Corncob Caesar

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997

From Wylie Horn

In his perceptive analysis of the career of General Douglas MacArthur (LRB, 6 February) Murray Sayle seems to have overlooked one important point. It is true that the dispersal of the ‘bonus army’ in brutal fashion in July 1932, while MacArthur was in very obvious and characteristically dramatic charge of events, ‘doomed his own hopes of ever being elected President’. However, as a recent television programme on the life of FDR pointed out, MacArthur’s second in command during this tawdry affair was none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. His subsequent progress to the White House did not seem to suffer any harm or hindrance from this incident. This may well have been, as Sayle shrewdly remarks, because the future President ‘retreated to Washington after a few years’, at a goodly distance from the General’s not always benevolent influence.

Wylie Horn
Ayr

Vol. 19 No. 9 · 8 May 1997

From Tony Barrell

Murray Sayle’s review of John Perret’s biography of Douglas MacArthur (LRB, 6 February) missed one of the most irritating and disturbing details in the book: the use of inflated casualty figures for the proposed invasion of Japan in late 1945. Perret claims that President Truman’s Joint Chief of Staff, General Marshall, ‘feared’ there would be ‘275,000 dead and wounded’ in the campaign to seize Kyushu, which was to have started on 1 November and was known as Operation Olympic. Marshall was indeed worried about high casualties but the figure Perret quotes does not appear in the documents put before Marshall by military planners. The plans for Olympic were very detailed and have been studied by a number of historians.

MacArthur’s first submission estimated a total of 125,000, which would represent thirty thousand-plus deaths if the battle continued until March – about the same rate of loss as at Okinawa or on the Normandy beaches. The figures do not come close to Perret’s 275,000. MacArthur submitted another estimate which amounted to 105,000 casualties. These were the figures Marshall found disturbingly high. MacArthur assured him that there would be no ‘excessive losses’. After the war, both Truman and Churchill referred in their memoirs to deaths and casualties – the two have long been interchangeable in this dispute – of between 500,000 and a million. Even to reach the lower end of the range, the invasion of Japan would have had to entail far more losses than throughout the war in the Pacific and Europe combined.

It may well be that the total losses on both sides, including civilians and POWs, would have amounted to many hundreds of thousands if the war had continued well into 1946, but it has to be said that the motive for revising the figures upwards has been and still is to make the case that atomic bombs ‘saved lives’ – the more the better – and to discredit arguments that Japan might have surrendered before an invasion.

Tony Barrell
Sydney