The Battle of Okinawa was the last major ground battle of World War ii. The Tenth u.s. Army that invaded this small piece of Japan was a unique force composed of units from the u.s. Army and others from the u.s. Marine Corps. Much historical literature has focused on the different approaches to ground combat of the two armed services, but they also employed very different policies towards support of the news media. The u.s. Marines were much more supportive than the u.s. Army. The two different policies and styles of news coverage that reporters employed led to coverage favoring the u.s. Marines. Reporting suggested that u.s. Marine procedures were less costly in lives and created enormous concern in the United States about casualty rates, motivating President Harry S. Truman to hold an Oval Office meeting to re-think strategy in the Pacific theater. It would be wrong, though, to argue that the media altered the course of the war. Truman asked hard probing questions about the direction of the war, but General of the Army George C. Marshall acted to ensure that the United States stayed on its current strategic path.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Joseph J. Matthews, Reporting the Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957); M. L. Stein, Under Fire: The Story of American War Correspondents (New York: Julian Messner, 1968); Phillip Knightly, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975); Robert W. Desmond, Tides of War: World News Reporting, 1931–1945 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1984); Peter Young and Peter Jesser, The Media and the Military: From Crimea to Desert Strike (New York: St. Martins’ Press, 1997); Michael S. Sweeney, The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006); John Byrne Cooke, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Mary S. Mander, Pen and Sword: American War Correspondents, 1898–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969); Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); David H. Culbert, “‘This is London’: Edward R. Murrow, Radio News and American Aid to Britain,” Journal of Popular Culture 10, no. 1 (Summer 1976): 28–37; Raymond Sokolov, Wayward Reporter: The Life of A. J. Liebling (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Lawrence S. Rudner, “Born To a New Craft: Edward R. Murrow, 1938–1940, A Different Kind of News: Edward R. Murrow as Broadcast Journalist,” Journal of Popular Culture 15, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 97–105; Antoinette May, Witness to War: A Biography of Maguerite Higgins (New York: Penguin Books, 1983); A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986); Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White (Reading, ma: Addison-Wesley, 1987); Joseph E. Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988); Daniel W. Pfaff, "Joseph Pulitzer ii and the European War, 1938–1945,” American Journalism 6, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 143–57; Richard Collier, Fighting Words: The War Correspondents of World War ii (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Peter Kurth, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Gary Edgerton, “The Murrow Legend as Metaphor: The Creation, Appropriation, and Usefulness of Edward R. Murrow’s Life Story,” Journal of American Culture 15, no. 1 (March 1992): 75–92; Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, The Murrow Boys (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War ii (New York: Free Press, 1997); Christopher C. Sullivan, “John Steinbeck, War Reporter: Fiction, Journalism and Types of Truth,” Journalism History 23, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 16–24; Garna L. Christian, “George Perry’s War,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102, no. 2 (July 1998): 186–220; James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War ii (New York: The Free Press, 1997); Carl Rollyson, Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn (London: Aurum Press, 2001); William E. Cote, “Correspondent or Warrior?: Hemingway’s Murky World War ii ‘Combat’ Experience,” Hemingway Review 22 (Fall 2002): 90–107; Mark Bernstein and Alex Lubertozzi, World War ii on the Air: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts That Riveted a Nation (New York: Source Books/Mediafusion, 2003); Giovanna Dell’Orto, “Memory and Imagination are the Great Deterrents’: Martha Gellhorn at War as Correspondent and Literary Author,” Journal of American Culture 27, no. 2 (June 2004): 303–14; Philip M. Seib, Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War (Washington, dc: Potomac Books, 2006); Catherine McLoughlin, Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2007); Steve Wick, The Long Night: William I. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Robert B. Davies, Baldwin of The Times: Hanson W. Baldwin: A Military Journalist’s Life, 1903–1991 (Annapolis, md: Naval Institute Press, 2011); Timothy M. Gay, Assignment to Hell: The War against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart and Hal Boyle (New York: New American Library, 2012). Journalists working in the Pacific have seen far less historical investigation. This literature includes Wilda M. Smith, The Wars of Peggy Hull: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent (El Paso: Texas Western University Press, 1991); Jim Hughes, Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance—The Life and Work of an American Photographer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989); Roger Pineau, “Robert Sherrod,” Naval History 4 (August 1990): 55–58.
Thomas Bowers, “The Bankhead Bill: How a Threatened Press Subsidy was Defeated,” Journalism Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 21–27; Mary S. Mander, “American Correspondents During World War ii: Common Sense as a View of the World,” American Journalism 1, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 17–30; Michael D. Sherer, “Invasion of Poland in Four American Newspapers,” Journalism Quarterly 61, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 422–26; Albert E. Moffett, “Hometown Radio in 1942: The Role of Local Stations During the First Year of Total War,” American Journalism 3, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 87–98; Donald Godfrey, “Ethics in Practice: Analysis of Edward R. Murrow’s World War ii Radio Reporting,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 8, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 103–19; Edward E. Adams and Rajiv Sekhri, “Daily Newspaper Advertising Trends During World War ii: irs Tax Rulings and the War Bonds,” American Journalism 12, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 201–12; Andrew Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith, “Part of the Team: Life Photographers and their Symbiotic Relationship with the Military During World War ii,” American Journalism 12, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 276–89; Richard Fine, “Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press,” American Journalism 29, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 114–16; Ronald Garay, “Guarding the Airwaves: Government Regulation of World War ii American Radio,” Journal of Radio Studies 3 (1995–1996): 130–48; Paul Somers, “Right in the Fuhrer’s Face: American Editorial Cartoons of the World War ii Period,” American Journalism 13, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 333–53; Mei-Ling Yang, “Creating the Kitchen Patriot: Media Promotion of Food Rationing and Nutrition Campaigns on the American Home Front During World War ii,” American Journalism 22, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 55–75; Michael J. Socolow, “‘News is a Weapon’: Domestic Radio Propaganda and Broadcast Journalism in America, 1939–1944,” American Journalism 24, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 109–31; Richard Fine, “‘Snakes in our Midst’: The Media, the Military and American Policy toward Vichy North Africa,” American Journalism 27, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 59–82; Robert W. Ross, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: The Free Press,1986); Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Brianna Buljung, “From the Foxhole: American Newsmen and the Reporting of World War ii,” International Social Science Review 86, no. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2011): 44–64.
Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: The Free Press, 1984), xiii.
John D. Chappell, Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s Ultra: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence, u.s. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision (Washington, dc: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998).
Galen Roger Perras, Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867–1945 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003).
Diary entry, 13 April 1945, box 1, Papers of Simon B. Buckner Jr., Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library [hereafter ddepl], Abilene, ks. See also, Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr.’s comments in his diary entries of 21 March, 4 April, 1, 10 May, and 7 June 1945, ibid. For information on the career of the senior Buckner, see Lloyd J. Graybar, “The Buckners of Kentucky,” The Filson Club Quarterly 58, no. 2 (April 1984): 202–18.
Sherrod, cable 47, 1 April 1945, folder 268, Time Magazine Correspondent Dispatches: First Series, 1942–1945 Collection, hlhu.
Diary entry, 11 March 1945, box 1, Buckner papers, ddepl.
Sherrod, cable 54, 5 April 1945, folder 269, Time Magazine Correspondent Dispatches: First Series, 1942–1945 Collection, hlhu.
Sherrod, cable 55, 5 April 1945, folder 269, Time Magazine Correspondent Dispatches: First Series, 1942–1945 Collection, hlhu. Shirley Povich returned to sports writing in May. See Washington Post, 17 May 1945. On his career, see his obituary in the Washington Post on 5 June 1998. On Ernie Pyle’s death, see Appleman, Burns, Gugeler, and Stevens, Okinawa, p. 163.
Diary entry, 11 March 1945, box 1, Buckner papers, ddepl.
Sherrod, cable 54, 5 April 1945, folder 269, Time Magazine Correspondent Dispatches: First Series, 1942–1945 Collection, hlhu.
Sherrod, cable 55, 5 April 1945, folder 269, Time Magazine Correspondent Dispatches: First Series, 1942–1945 Collection, hlhu.
Sherrod, cable 54, 5 April 1945, ibid.
Diary entry, 12 June 1945, box 1, Buckner papers, ddepl.
Diary entry, 12 June 1945, box 1, Buckner papers, ddepl; Buckner to Adele Buckner, 14 June 1945, box 1, Papers of Simon B. Buckner, Jr., u.s. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, pa.
Hodge to Stilwell, 30 June 1945, folder A-27 1945, box 28a, Career File, Stilwell papers, hisu.
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, no. 1 (February 2003): 93–132; Herbert Hoover notes, Meeting with President Harry S. Truman, 28, May 1945, in Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman: A Documentary History, Timothy Walch and Dwight M. Miller, eds. (Worland, wy: High Plains Publishing, 1992), 37–43.
Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 47.
Brower, “Sophisticated Strategist,” p. 321; Charles F. Brower iv, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy: American Strategy and the War With Japan, 1943–1945,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1987, pp. 272–274, 298.
Brower, “Sophisticated Strategist,” pp. 321–22; Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehall, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), 605–606; William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950), 305, 449; Diary entry, 18 June 1945, box 4, Papers of William D. Leahy, Library of Congress [hereafter loc], Washington, dc.
MacArthur to Marshall, 19 June 1945, folder 4, box 17, series 2, rg 4, dmml.
Ibid.; Frank, Downfall, p. 141; Diary entry, 18 June 1945, box 4, Leahy papers, loc. The other three people who kept diaries were Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. For the information about their diaries, see Bernstein, “The Alarming Japanese Buildup on Southern Kyushu, Growing u.s. Fears, and Counterfactual Analysis,” pp. 574, fn. 23.
Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of the Enola Gay (New York: Springer Verlag, 1997); Hogan, Hiroshima in History and Memory; Philip Nobile (ed.), Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe, 1995); Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History Wars: The Enola Gay and other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); “History and the Public: What Can We Handle? A Round Table about History after the Enola Gay Controversy,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (December 1995), 1029–1144.
Giangreco, “Operation Downfall,” pp. 86–94; Giangreco, “Casualty Projections for the u.s. Invasions of Japan, 1945–1946,” pp. 521–82; Polmar and Allen, “Invasion Most Costly,” pp. 51–56; Giangreco, “‘A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas,’” pp. 93–132. Bernstein has questioned many of the findings Giangreco presents in “Casualty Projections for the u.s. Invasions of Japan, 1945–1946.” Bernstein, “Truman and the A-Bomb,” pp. 547–70. See also his comments in Bernstein, “Reconsidering ‘Invasion Most Costly,’” pp. 244, fn. 23 and Bernstein, “The Alarming Japanese Buildup on Southern Kyushu,” pp. 572, fn. 16.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 357 | 89 | 13 |
Full Text Views | 255 | 20 | 5 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 105 | 46 | 11 |
The Battle of Okinawa was the last major ground battle of World War ii. The Tenth u.s. Army that invaded this small piece of Japan was a unique force composed of units from the u.s. Army and others from the u.s. Marine Corps. Much historical literature has focused on the different approaches to ground combat of the two armed services, but they also employed very different policies towards support of the news media. The u.s. Marines were much more supportive than the u.s. Army. The two different policies and styles of news coverage that reporters employed led to coverage favoring the u.s. Marines. Reporting suggested that u.s. Marine procedures were less costly in lives and created enormous concern in the United States about casualty rates, motivating President Harry S. Truman to hold an Oval Office meeting to re-think strategy in the Pacific theater. It would be wrong, though, to argue that the media altered the course of the war. Truman asked hard probing questions about the direction of the war, but General of the Army George C. Marshall acted to ensure that the United States stayed on its current strategic path.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 357 | 89 | 13 |
Full Text Views | 255 | 20 | 5 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 105 | 46 | 11 |