Movie: WWII From Space

A 2-hour 2012 History Channel documentary, a very concise and fast moving summary of the Second World War. The title is somewhat misleading, although a fair amount of CGI is used to show battle fronts and territories from space, the bigger majority of footage is visualizations of weaponry and battles on the ground. Really hammers home the ferocity of the wars, and the awful casualties all sides suffered.

I think this film changed my opinion of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

In previous land battles at the Marianis Islands, Iwo Jima, Okinowa and others, Japanese determination was incredible -- mass suicides of civilians, mass suicides of Japanese troops, soldiers hiding in caves after battles and refusing to surrender even after the territory was defeated. Estimates ranged as high as 10,000,000 casualties (civilian and military) if the Japanese homeland was invaded -- and Japan wouldn't have surrendered for anything less.

If these figures are to be believed -- and they seem believable -- Hiroshima was the lesser of two evils. Gar Aperovitz's book claims the opposite, so arguments can certainly be made, but the conclusion is anything but foregone.

And the buildup of military might in the world, between 1938 and 1944, is just incredible. The world mobilized on an unimaginable scale.

Losses were staggering, and probably lots of lives were wasted on poor decision making, but the pivoting of so many people and so much materiel to the purpose of war making belies human decision making on a scale not seen before or since. I get the feeling today nothing of this scale could ever be mounted. Too much prevarication.

The bombs will always be a point of contention among historians. There were too many variables, I believe, to ever reach a definitive "right or wrong" decision.

There was a group in the Japanese government, including civilian and military, who believed they had lost the war and should surrender. There was another group who believed that, lost or not, the war should continue regardless of the ensuing casualties. This conflict was never carried to a decision within the Japanese government, because the bombs were dropped before its conclusion. Would Japan have surrendered without the bombs? I doubt that anyone can ever know.

There were also far-ranging political considerations. The Soviet Union was regarded by many in the American government, including Truman, as a future enemy of the country. Some historians have concluded that Truman ordered the bombs dropped as a signal to the Soviets. I tend to agree with this.

The American military has pushed for the use of atomic weapons in nearly every conflict we have been engaged in since WWII. They wanted to drop them on China during the Korean war. They wanted very much to use tactical nukes during the Viet Nam war. So it's not hard to believe that they really, really wanted to use their new toy in the war with Japan, regardless of any necessity.

Well sure, the government threw a lot of money at the Manhattan Project ($23 billion in 2007 dollars) and so they needed something to show for it.  Germany was defeated before the bombs were finished, so leadership intentionally left some major Japanese cities unbombed so they could accurately gauge the effects of the plutonium versus the uranium bomb.

And please note, I said "the Hiroshima bomb."  I still do not see any moral justification for Nakasaki.  Uninhabited atolls would have provided the yield data equally as well.

That said however, the Japanese were not a surrendering people.  As much as Alperovitz claimed that elements within the Japanese government were tendering surrender proposals through Sweden and Portugal, the idea that the official Japanese government would surrender unconditionally is a little hard to believe, given the history of the Pacific Theater battles.

If I recall it accurately (it has been quite a few years since I've read anything about the subject), the factor of the government looking for a means of surrender were doing so, in part, to avoid an unconditional surrender, which they foresaw as the only other outcome.

Well we're not going to re-litigate the 2nd World War, but Alperovitz made a big deal about the conditional surrender terms being offered, which included allowing the emperor to keep his throne. The United States had no small measure of revenge in seeking his demotion.

What demotion? Hirohito remained Emperor until his death.

Remember when they made a big deal of him flying to the US to meet with President Ford? Of course, not everyone showed him the proper respect. On the day the Emperor flew over, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a headline - supposedly about the cold spell - which read, "There's a Little Nip In the Air."*




*You may want to consider the possibility that I made that up.

From Wikipedia:

The role of the emperor as head of the State Shinto religion was exploited during the war, creating an Imperial cult that led to kamikaze bombers and other fanaticism. This in turn led to the requirement in the Potsdam Declaration for the elimination "for all time [of] the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest". Following Japan's surrender, the Allies issued the Shinto Directive separating church and state within Japan, leading to the Humanity Declaration of the incumbent Emperor. Subsequently, a new constitution was drafted to define the role of the emperor and the government.

I don't want to get into a quote battle here, but there is some difference between what was provided for foreign consumption and what was kept in reserve for the Japanese. Regardless of the changes in the government, Hirohito remained Emperor of Japan until his death.

Quote :

Hirohito was however persistent in the idea that the Emperor of Japan should be considered a descendant of the gods. In December 1945 he told his vice-grand chamberlain Michio Kinoshita: "It is permissible to say that the idea that the Japanese are descendants of the gods is a false conception; but it is absolutely impermissible to call chimerical the idea that the Emperor is a descendant of the gods." In any case, the "renunciation of divinity" was noted more by foreigners than by Japanese, and seems to have been intended for the consumption of the former

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but a weren't both Germany and Japan prohibited from having standing armies after WWII?

I don't know if they were prevented from having standing armies, bit I believe the Japanese constitution prohibits their armed forces from operating outside their national boundaries. I fail to see the connection of this with whether or not Hirohito was removed from his position.

I think his position as emperor became largely ceremonial, and his ability to wage war was curtailed.

It would be like if Donald Trump suddenly started combing his hair to the side instead of forward. Yeah, exactly like that.

At the end of the movie, in the "summing up" part, the narrator said that WWII spelled the end of United States isolationism. He said never again could the U.S. stand by because we were now too embroiled in world commerce and politics.

At the time this statement slid off my back and didn't make much of an impression, but in the couple days since then, it keeps coming back up, like a sweet potato that won't digest.

WHY do we have to be the world's policeman, why do we intervene in local conflicts? What purpose was served in intervening in Korea, Viet Nam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen? Are US interests really served by interventionalism?

I have my doubts.