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 for the upcoming fighting in Japan were beginning to appear in daily newspapers, and although the Army stopped running casualty figures in Yank, the paper nevertheless quoted a series of unnamed “War Department strategists” and “military experts” who warned veteran troops and new draftees alike of prolonged fighting ahead. They repeatedly estimated a year and a half to two years as the minimum time it would take to “get it over unless there is a sudden collapse.”(43) This was not good news. 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.”(44)