but other data, such as the loss by at least 7,000 families of two
or more sons serving in the U.S. Army, was never released, even within the numerous
comprehensive Army Medical Department analyses produced over the following twenty
years. Apparently such data did not fit the criteria of the published works.
The information on multiple deaths per family was outlined in a 1947 War Department
memo to a member of President Truman’s White House staff. The memo was
discovered in 1998 at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri.
See D.M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, Dear Harry . . . Truman’s Mailroom,
1945-1953: The Truman Administration Through Correspondence with ‘Everyday
Americans,’ (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1999), 100-102.
24. Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast, The Procurement
and Training of Ground Combat Troops, in United States Army in World War II
(Washington, 1948), 230-31. Prior to publication, Dr. Arthur G. Volz wrote
from Bammental, Ger.: “I clearly remember [the] introduction of the British
term ‘reinforcement’ for ‘replacement’. I think it was
a useless exercise — calling a dog a canine doesn’t change him one
iota. People in the replacement stream in the ETO were well aware of what faced
them. When I crossed the Channel with a replacement package in early September
1944 one of the lieutenants in another package aboard the ship was returning
to the Continent for the second time, following his third wound. He didn’t
have any illusions.”
25. Marshall Papers 4, 690–92.
26. Marshall Papers 5, 75.
27. Marshall Papers 5, 77. See also text to note 23.
28. For example, see Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Appropriations, House
of Representatives, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session, on the Military Establishment
Appropriations Bill for 1946, conducted 25 May 1945, (Washington, DC, 1945),
1-18. Marshall and Stimson testified separately before Congress. Both went off
the record when they discussed this highly charged manpower question. Only many
years later did references to what was discussed surface in other congressional
testimony. In addition to his off-the-record testimony before the House Appropriations
Committee in which he discussed, among other matters, the "inadvisability
of war of attrition," Marshall testified before the House Military Affairs
Committee and discussed "the terrific losses which we would sustain when
we invaded Japan." See the transcript of Charles E. Bohlen's testimony
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2, 1953, in Charles E.
Bohlen, Witness to History: 1929-1969 (New York, 1973), 317.
29. “Casualties,” Yank 3 (March 9, 1945), 17.
30. “Army Full Strength,” Yank 2 (April 28, 1944), 17.
31. Mattie E. Treadwell, United States Army in World War II: The Women’s
Army Corps (Washington, DC, 1954), 686.
32. Selective Service and Victory: The 4th Report of the Director of Selective
Service, July 1, 1944 to December 31, 1945 (Washington, DC, 1946), 53-59,
70-71, 85-88.
33. Diary entry, January 4, 1945, Diaries of Henry Lewis Stimson (microfilm
edition reel 9), Henry Lewis Stimson Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven,
CT, from microfilm at Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Independence, MO.
34. Selective Service and Victory, 112.
35. Diaries of Henry Lewis Stimson, January 11, 1945.
36. Selective Service and Victory, 595.
37. New York Times, Jan. 18, 1945, "Roosevelt Urges Work-Or-Fight
Bill to Back Offensives," p. 1; "Letters on the Pressing Manpower
Problem," p. 13. [Note: the titles of the two New York Times articles were
not added to the footnote until the deadline for publication had passed and
are not included in the published article.]
38. D.M. Giangreco, “ ‘A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas’:
President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan,” Pacific
Historical Review 72 (February 2003), 93-132, esp. 104-5; and Giangreco,
“Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan, 1945-1946: Planning
and Policy Implications,” Journal of Military History 61 (July
1997), 521-81, esp. 537–38.
39. Frank McNaughton and Walter Hehmeyer, Harry Truman: President (New
York, 1948), 3.
40. “Palmer Warns Nips Set for Murderous Combat,” Los Angeles
Times, May 8, 1945, sect. 2, p. 1. This article was published alongside
“New Casualty List Released,” which named 78 dead, missing and wounded
from the Los Angeles area.
41. “Palmer Warns No Easy Way Open to Beat Japs,” ibid., May 17,
1945, sect. 1, p. 5.
42. How did this much casualty data, readily available in the public record,
escape becoming part of the debate during the Enola Gay affair or the earlier
controversy over “atomic diplomacy”? Harwit displays a pronounced
aversion to military historians (Exhibit Denied, 53) that is shared
by many others in the academy. In addition, logistical/manpower analysis is
complex and uninviting, (see Giangreco, “Letters to the Editor,”
Journal of American History 84 [June 1997], 322-23). However, while
these may be part of the answer to the question of why obvious military sources
for what servicemen were learning about their own destinies were not consulted,
other questions persist. For example, anyone studying the diary of Henry Stimson
will note that he was not one to affix newspaper clippings to his typescript
pages. Hence, the inclusion of a single newspaper clipping within Stimson’s
heavily cited diary— the January 18, 1945, page-one New York Times
article announcing that 900,000 replacements needed to be drafted within the
next six months —should have attracted a great deal of attention. Inexplicably,
no one has mentioned it.
43. “The Jap War,” Yank 3 (June 8, 1945), 1.
44. Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New
York, 1988). See also Matthew Stevenson, “War’s End on Okinawa:
In Search of Captain Robert Fowler,” Journal of Military History 67
(April 2003), 517-28, esp. 528.
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