Out of context this is a contentious clip at best.

*nominate (Best documentary type VS submission)

I thought this was very informative. I had no idea the level of destruction we created before dropping the nukes.

I've always felt trumann shouldn't have done it.

*asia

Adding video to channels (Asia) - requested by lucky760.

As I understand it, the decision to switch to fire-bombing came about because of the complete and utter ineffectiveness of high altitude bombing. They started out trying to bomb legitimate military targets like munitions factories and realized that the high altitude bombs simply weren't precise enough to hit the targets due to severe cross-winds. The decision then came to fly lower and drop a napalm payload that, even if it missed the intended target, would start a fire that would likely consume the target anyway. Unfortunately the fires, once started, continued to burn indiscriminately.

The argument has also been made that since the Japanese civilians basically supplied the manpower for the Japanese armies and the workforce for the War Machine itself that technically they were valid military targets.

It should also be noted that the Japanese tried to firebomb the U.S. by using high altitude balloons filled with napalm that floated on the jet stream to the West Coast (do a google search for FUGO balloon bombs). Fortunately, only a few of the balloons released actually landed on U.S. shores. At the time, the government covered it up because the idea that the U.S. mainland was vulnerable to attack was simply to terrifying a prospect to consider.

*dead

This published video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by eric3579.

rasch187 has fixed this video's dead embed code - no Power Points awarded because rasch187's points are already fully charged.

*promote

let's try that again... *promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Thursday, March 15th, 2007 10:19am PDT - promote requested by grinter.

Read about what the Japanese had already done to the locals throughout their conquest of Asia before judging Trumann too harshly. It's important for documentation like this to remind people how horrific war is. It's also equally important that the context not be lost lest we forget the even more horrific events that led people to deem the war the lesser evil.

They also switched to it because the japanese were using their homes as industrial centers.

We are very lucky that he did. The invasion of Japan would have cost million of lives on both sides. Think of all the lives he saved by dropping the nukes.

Well, there is a reason that Japan was ready to sue for peace before we even dropped the first atomic bomb.

If proportionality should be a rule of war, we're almost as in debt there as we are financially.

And yet they didn't sue for peace after we had already dropped the first one. A more concise argument against Japan's willingness to surrender can hardly be made.

The problem with this kind of argument is that it conflates the crimes of select people in the Japanese military (not everyone was a bloodthirsty or order-following robot) with innocent civilians (although see my comment from 5 years ago about how some have rationalized attacks on Japanese civilian population centers). If you believe that the Japanese people are culpable for the crimes of their military and should pay the ultimate price (i.e. death) for those crimes then you've essentially also rationalized the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., as those that planned them explicitly stated they were retaliation for U.S. political and military interventions in a variety of Muslim countries (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks for more info). Holding the citizens responsible for the actions of their government/military leads to very murky waters indeed.

To be fair to America at the time though, everyone was targeting civilians during World War 2--the Germans were bombing indiscriminately in London, the Brits and U.S. retaliated with the same kind of attacks on the German homeland, the Japanese military was doing medical experiments on random Chinese farmers they rounded up... it was a f'd up war all around and I think by the time the firebombings and atomic bombs were dropped in Japan people were willing to do just about anything to end the war. Victory became more important than humanity.

You're conflating war time attacks with punishment or maybe even justice.

It's not about declaring the people that died deserved to die or not, because we know for a fact we killed 'innocents' by the thousands. People who unquestioningly were good people and did not deserve to die. It's about saying their deaths were an unavoidable consequence of prosecuting a war that was necessary. It's messed up to talk about a 'just' war, and a 'good war' is an oxymoron. Necessary evil is more the idea I'd say. The Japanese military machine was brutally and systematically exterminating everything in it's path, and war was the only way to stop it. We did terribly things to win that war, and the only defense of our committing those acts was preventing and ending worse ones in the future. It's not a clear good thing, it's messy.

Incendiary Bombs has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.