Reconsidering “Invasion Most Costly”: Popular‐History Scholarship, Publishing Standards, and the Claim of High U.S. Casualty Estimates to Help Legitimize the Atomic Bombings

This is a critique of an article in the popular military magazine U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (August 1995) by journalist/historians Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen. Those two coauthors argued for high casualty numbers in the November 1945 invasion of Japan in order to justify the atomic bombings.

Because their article is severely flawed, because it appeared in a popular military journal, because it won a prize and is likely to be regarded as authoritative, and because it was conceived to justify the atomic bombings, it warrants serious critical examination. This critique examines, among other problems, the two coauthors' misreading of sources, their reliance upon some dubious materials, their neglect of some important documentary evidence, and their questionable reasoning and conclusions. Ultimately, this critque also discusses the social/political functions of Polmar and Allen's article, and briefly raises some questions about standards in scholarship and in publishing.

This critique is based upon very substantial archival research, as well as the use of the Freedom of Information Act, and considerable knowledge of the A‐bomb literature, the casualty‐estimates literature, and the scholarship on the Smithsonian's ill‐fated Enola Gay exhibit.