The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War against Japan

Abstract

The War Beat, Pacific is a nuanced and engaging narrative of the Pacific war in World War II, told through the lens of the reporters who covered it. Steven Casey, who earlier wrote about U.S. reporting from the European theaters, untangles the complex challenges that reporters experienced from the moment they arrived on the vast front. The essential dilemma in the Pacific battle zone involved the public's right to know against the government's need to keep some plans and results secret. Casey skillfully unfolds the layers to show how American military leaders tried to manipulate the press for their own purposes, whether it was to provoke public outrage by turning attention from the war against Adolf Hitler in Europe, or, in the case of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, to shamelessly spin the coverage to mask his own failings, which Casey rightfully refers to as a “military misinformation campaign” (p. 29). Throughout, Casey reveals illuminating lesser-known cases, such as a racial “mutiny” where hundreds of Black G.I.'s were rounded up by American soldiers with “bayonets and loaded guns” (p. 72). A visiting Rep. Lyndon Johnson, wanting to keep such examples of Americans fighting each other hidden from the public, destroyed the original copy that one reporter referred to as “one of the biggest stories of the war” (ibid.). Others worried that some admirals “were more interested in protecting their own reputations than in denying usable information to the enemy” (p. 92).