The Whole Picture Restored

...Had Japan's leaders kept their nerve they would soon have discovered that America had only a few bombs, the two dropped and a third ready for transport from Los Alamos...

...The brave air crews who risked, and lost, their lives in very large numbers, however, were victims of the air marshals and generals, the bomber "barons" who persuaded Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt to give heavy bombers a much higher priority than they deserved...

...As with most surveys of big subjects, there are also errors here...

...They would have a mighty invasion force totaling 750,000 men, but late intelligence reports disclosed that Japan had 900,000 troops in Kyushu and 5,000 suicide aircraft...

...This selfcensorship, together with often incomplete or inaccurate official handouts, kept Commager from presenting a coherent picture of this huge and complex historical phenomenon...

...As time went on MacArthur learned how to minimize casualties by islandhopping, attacking the enemy's rear, and other techniques made possible because the land masses in his theater were too large and numerous for the enemy to garrison except at critical points...

...Miller fails to discuss the 1944 military manpower shortage, but it significantly lengthened the fighting in Europe because General Dwight D. Eisenhower was very short of men...

...In the end the entire Central Pacific campaign turned out to have only one main purpose: providing bases for B-29s in the Marianas, and, in the case of Iwo Jima, facilitating their largely irrelevant firebomb attacks...

...Another 23 or so divisions, the equivalent of a large field army, would have made a great difference to the campaigns in France and the Low Countries...

...The B-29s had to go around it to avoid enemy fighters, lengthening their flights and reducing their bombloads...

...Miller takes the traditional view that Germany's dreaded U-boats came close to cutting the sea lanes to Great Britain and putting it out of the War...

...Miller does not make the same mistake...

...Similarly, Miller does not question the U.S...

...Yet it was a near-run thing, much more so than it seemed at the time when people regarded the A-bomb as invincible...

...In the event, Eisenhower had no strategic reserve and too few replacements...

...Using Okinawa as a rough yardstick, projected Allied casualties, mostly American, ran as high as 394,859, a figure used for planning purposes by the Army Medical Corps...

...Miller rightly dismisses the revisionist view that Japan was on the verge of surrender, making nuclear warfare unnecessary...

...Apart from being morally dubious, since heavy bombers primarily killed civilians, strategic bombing consumed materials and men that could have been put to better use on the ground...

...MacArthur won brilliant victories while expending relatively few American lives, but his operations would have been even more successful and more quickly achieved if the Pacific Fleet had been available to him on a regular basis...

...The decision was arrived at for political reasons...

...decision to have two separate and largely unrelated wars in the Pacific—one in Douglas MacArthur's Southwest command where many Japanese troops were deployed, and a second in the Central Pacific run by the Navy...

...Even Miller admits that basing fighter planes on Iwo Jima to escort B-29s provided an "extra margin of safety for the bombers [that] came at an immeasurable cost...

...No American outfit fought harder than General Mark W. Clark's Fifth Army...

...Products of Winston Churchill's obsession with the Mediterranean and his reluctance to invade France, the battles in Italy were costly to the Allies and contributed little to ultimate victory...

...A small, volcanic island, it was situated halfway between American air bases in the Marianas and Japan...

...Iwo pointed up the folly of this campaign...

...Luckily for all concerned, the two atomic bombs had the desired psychological effect...

...Marine and Army divisions had to take them by storm, frequently at heavy cost...

...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" This is ostensibly a revised and expanded version of The Story of the Second World War (1945) by Henry Steele Commager, who was at the beginning of his distinguished scholarly career at the time he wrote it...

...When B-29s beganbuming down cities in March 1945, Japanese industry was already at a virtual standstill because of the naval and air blockade that denied it the raw materials from Manchuria and Southeast Asia needed to continue production...

...Moreover, bomber crews forced to ditch in the sea had a good chance of being picked up by submarines, whose mainjob at this late stage of the War was rescuing downed airmen...

...Bombing Japan was simply pointless...

...Finally, air bases on Iwo Jima would serve as fighter strips and emergency landing fields for damaged B-29s, saving lives and expensive aircraft...

...Italy should have been blockaded by sea and air, freeing up troops for France where they were desperately needed...

...Probably about as good a volume as could have been produced then, it is now very dated...

...By taking advantage of his options and mobility, MacArthur lowered his casualty rates...

...About all Donald L. Miller owes to the original are a handful of excerpts, mostly first-person accounts by combat veterans...

...But a recent book by Clay Blair, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945, shows that once the United States joined the Allies the U-boats were finished...

...It is a good introduction to America's role abroad in World War II...

...The bomb's incredible force notwithstanding, it was nearly useless as a weapon...

...Japan's military leaders were shaken, enabling Emperor Hirohito to force them to surrender...

...The number of lives actually saved fell far short of 24,000, while the three experienced Marine assault divisions destroyed on Iwo would have been sorely missed had the invasion of Japan gone forward...

...For the only time in the Pacific war America's dead and wounded, about 21,000 men, exceeded those of the enemy...

...But he duplicates Commager's format in combining these stories with contemporary reporting and an extensive narrative of his own...

...And an invasion, had it taken place, could easily have cost the Allies a million casualties...

...Too powerful to employ on the battlefield, it was only suitable for attacks on urban areas, and most of them had already been burned down...

...After that production would gradually increase to a handful per month...

...The same can be said of strategic bombing, to which Britain devoted perhaps 25 per cent of its entire war effort and America about 9 per cent of its much greater resources...

...In fact, America's alternatives were few and bad...

...After MacArthur escaped from the Philippines it became evident that he would have to be given command of what had suddenly become a major theater of war, and if it was the only important Pacific theater he would control the fast carriers that with equal suddenness had become the Navy's primary surface weapons...

...But the Italian mountains were so defensible that about 20 German divisions tied down a larger Allied force from September 1943 until May 1945...

...He further complicated matters by trying to include the British and Soviet War efforts as well as America's, and in doing so he treated too skimpily, or left out entirely, many important subjects...

...To avert this threat the Navy demanded, and got, a theater of its own far enough removed from MacArthur so that the Navy seldom had to support him...

...In the face of these appalling estimates, and with bombing and blockade such a costly alternative, American leaders had no choice but to use the atomic bomb and attempt to bluff the Japanese into unconditional surrender...

...Despite early success while America geared up, they were driven from the sea by heavy bombers and Allied hunter-killer groups...

...Continuing to bomb and blockade Japan would eventually lead to victory, but no one knew how long that would take and how many Allied lives would be lost in the process, for heavy fighting still continued in the Philippines, Burma and elsewhere...

...When the first two atomic bombs became available the Allies were planning to invade Kyushu, southernmost of the home islands...

...Miller accepts the official contention that capturing Iwo Jima saved 24,000 lives—the number of airmen in B-29s who landed there...

...The Story of World War II reminds us, if anyone still needs reminding, why it is only simple justice to call these men "the greatest generation...

...Unlike Commager, too, Miller criticizes America's War effort, although sparingly and rather gingerly...

...Radar stations on Iwo picked them up anyway, giving the home islands advance notice of incoming raids, but the Japanese air defense was so pitiful that this actually made little difference...

...Miller endorses the official position that while aerial bombing did not win the War, it seriously damaged the Axis and justified its cost in money and manpower...

...Despite his conventional treatment of the War, Miller has produced a highly readable book...

...In doing so it sustained nearly 50,000 casualties and, thanks to kamikaze attacks, the Navy had more men killed (4,907) than any other service for the first time since Pearl Harbor...

...Unlike Britain and even Germany, which rotated units in and out of battle, American combat soldiers stayed on the line until death or serious wounds relieved them of duty—a cruel and dangerous policy resulting from military miscalculations, the Italian campaign among them...

...Diplomacy was out of the question because the military leaders of Japan wanted a settlement that would leave them in power...

...For the sake of these rather modest advantages three Marine divisions, half the entire Corps, were used up on Iwo Jima in February-March 1945...

...In fact, Blair believes that the Allies overinvested in antisubmarine warfare...

...On Okinawa a vastly superior Allied force took 82 days to subdue a Japanese garrison of 110,000 men...

...The chief exception concerns the Italian campaign, where Miller joins many historians who have argued that it was a mistake...

...Even those with considerable knowledge of the War will discover material of interest, particularly the accounts of combat veterans and the harrowing tales of American POWs who were savaged by their captors...

...By contrast, the Central Pacific islands were few, small and often heavily defended...

...But many landings were scheduled refueling stops, and others involved bombers that could have made their way back to the Marianas...

...Commager's edition foundered because it was written when the press felt obligated to help win the War, seldom criticized military decisions, and sometimes lapsed into cheerleading...

...There would have been a large surplus of bombs for urban attacks, but far too few to destroy the hundreds of military targets in Japan...