March 13, 2007
MacArthur’s War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:55 AM EST The editor of this magazine sent me a galley of a soon-to-be-published novel of alternate history, Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson’s MacArthur’s War, and I read it in a Chicago hotel room. MacArthur’s War is not, I think, particularly interesting, but it is, in its way, very sensible, and in one respect instructive. Niles and Dobson’s point of departure is the battle of Midway, where against all odds the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers for the loss of one of our own. Japan lost the initiative and would never recover it. Niles and Dobson create a tiny change—the Japanese cruiser Tone in our history was late in launching a scout plane, with fateful results, but here the Tone’s catapult is repaired in time to launch that scout, which duly finds Admiral Spruance’s TF 16. The result is that the Japanese sink two U.S. carriers and lose only one of their own. This is quite plausible, and in the world imagined there is a great but also intriguingly limited effect: Nimitz’s prestige being damaged, MacArthur manages to wrest control of the Pacific War from Admiral King. Niles and Dobson also make a second and quite independent change in our history: A crucial experiment at Los Alamos goes wrong in September of 1944, killing three important scientists and delaying U.S. production of nuclear weapons. This, too, could certainly have happened. So the greatest American naval victory vanishes, as does our greatest feat of military research and development. What are the results? In the long run, almost none that much matter. Niles and Dobson see MacArthur as a brilliant general with a repellant character and think his plans for defeating Japan were in some respects better than Admiral King’s. In real history, we advanced on two separate axes in the Pacific, because the Army and the Navy came close to waging parallel wars against Japan. In this altered world, MacArthur is in a position to invade the Japanese home islands in March of 1945, and has taken fewer casualties than we suffered historically (he does not invade Iwo Jima or Saipan, or feel the need to control the worst terrain on Okinawa, etc.). But the casualties we take in Operation Downfall, the invasion of Kyushu, only planned in our history but actually executed in this one, are horrific. With no atomic bombs, the U.S. launches incendiary raids on Hiroshima that seem to kill at least as many as died historically in the first nuclear attack. Human suffering is not significantly reduced by the non-appearance of nuclear weapons in 1945, nor is history much changed. Nuclear weapons are eventually invented anyway in this world, in 1956, and MacArthur, rather than Dewey, loses the presidency to Truman in 1948. There is nothing implausible about Niles and Dobson’s alterations of history, nor in the consequences they allow to flow from their first alterations, but the implication is that when an antagonist is as terribly outweighed by its opponent as Japan was outweighed by us, and as crippled by gross irrationality, something much like the historical outcome is inevitable. Fascinating and sometimes deeply disturbing alternate histories depict worlds eerily but plausibly different from our own, can give a disorienting sense of contingency, and can sometimes persuade us of the profound importance of a specific moment, when everything might have turned out very differently indeed. Niles and Dodson have instead successfully communicated a sense of one historical moment’s mass and inertia. Japan’s leaders assumed that Americans would lose their will for a fight if victory could be made sufficiently expensive and its prospect sufficiently delayed. This sort of thinking has been a good calculation of likely American behavior on other occasions, and may be again, and soon, but it was not a particularly likely outcome in the 1940s. The consequence is good history but a less-than-diverting novel, because this is a milk-and-water approach to writing alternate history. The genre works best when it grossly unsettles, and it can work well when it is furiously imaginative although merely playful. Working out just how differently the world might reasonably have been is most effectively done in a novel. Working out how overwhelmingly likely was the history that actually happened should be the subject of an essay, not a fiction.
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