IN RECENT YEARS, historians looking into the reasons behind the decision to drop the atomic bombs have been hampered by a lack of understanding of how
the casualty projections given to President Harry Truman by the U.S. Army were formed, or even that specific methodologies existed for their creation....
From its inception during the Revolutionary War, the U.S. Army had made efforts to estimate probable losses because its leaders had to know approximately how many men would still be fit for duty by the last battle of the campaign season (i.e., before winter) after casualties from accidents, planned and unforeseen clashes, the erratic flow of recruitment, and disease drained it of men. Disease, in fact, felled more soldiers than musket fire during the Revolution, and this situation remained essentially unchanged until World War I. ^4 While serving as the commander of America's young army, George Washington worked unceasingly to strengthen and expand its fledgling medical corps, and pointedly informed the Continental Congress that lack of proper planning for medical facilities and personnel had contributed to the drastic reduction in the size of his forces during the winter of 1776-77, stating that: "the <page 523> dread of undergoing the same Miseries of want of proper care and attention when Sick, has much retarded the new inlistments."
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At the Civil Affairs Staging Area in Monterey, California, the JCS Working Group's chief of the Agricultural Section,
George L. McColm, was working on plans for Operation Olympic, the first--- and smaller--- of the two planned invasion operations. He noted that "in February and March 1945, the figure used in staff meetings [for the projected] number of casualties we were likely to have during the invasion of Kyushu [Operation Olympic] was 100,000," but added "this wasn't a fixed number." McColm said that "every time the Japanese moved more troops i! n, they had to revise the numbers up." Expected losses during Olympic "more than doubled by about June," and
McColm related that the numbers were being revised virtually every week by summer--- sometimes making steep jumps. "It was so common that I stopped paying attention after a while, and besides, it wasn't directly related to my subject area." McColm added that "it was likely <page 537> that they were going up even further at higher [planning] levels because, at our level, we always worked with older numbers."
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The implied top-end figure of approximately 1,700,000 to 2,000,000 battle casualties built on the basis of the Saipan ratio was slashed down to a best-case scenario figure that was not so huge as to make the task ahead appear insurmountable, and use of a 500,000 battle casualty figure was "the operative one at the working level"^60 during the spring of 1945. Andrew J. Goodpaster was then with the Strategy Section of the JWPC. He noted that Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson used the number regularly.^61 When Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer Samuel Halpern was pulled back to Washington from the China-Burma-India Theater in May 1945 to assist in the invasion planning,
the estimate was given in his initial briefing, and even Eighth Air Force maintenance crews at Clovis Air Field, New Mexico, transitioning from the B-17 Flying Fortress they serviced in England to the B-29 Super Fortress they would operate against Japan, were told in May that "the invasion could cost a half million men [and that] every `Fort' they could keep in the air would mean more boys could make it home alive."^62 Halpern said forty-five years later that the 500,000 figure "made a deep, indelible impression on a young man, 23 years old. It is something I have never forgotten."
http://home.kc.rr.com/casualties/
"Can't we all just get along?"
when she gets back.
