Evolving Methodologies
in Casualty Reporting
to the American Public During World War II
In
the fall of 1944, questions concerning American casualties generated by both
current and future operations —
and, indeed, just how long into the future those operations
would extend —
were becoming a hot subject within the Pentagon. Commencement of large-scale operations
earlier that year in June, with the invasions of the Mariana’s in the Pacific
and Normandy in France, had produced the long-expected “casualty surge.” This rapid increase in combat casualties
turned out to be not only beyond what the U.S. Army anticipated[1]
but was so politically sensitive that the War Department changed how it
reported Army losses to the American public through the civil press, and to the
troops, principally through the Army publication Yank, which distributed 2.6 million copies weekly to the
reading-starved soldiers and any civilian willing to pay the price of a
subscription.
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, North Africa, the Gilbert Islands, and Aleutians. A fairly comprehensive account running up
through the third week of June 1943 was published in mid-July and listed four
principal loss categories —
killed, wounded, missing, prisoners
— and their totals by
theater of operation. All-causes Army
casualties were given as 63,958 and included 12,506 Philippine Scouts in the
total of 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.[2]
Left
unstated were other categories that were even then draining the U.S. Army of
manpower. This included “nonbattle”
losses among troops in the field as well as simple administrative attrition
that included separations from the service for reasons like age or
infirmity. Most apparent to commanders
overseas were the destructive effects on the combat strength of units through
nonbattle losses from disease and, to a lesser degree, psychiatric breakdowns
popularly known as “battle fatigue.”
For example, the destruction of Merrill’s Marauders in Burma to disease
and fatigue is painfully recounted in a number of works,[3]
and in New Guinea, the 32d Infantry Division disease-per-year rate for all
fevers — malaria,
dengue, and of undetermined origin —
peaked at 5,358 cases per
1,000 troops.[4]
Naturally,
the war’s other belligerents also lost great numbers of men from “noncombat”
factors, and the Germans in particular were made painfully aware of the
debilitating effects of disease on the successful prosecution of combat
operations. Even before U.S. forces in
North Africa found that approximately 9 of every 10 admissions to field
hospitals were not the result of
combat,[5]
disease among German forces in that theater regularly sapped a stunning 40 to
50 percent of their front-line strength in 1942 and 1943.[6] What would General Rommel have been able to
do with those critically needed men?
Excluding
soldiers who recovered sufficiently 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.[7] 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 7-month
period in 1944 when they were released somewhat obliquely.
In
any event, figures for sickness among deployed troops were never released for
two very good reasons: 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 would provide the enemy a much fuller picture of the
U.S. Army’s effective fighting strength.
And second, while the American public understandably focused on the cost
of combat operations, there was no crying demand for collateral information
— no squeaking
wheel. During the run-up to Normandy
and the Marianas, totals for wounded troops were dropped as well, undoubtedly
for the same reason.
The
exclusion of figures for both the sick and wounded, however, created other problems,
not the least of which was that it resulted in smaller, more select loss
figures being reported to the public.
Clearly at this point in the war many Americans at all strata of society
and the government believed, to varying degrees, that the United States was
making somewhat less of a contribution to the war effort than our allies, and
this was a very sensitive subject, somewhat egged on in the press. Discussing its effects on everything from
congressional elections to global war-planning with Great Britain and the
Soviet Union —
and what the Roosevelt Administration did to counter this
perception —
is beyond the scope of this paper. We can, however, examine how it affected what the public was told
about the U.S. Army’s quote: “losses,” end quote.
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.[8] The multi-million circulation Army
publication Yank also contrasted this
number against the nearly 670,000 men lost by the British Empire and had
earlier editorialized on the Soviet loss of some 6 million troops in their
battles against the Nazis.[9] Stories of the huge sacrifices made by our
allies were not limited to mass-circulation military publications and were
common in civilian newspapers, radio, newsreels, and Hollywood feature-length
films.
As
noted, the cumulative figures for wounded to April 1944 were dropped from
casualty totals released just before the invasions of France and the
Marianas. This should have resulted in
numbers displaying an even greater apparent disparity between our figures and
those of our long-suffering allies except that the Army now established a
policy under which virtually the entire flux and flow of manpower was
disseminated, 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 first of the monthly totals,
released in late June 1944, 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.[10] The clear implication
— if you didn’t know how
the number was constructed and what it actually represented
— 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 —
an open display ostensibly demonstrating to the public and
to both allies and enemies alike that America’s commitment to the war was
unequivocal, that its resources were enormous, and implied that America was
already pulling its share of the load against the Axis. It is interesting to note that even with
the number of sick and wounded being held from public view, releasing the
artificially large monthly totals, gained by lumping together losses through
purely administrative matters with battle and nonbattle deaths, prisoners, and
missing, would eventually prove to have some utility 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 1944 caused real casualties to
skyrocket.
Through
this now month-by-month release of figures combining administrative separations
with selected combat-related categories, the public became conditioned to
seeing million-plus —
and steadily growing —
loss figures long before American troops began to experience the frightening
attrition of manpower that had been commonplace among the other antagonists for
several years. For example, in August
1944, after the standard 75 days it took to collect, collate, vet, and publish
the data, the inflated “total Army losses” for December 7, 1941 through May
1944 were released as 1,234,000.[11] As noted earlier, however, no clue was given
to the number of casualties directly related to combat which by that point were
actually no less than 194,000 men even without factoring in the appalling
losses to sickness in the disease-ridden overseas theaters.[12]
The
June 1944 reporting period, covering the first three weeks in Normandy and two
from Saipan, was added to the total made public in September and it was handled
in the same manner as the other recent releases. The 1944-1945 casualty surge had begun that month and was clearly
visible as the marked jump in the number of “total losses”
— 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. If various trends had not been arrested,
such as administrative separations that had been brought to almost a complete
halt, this reporting structure would have publicly displayed a figure that had
rapidly soared to approximately 1,407,000 through the August 1944 reporting
period.[13]
The
total-losses formula had certainly produced much larger numbers which were
seemingly more in sync with the casualties suffered by our principal allies,
but at what point do the numbers become too big and start to become a hindrance
to the war effort? The August figures
were scheduled to be released in November, and one can only speculate as to
whether or not there was now, after only six months using the uniform new
system, an apprehension that the upcoming tally was coming perilously close to
a psychological crossroads at the million-and-a-half mark. And it was clear that attrition alone would
push the “total Army losses” past this point in the December release.
Such huge numbers would not escape notice by
an American public uneasy over the mounting local, name-by-name casualty lists
appearing in nearly every hometown newspaper, and the release of loss figures
in the million-and-a-half range would coincide with fresh combat along
Germany’s western frontier and in the Philippines. Moreover, all of this was coming to a head at precisely the time
that the Army was formulating both the following year’s steep increase in draft
quotas and the “points system,” which allowed some soldiers to be released
after a specified amount of time in combat combined with length of service.
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 if the
War Department created a potential public-relations bombshell
— one that was rapidly
approaching and 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
— it could also attempt
to minimize or delay the blow by returning to some form of narrowed criteria
for what it made public.
November
1944 saw the War Department publicly experimenting with various formulas for
how casualties versus total losses could be presented. One tack was to limit their release to the
listing of a narrow range of specific combat-related categories; a complete
reversal of its 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, a figure that displayed the category “wounded” (208,392 men) for the
first time since April, but still not those incapacitated by disease. Once presented, however, the listing of
wounded could not easily be made to go away.
When the monthly total-losses figure was released two weeks later, its
sum of 1,357,000 through August 31, 1944, glaringly excluded wounded in action
from its compilation.[14] Although the respective figures represented
end points five weeks apart, this 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 total-losses-type release 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.
All-service casualties were given as 562,368. When figures next appeared in the 2 February 1945 edition of Yank, it was apparent that total-losses
listings had finally been completely abandoned, but the narrowly constructed
Army battle casualty listing had nevertheless climbed to a whopping 638,139
through 21 December 1944, which incorporated the first week of the German
counteroffensive. 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, 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.”[15]
Manipulations
in the way casualties were reported, however, could only go so far to mask the
fact that an 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” —
with November, December and January’s figures standing at
72,000, 88,000, and 79,000 respectively in postwar tabulations.[16] Now, the Army abruptly went from running
monthly listings to running no listings at all, and the last
— that’s last —
U.S. casualty figures displayed in Yank were in its 9 March 1945 edition. They totaled 782,180, including 693,342 for the Army alone,
through 7 February, and were displayed next to a tongue-in-cheek cartoon
depicting a lone pup tent flanked by a campfire and swaying palm trees on a
starry, starry night. 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?’ ”[17]
What
is 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.[18] Beyond the pages of Yank, however, the War Department and commanders of both the Navy
and Army were putting the publications’ future
readers —
and by that I mean 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 demands 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 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.”[19] Thankfully, a short-term personnel crisis
caused by unexpected and extensive troop losses during the German’s December
counterattack was solved less by the arrival in Europe of Army replacements
already in the pipeline than by the draconian culling of excess Zone of the
Interior personnel in the European Theater, and Stimson even looked forward to
a possible benefit from Hitler’s last throw of the dice.
Stimson
believed that the Battle of the Bulge would help soften Congressional
resistance, ahead of the invasion of Japan, 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
because the Senate, with Harry S. Truman as its presiding officer, balked on a
House Bill to draft women nurses.[20] On 4 January 1945 Stimson was pleased to
write in his diary about “The 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.”[21] Indeed, a telegram sent the day before from
Selective Service Director Hershey to the state Selective Service directors
reached to the heart of the matter. Although
the public was understandably focused on the Ardennes fighting, Hershey’s
message tied proposed or directed changes in various draft deferments to
long-term needs of the coming one-front fight against Japan rather than to a
passing crisis precipitated by the German counteroffensive. The message —
quoting a letter from the director of the Office of War
Mobilization, future Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes
— read in part: “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.”[22]
The
following week, on 11 January, 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, was to be raised again in March to
100,000 per month for the Army[23]
(and, incidentally, the total draft actually climbed to over 140,000 when the
Navy and Marine calls were added).[24] One week later, letters outlining the
military’s critical manpower needs were sent from President Franklin Roosevelt,
Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations Adm.
Ernest J. King to Chairman Andrew J. May of the House Military Affairs
Committee and released to the New York
Times and thence other newspapers 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.”[25]
So
we were now moving, in the winter and spring of 1945, from discussing 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 to newly assigned planning personnel at the
Pentagon all utilized a figure for expected casualties somewhat lower than
those released to the New York Times
— just 500,000.[26] In addition, Frank McNaughton, an early
Truman biographer who had worked on his Senate Investigating Committee, noted
that interservice politics of the day led to the Navy leaking casualty figures.[27] They 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 theme that “it
will take plenty of murderous combat before our soldiers, sailors and marines
polish off the fanatical enemy”[28]
in both articles and appearances before civic groups. 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.”[29]
At
this point it is worthwhile to mention that veterans of World War II have been
roundly dismissed when claiming they “remembered” being told that the invasion
of Japan might cost 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,
these reading-starved troops had, in fact, been regularly exposed to huge
casualty figures in Army organs and commercial newspapers since the middle of
1944, as the needs of both politics and maintaining morale led the War
Department to first inflate, then deflate, the number of casualties through
statistical manipulation.
By
early 1945, similar figures were beginning to appear in daily newspapers for
the upcoming fighting in Japan, and although the Army stopped running casualty
figures in Yank, a series of unnamed
“War Department strategists” and “military experts” in the weekly were
nevertheless warning veterans and new draftees alike of prolonged fighting
ahead. A year-and-a-half to two years
was repeatedly given as the minimum time it would take to “get it over unless
there is a sudden collapse.”[30] This was not
good news, and 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.”[31]
[1] Even before the advent of
the casualty surge, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was convinced that
there was insufficient Army manpower available for combat units. Events during the German’s Ardennes
counteroffensive of December 1945 would later prove him right. See Henry L. Stimson diary entries of May 10
and 16, 1944, in Bland and Ritenour, The
Papers of George C. Marshal: vol. 4, “Aggressive and Determined Leadership,” 450-51.
[2] “Our Casualties,” Yank, 2 (23 July 1943): 11.
[3] A useful synthesis of these
works is found in the recently published The
Medical Department: Medical Service in the War Against Japan by Mary Ellen
Condon-Rall and Albert E. Cowdry, (Washington, DC, 1998), 302–311.
[4] Ibid., 132.
[5] Captain Gilbert W. Beebe
(Ret.) and Colonel Michael E. DeBakey (Ret.), Battle Casualties: Incidence, Mortality and Logistic Considerations
(Springfield, IL: 1952), 14, see also 31.
[6] Colonel Ronald F. Bellamy
and Colonel Craig H. Liewellyn (Ret.), “Preventable Casualties: Rommel’s Flaw,
Slim’s Edge,” Army, (May 1990):
52-56.
[7]Frank A. Resiter, ed., Medical Department, United States Army:
Medical Statistics in World War II (Washington, DC, 1975), 13 - 14, 43.
[8] “Casualty Lists,” Yank, 2 (2 June 1944): 17.
[9] “They Could Have Been
Worse,” Yank, 2 (23 July 1943): 17.
[10] “Army Separations,” Yank, 3 (23 June 1944): 17.
[11] “Total Army Losses,” Yank,
3 (25 August 1944): 17.
[12] Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II, Final
Report, 7 December 1941-31 December 1946 (Washington, DC: Comptroller of
the Army, Office of the Chief of Staff, 1987), 6.
[13] “Total Army Losses,” Yank, 3 (29 September 1944): 17. See also Army
Battle Casualties, 6.
[14] “Army Casualties,” Yank, 3 (17 November 1944): 17; and “Army Losses,” ibid., 3 (1 December 1944): 17.
Note that as of the November 17 edition (this and the following
footnote), Yank’s editors or higher
Army authorities also had trouble settling on a new title for the monthly
listing.
[15] “Casualties,” Yank, 3 (2 February 1945): 17.
[16] Army Battle Casualties, 6
[17] “Casualties,” Yank, 3 (9 March 1945): 17.
[18] “Army Full Strength,” Yank, 2 (28 April 1944): 17.
[19] Mattie E. Treadwell, United States Army in World war II: The
Women’s Army Corps (Washington, DC, 1954), 686.
[20] 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. In
addition to manpower increases through Selective Service, the Army’s finely
tuned “points system” was structured in such a way that public demands for a
return of troops after V-E Day might be placated while still allowing the Army
to retain a sizable core of veterans for the upcoming campaigns on the Japanese
Home Islands.
[21] Diary entry, 4 January 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.
[22] Selective Service and Victory, 112.
[23] Diaries of Henry Lewis Stimson, 11 January 1945.
[24] Selective Service and Victory, 595.
[25] New York Times, Jan. 18, 1945, p. 1.
[26] D.M. 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.
[27] Frank McNaughton and Walter Hehmeyer, Harry Truman: President
McGraw-Hill 1948, 3
[28] “Palmer Warns Nips Set for
Murderous Combat,” Los Angeles Times,
8 May 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.
[29] “Palmer Warns No Easy Way
Open to Beat Japs,” ibid., 17 May
1945, sect. 1, p. 5.
[30] “The Jap War,” Yank, 3 (8 June 1945): 1.
[31] 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.