Curtis LeMay Starts Firebombing Tokyo - War Against Humanity 123
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- čas přidán 28. 12. 2023
- Curtis LeMay orders his B-29s to begin the firebombing of Japanese cities. This begins a campaign that will destroy the Japanese economy but leave hundreds of thousands dead. Meanwhile, the radicalisation of Japanese society continues at all levels as the Kamikaze suicide-pilots attack Allied warships and school-children build vengeance weapons.
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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Marek Kamiński
Community Management: Ian Sowden
Written by: Gaby Pearce, James Newman, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Gaby Pearce, James Newman
Map animations by: Daniel Weiss
Map research by: Sietse Kenter
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Artwork and color grading by: Mikołaj Uchman
Sound design by: Marek Kamiński
Colorizations by:
Mikołaj Uchman
Daniel Weiss
0:50 Recap of the air war over Japan
3:04 First B-29 missions from the Marianas
5:23 Weakness of Japanese air and civil defence
08:56 Radicalisation of Japanese society under the bombs
10:35 Kamikazes
13:40 America changes leadership and strategy
17:29 Conclusion
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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
Even as this war gets closer and close to its inevitable end, the scale of death and destruction continues to grow. Soon, Spartacus will cover the renewed Allied bombing of Germany which now reaches greater levels of ferocity than ever before.
The image of Tokyo being firebombed reminds me of an episode of Sailor Moon in 1992 where a villain named Jadite threatens to set the entire city on fire if he is not met face to face by the protagonists, showing a vision to the millions of people there of what that would look like in graphic detail. He is promptly met with a sword through the ribs by Venus IIRC. It's been a while since I saw that.
I recently read a comment on another channel that was talking about the frontier myth and a Japanese user said that Americans are inferior to Japanese it made me wonder if the user forgot that the US destroyed a lot of their cities not to mention, we destroyed most of their Navy and Air Force
I would love that Spartacus and Indy could do a special about the attempted coup made by officers of the Japanese army that tried to avoid the emperor's speech of accepting the unconditional surrender to the Allies
Thanks for your work!! Curtis Le May was an abominable person. He wanted to use nuclear weapons against Cuba during the October Crisis of 1962. Thank God he never got a hold of the nuclear codes.
After watching this video I'm going to need a detox from an overdose of virtue signaling.
My father was assigned to Saipan in the 500 th Bomb group. Two B-29's that were "destroyed" in the Japanese air raids were rebuild by combining parts from the other destroyed planes.
Mostly out of spite.
Thank you to Dad for his service. Tim UK.
That's not a good thing to do .
I mean seriously, sometimes these parts attract things which are beyond understanding of science.
Not gonna lie, this sounds like an impressive feat if you ask me! -TimeGhost Ambassador
You know, You could end a description of any event at this point in the war with "they did it mostly out of spite".
The most heavily armed B-17 serving in the PTO, "Old 666", was also built largely of scrounged parts from other Fortresses too heavily damaged to carry on. The men of "Old 666" were the most highly decorated aircrew in American history.
A U.S. Colonel named Glenn Frazier (who I met) was captured in Bataan in 1942 and spend three years as a Japanese POW in Japan. He has a book Hell's Guest about it. He saw the bombing raids, including one that he said killed 400 Japanese workers in a factory next to the POW camp. One of the interesting parts of the book is that after Japan's surrender, the American POWs were left in limbo. The American ex-POWs were just milling around with nothing to do but wait a few weeks for our army to arrive to occupy northern Japan. Frasier and a few others didn't want to wait, so they boarded a Japanese civilian train and rode side by side with the Japanese passengers and discharged soldiers through all the burned-out cities until they got to the American headquarters in Tokyo. Neither he or the Japanese showed any animosity toward each other on that long ride through a bombed-out country. The war was over and the countries were at peace. Everything changed on a dime as soon as the Japanese surrendered. Humans are ferocious against each other in war, but when peace returns, so does the innate respect we have for one another.
Sadly in Europe this was not the case. The Emperor surrendered. The Fuhrer committed suicide.
Onve the Allies knew the price of Japanese surrender was the the continuity of office of the Emperor
and once the imperial military accepted that a route to personal survival and honour existed their admission of "bad advice" and capitulation soon followed.
No bomb was needed. theoretically.
That's what humans are. Can go from savagery to to refinement and back again so fast..
we're all by nature cavemen, living in the 21st century. Hardly surprising if we struggle.
Thankfully peace is our natural state of being.
I read this book! Great book! He also demanded a Japanese officer give him his katana. He literally said "give me your sword. You have To. You are defeated"
And the officer did! He weeped, cried and gave up his sword
@@mailman35419 Several other things before and after the war come to mind too: How he joined the Army to escape being killed by a bar owner whose place he trashed riding through it on a motorcycle; how he slowed the Japanese advance through the Philippines in 1942; and how he succeeded after the war in doing everything from trucking to running a gift shop to renting motorcycles. But the recurring nightmares of being in Japanese captivity gave him screaming fits at night. Several of his wives left him because of the lingering scars on his personality. He didn't get over it until decades later when he forgave the Japanese for what they did to torture him and other American captives. The horrors of war continue long after the shooting stops. I think I'll reread the book, now that you brought it vividly to life in my mind with the Japanese officer surrender.
@@fortpark-wd9sx why 1972?
what a lot of people forget, do not understand or know is that the Big 5 firebombing raids (was one raid pulled so they should have been 6 raids?) over Japan killed more people and damaged more area of land then the two atomic bombs that was dropped on Japan.
While true some people use that as a justification for dropping the atom bombs and killing more civilians with no military value. Which is obviously crazy.
That's why the Soviet entry into the war and the Americans agreeing to let the emperor stay in place under American command were much bigger reasons for the Japanese surrender than the A bombs. It didn't really make a difference to Japan how many American planes it took to destroy a city. The city was still destroyed the same.
Much more; you are correct!
When I was at The Citadel, one of my history instructors once said when you unleash total war on your enemy, expect him to bring it back upon you with all he has in his destructive arsenal.
Exactly. If you can't face the whirlwind, don't sew the winds of war.
so 9/11was welldeserved
Well duh.
I could have told you that when I was 12 years old.
☮
@@McRocket oh yeah? Well what would your 12 year old self say about being an condescending douche bag?
My father in law was a boy in 1945 on the central coast of Honshu. He trained using bamboo spears to fight the invasion. Later, after the surrender a GI gave him chocolate. It was his first time to taste it and he recalled thinking "these men have extra chocolate to give away. How could we possibly win a war against such power ?"
Thanks for sharing this touching story with us! -TimeGhost Ambassador
The USA had it all: food, steel, oil, rubber and manpower. If we had lost, it would have been like a "fixed" boxing match.
The USN had refrigerated Ice cream ships for the Marines. Any Japanese soldier aware of this was probably immediately dejected. IIRC there was an account of Japanese soldiers coming out from their hiding because they smelled cooking food. They had been eating maggot rice for months and couldn't take it anymore.
My Seabee dad did the surveying for the ramps and atomic bomb pits on Tinian. He said his--and fellow sailors'--only regret at the time was they didn't drop the atomic bombs sooner.
We may not understand that feeling today. Until the Japanese actually unconditionally surrendered, there was still an unsettled feeling that, in perfect hindsight, we can't understand. Today, we know who won the war. Easy to know; history. Those folks lived it moment by moment with a lot of smaller wins, and yes, losses during the war. Certainty was not known.
Amen!
If Filipinos were running the war, they would have been demanding that Japan keep fighting. I believe the Chinese may have felt the same way. But they were too busy fighting each other (Nationalists v Communists) just as hard as they were fighting the Japanese. @@WilliamMurphy-uv9pm
Worth noting the B-29s were also used in a hugely successful aerial mining campaign, effectively completing the blockade imposed upon Japan by the USN submarine campaign.
I have read that had the war continued into 1946 that the starvation caused by the blockade would have killed more people than the bombs did.
They probably not needed the aerial mining campaign, too. The US Navy's submarine force, which had overcome the technical issues with the Mk. XIV torpedo, was sinking so many ships by the beginning of 1945 that Japanese merchant shipping pretty much ground to a halt anyway. Indeed, by the summer of 1945 Navy submarines were pretty much reduced to sinking ferries plying the Seto Inland Sea.
Thanks for pointing this out. By the end, basically no ships could even move between Japanese home ports, forcing equipment and troops to move over some very challenging geography.
The aerial mining operation took about 5% of bombing campaignn sorties suffered lower loss and effectively blockaded all ports and inshore traffic. using the straights
If he Germans had done iikewise to British ports 1940 onwards and put all the R&D re0sources they put into U-boat fleet exapansion development into aerial mine and torpedoes it is likely that they would have dcveloped the pressure wave triggered fuzse and not even the brits had counter measures for that.
All this ids ddisputed but thge Brits had the defence data no. type and tonnage of losses. we should by now have records from the German side on how many mines were dropped.
submarines wer often used in developing defensive fields.
So one could argue that Both Doenitz and LeMay got it wrong.
Ecepytv thast neruther aaatb the time had the data to base bn analysis on.
For aerial aggressive mining to work well as strategy you need an island based enemy.
Airbases or sea posts (tiny island or atoll will do nicely) within 600 miles, a succession of fuses, a stockpile of advnced torpedoes (production bottleneck) long range bombers. Night navigation, nihhhhhght flying skills and time for the embargo to finish its job.
1940-45 there was no way to stop such a strategy.
In order to avoid US terror-bombing the Japanese resorted to sending their children to Korea on those ships you're oh so proud of sinking
My father always felt that he survived the war because of the usage of the atomic bombs. He was trained as a glider pilot for the invasion of Japan in November of 1945, and his life expectancy in combat was not encouraging and he knew it. In later years after the war when folks would decry the use of the bombs, he would speak up in defense of the decision to use the bombs for that reason. The Japanese people were indoctrinated in a fight to the death mentality that would have made a ground invasion a bloodbath. The use of the bombs established a reason for the Japanese to surrender in a way that did not dishonor them and save face.
Don't forget the Asian Holocaust. Over 100,000 civilians were killed a month throughout the occupied areas. The Japanese soldiers were animals.
that and the Japanese high ups did not want Stalins crazy ass getting involved. which the Red Army was planning on doing. everybody knew it was best to make peace with the Americans.
Met Paul Tibbets grandson recently and expressed my gratitude for his Grandfathers efforts during the war. A great many americans are alive today thx to his grandfathers efforts.
I, too, am grateful.
My son, then age 8, and I met Paul Tibbets in 2000. I greeted Gen. Tibbets and introduced him to my son with the words, "Sir, my father had been assigned to the invasion of Japan. I'd like for you to meet my 8 year old son, who is possibly here to shake your hand because of your mission to help end the war."
I could tell by his reaction that Paul Tibbets was genuinely moved by meeting yet another American who was likely alive because of the war-winning decisions and missions made then.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written about his father, who was one of Gen. LeMay's fliers on the B-29 raids over Japan. He said that it took his father a long time to recover from all of the amphetamines the fliers were compelled to consume.
Wherever their military went after Pearl Harbor...their behavior toward prisoners of war and non-combatants was so egregious, it had galvanized America into holding the entire population accountable...and it put the home islands right in the crosshairs...But it's important to remain in possession of the fact THEY started this..
I mean it was using japans own playbook against them. All their raids over Asia they never once hesitated to bomb civilian centers. If the roles were reversed the Japanese wouldn't have even felt bad tbh.
5:18 The Air raids Do-little Damage... I see what you did there Timeghost
Nice catch! -TimeGhost Ambassador
I appreciate how Sparticus asks us to empathize with the late war state of mind. Those men, for the most part, weren’t monsters, they were human.
and a hell of a lot braver than the namby pamby similarly aged that wander around nowadays.
@@chuckh5999 boomer comment
They were both. As a quote I like goes: "There's a beast in every man and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand." Yes it is a show and book, but GRRM was a conscientious objector to Vietnam and he makes a point to show how war effects the average person. Not just the crimes committed to them, but how easily you can get otherwise decent people to do terrible, terrible things.
@@chuckh5999it's okay Grandpa, take your pills and lie back down, Wheel of Fortune is gonna be on soon
@terryshaw.
It is the human form that makes monsters.
That is the difference from beasts.
Mr. Olsson,
Your speech at the end I always find stirring. The deeper look into war and it's personal effects on us as individuals and us as a people takes these historical facts to a higher place and gives us pause to reflect. Thank you and all those working with you.
Amen.
if only we lived in a perfect world.
A powerful reflection on the current moment
My father was a Staff Sargent stationed at McChord AAF in 1945 a medic assigned to the invasion of the Japanese home islands - he told me the Japanese were fanatics, would fight to the last person and never surrender - when shipped out they never expected to return alive - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and as a result I exist - at that time the Japanese were fanatics and did not abide by the Geneva conventions and protocols for war and were sadistic in the extreme to anyone captured alive - people today cannot imagine what living in that kind of reality would be like - the decisions made then cannot be criticized through the lens of today.
I expect that is the propaganda he was told. Might have been true to an extent
The recent Japanese movie "Godzilla Minus One" is set at the end of the war and in the following years. It shows in graphic detail the devastation of Tokyo that took years to rebuild. For those that think it is just another monster movie, it has a great human story showing characters living with survivors guilt (both from the war and the monster attack). I do not remember seeing such an on screen representation before of post war Tokyo. Also of note, the lead character was a kamikaze pilot, the fact that he is alive should tell you something. I encourage anyone interested to watch this excellent movie (not just monster movie).
That is an interesting fact, I'll have a look! Also thanks for your comment! -TimeGhost Ambassador
I ws also going to note the new Godzilla film in that regard - you beat me to the punch! It's a really good movie, which is not something I would normally say about a Godzilla movie.
Thank you very much !
This sounds like an amazing plot...
Godzilla minus one is an incredible movie!
The pilot returning to Japan and learning that his relatives (including his parents) have all perished in the firebombing.
And then being blamed by the neighbor for failing to do his duty (to protect Japan).
Him being haunted by survivor's guilt and a fair share of PTSD - that was an incredible job both by the actor and the director!
The scene where he breaks down, wondering if he died in the war with everything around him just being an illusion.....
My personal opinion is that the Hollywood adaptions of Godzilla are absolutely not my taste, while the Japanese movies are great - Shin Godzilla (2016) was a wonderful way to describe the early reactions to the Fukushima disaster and the current movie is a way to describe Japan's postwar society.
As I see it, the monster itself is not the center of the movie - it is just used as a supplemental tool to narrate the story of the returning war veteran and his personal demons.
My Uncle Ed was a Air Force tunnel rat on the island of Iwo Jima. My parents and my Aunt said he was a changed man when he came home. Even so he seemed to get through it by talking with my cousin and I about it. He didn't sugar coat any of it.
Never Forget. -TimeGhost Ambassador
What did he talk about?
Do you want to share any of it?
@@thomaskositzki9424 He talked of the smell, using flame throwers and grenades to clear them. He said that they had hidden areas were they would hide and if you missed them, would come out and surprise you. He said he could smell the smell of death for several years after coming home. Uncle Ed was a Iowa farm boy and enlisted at 17. He was a good man and really to be honest spent more time with me then my own father.
That must have been interesting, since there was no "Air Force" in 1945
@@dukeford Excuse me, Army Air Corp. I got it confused with my cousin who was Air Force 1967-71 Vietnam.
Imperial Japanese : Launchs Operation PlayStupidGames
_Four Years Later_
Imperial Japanese : Signs The Treaty of WinStupidPrizes
The problem with these types of opinions on historical events is that they are short on alternative solutions to the ones the historian is criticizing. Japan had just spent the last 15 years turning Asia into a graveyard even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, including Manchuria (remember Nanking?), Korea, The Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, etc. Some estimates go as high as 10 million people killed mostly civilians with no sign of stopping. What else could the United States have done to get Japan to stop?
It is easy to criticize. It is much harder to come up with viable alternative solutions as millions are being slaughtered.
I don't know what problem people have with 'it's the responsibility of a warring nation to surrender if it wants the fighting to stop' as a rule, it makes perfect sense. "America knew victory was inevitable" well even if that's true it's up to Japan to provision a surrender at *IT'S* earliest convivence, y'know whenever you're ready to stop dying *WE'RE* ready to stop killing.
You don't have to like war but aside from war being what it is what exactly is wrong with the basic rules? And even if you do take issue with the rules of war that's a reason to advocate for a change to the rules going forward not a cause to criticize those who adhered to them as they were in the past.
My Japanese mother survived the 3/10/45 bombing of Tokyo. As a toddler I went to Curtis Lemay elementary school at Offutt AFB (HQSAC).
The irony…
Curtis Lemay was the US version of Englands “Bomber Harris”. They both believed in total war and the annihilation of the enemy.
I knew Curtis LeMay when I was a youngster. I didn’t really realize his significance, but he was a rather quiet individual, and did not like to be disturbed when he was eating. He brought the war to an end and saved countless American lives.
You did justice covering such serious, and sad, topic.
Compliments to the writers!
The narration is impeccable & gripping. Very very well done. Thank you for educating us! 🫡
Thanks a lot for those kind words! Never Forget. -TimeGhost Ambassador
Spartacus does too much armchair moralizing.
@@rogerjohnson2562 This series is called War Against Humanity so a discussion of how the war damaged the humanity of everyone it touched is quite appropriate.
LaMay knew that the Japanese had no intention of surrender. They would fight to the last man. He and the rest of the U.S. command wanted to save American soldiers from a ground offensive in Japan. So he did what he had to do, break their will to fight!
I think one of the best summations of Curtis LeMay and this campaign is found in the Errol Morris documentary “Fog of War” about Robert S. Macnamara (defence secretary to JFK and LBJ), who served in LeMay’s staff during WW2. LeMay was a brutal and direct sonofabitch who knew what he was doing, who once said to Macnamara they all would be executed as war criminals if they lost the war. The anecdote about his reaction to Macnamara’s analysis of B25 bomber crews turning back from missions is fascinating - LeMay said he’d fly in the lead group of every raid and anyone who turned back would be court-martialled. The sequence of the documentary where they run through the Japanese cities burned (with an American city for comparison) is sobering, when you think it was destruction wrought in less than a year.
Was the first thing that I thought of when Mr Olsson started to speak of the civilians killed in the bombings. The numbers killed in the fire bombing was staggering, and relatively unknown to most. The "Fog of War" made those numbers especially significant when comparing them with U.S. cities. czcams.com/video/RceLAhPOS9Q/video.html
Good thing we don't do that kind of thing any more, raining down fire and brimstone on our fellow man.
@@whazzat8015 oh yes humans are so civilised now!
In the case of Lemay, the question is whether he was a monster or a hero. In WW2 sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. We won the war and LeMay became the good guy with a four star position in the new US Air Force, a cushy retirement and a seat on the board of the National Geographic Society, among other appointments, If we had lost the war, there's no question that he would have been executed as a war criminal.
LeMay believed the worst war is a long war. Best for both sides to bring it to a brutal conclusion.
Don't start a fight you can't finish.
British Columbia was also the target of Japanese balloon attacks and the RCAF maintained a few squadrons of weight reduced Hurricanes to try to shoot down balloons as well as a few mosquitos. Most of the pilots were air cadets so it also served as training. The summer of 1945 saw slightly higher than normal forest fires in BC but not statistically unreasonable. There is some concern that some UXB's exist in the mountains of BC to this day.
We also had submarine I-26 shell the lighthouse at Estevan Point (near Tofino) on Vancouver Island earlier in the war.
Balloon bombs were also found in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, and Northwest Territories.
@@sbmcmull Found well inland in the US as well, in part because they'd be much more easily seen in the prairies. The bomb which killed 6 in Oregon in 1945 was discovered by picnickers in 1945 hanging from a tree in a national forest. If you find a strange package hanging from a tree in a forest in BC or the western US it is likelier to be a bomb than DB Cooper's lost loot.
The channel, "WWII US BOMBERS" has a number of videos on the firebombing campaign over Japan. The techniques, technology, etc. I was very surprised to find out that these attacks killed more people than the two atomic bomb drops. It was very bad.
Instead of the high altitude daylight precision bombing the USAAF used earlier, especially over Germany, Le May changed everything. He switched to night, low altitude, high speed bombing with incendiaries to very deadly effect.
Earlier Nimitz was trying to get the USAAF to conduct massive aerial mining of Japanese waterways. US Navy submarines had been working effectively in strangling Japanese shipping but could not patrol the waters between Japan and Korea. They tried earlier in 1943 but it was too dangerous and costly. Nimitz asked the USAAF to mine the waters of Japan that the submarines could not patrol. The army had denied it repeatedly until Le May took over the job. Le May wasn't keen on it but he agreed to work with the navy. "Operation Starvation" was carried out. It is strategically one of the greatest, most effective uses of bombers with profound effect on Japan. That mining operation with the navy's submarines finally put two hands over the throat of Japan. Time was ticking. Post-war interviews with Japanese government and military officials said if the US had started that aerial mining campaign earlier, the war would have been over a lot sooner. When the shipping was cut off the Emperor was told that soon Japanese industry would grind to a halt. Not to mention incoming shipments of food. Remember a big reason for Japan venturing overseas, i.e. taking Korea, was farmland. Japan already had problems feeding its own population before Pearl Harbor.
LeMay was notorious for sitting in the base theater smoking his cigar.
I went to this small town museum in Hudson's Hope British Columbia Canada and they actually have one of those balloon's ignitor modules in their displays. It was found in the area by a hunter in the 1950's. Its seriously the coolest rarest thing i've ever seen and for it to be in this tiny little town is wild.
Indeed that is a very interesting fact! Thanks for sharing it! -TimeGhost Ambassador
Sometime in the future - 25, 50, 75 years hence - what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too.
-Curtis LeMay
It is easy to look back on history from an easy chair or as an academic analyzing numbers. There is a truth that few if any wish to address and that is the Japanese people were ready to fight to the death to defend their home islands. Men, women, children, and the elderly were all expected to play their role in making it so costly for the Allies that they would abandon their conquest of the Islands. Conservative casualty estimates for the allies, mostly American for invasion and taking of the main islands was around 1-2 million. In reality, it would have meant the extermination of the Japanese as a people and the eradication of Japanese culture except for what was left in museums. In addition to the dead, maimed, and wounded there would have been the soldiers forced to shoot down children fitted with bombs or worse those only looking for food. Can anyone imagine the psychological trauma inflicted on Allied soldiers? Captured Japanese films and post-war interviews with Japanese offers confirmed this as well as the plan to execute all Allied POWs in Japanese camps. Yes, this was a brutal war and the air campaign directed by Curtis LeMay was indeed inhuman. What would the author of this video have done given the alternatives presented to the Allies? The same goes for people who condemn the use of the atomic bomb equally as inhuman. It is easy to come to moral conclusions when one is detached from the historical and psychological realities of the time.
Japan could have stopped those raids anytime they wanted to. Just raise the WHITE FLAG.
One of those balloons Japan launched towards the U. S. actually landed as far east as Thermopolis, Wyoming. Growing up in Wyoming, I learned about that part of the war back in elementary school in the early 1980s. Gawd, I'm old. LOL
A few reached Canada as well. The Japanese thought they were all failures because the wartime censorship forbade mention of any public mention of them or where they were landing
When this came up before, I looked it up...one made it to Farmington, Michigan, about 40 miles from where I'm sitting typing this.
While acknowledging the horrors of the bombing campaign, I have to wonder if there was an acceptable alternative. We had seen that Germany didn't accept incomplete defeat after World War I, and something similar was likely with a Japan that did not unconditionally surrender. And given the war crimes and crimes against humanity that imperial forces were known to have committed, leaving an unreconstructed Japan able to make war was an intolerable outcome.
Massacring Japanese civilians isn't going to help with that though. The imperial government wasn't going to surrender because the poor people were getting slaughtered. That was part of their own plans.
And the idea that this would somehow cause a mass uprising that overthrew the government was a vague and nonsensical plan to begin with. And something the Americans should have known would not work, because it never worked in Germany or Britain either.
Why are you acting like there’s “no acceptable alternative” to killing millions of innocent women and children via indiscriminate firebombing? Are you not aware of how successful the blockade of Germany in WWI was? Or how successful it was of Japan by mid-1945?
The part of the story that’s being forgotten here is the brutal shock of the way Japanese civilians behaved at Saipan. The suggestion that victory was in sight for the Americans does not take this into account. Indeed, planners began to realize that an invasion of Japan would be harrowing in the extreme if not outright impossible. This was the stage onto which Lemay stepped.
While i despise the man and am sickened by what he did to the civilians of japan, i am at the same time forced to admit that 80 years of hindsight does not present to me an idea of what to do instead.
Peace talks have been going on between warring states for thousands of years. But you need grown-ups in charge, not an alcoholic psychopath and his demented grandad
The problem with your argument is that the mass bombing of civilians did not hasten the end of the war, it delayed it. The main effect on Axis morale was to increase anger against the Allies, hardening their will to fight. Hitler would never have surrendered, of course - surrender would only be possible only after a successful overthrow of Hitler's regime. But it seems incredible that the Germans never actually did so - until you take into consideration the anger of the Germans against the Allied bombing of civilians. Never mind that the Germans bombed civilians too - the German public was not very aware of that. They were very aware of their own suffering.
There was an alternative: first of all - no targeting of civilians. Period. It's been claimed that the bombing campaign was mainly a success because it forced the Luftwaffe to expose itself to destruction - but that would have been equally true, regardless of which targets the Allies attacked.
Second: try to maximize the destruction of legitimate military targets, while minimizing the collateral damage. With WWII technology, this would have required low altitude daylight bombing by medium bombers. Aircraft losses would have been higher, but the bombs would have been more effective at destroying Axis capacity to wage war, and less effective at hardening Axis civilians willingness to support the war.
LeMay like Sheridan knew what he was doing . The stupidity of army vs navy instead of working together. I personally blame the Emperor for not having the courage or ability to control the military and make them work together.
When Lemay was in Europe his bomber pilots were aborting missions out of fear with as much as 20% of his force dropping out with "engine trouble". He responded by going on missions in the lead plane of the leading squadron and threatening to cout martial any pilot who aborted. Aborted missions fell off dramatically. 18:00 I would point out that 40,000 people in the lands occupied by Japan were dying every month by various causes. The Atomic bombs saved more than American lives. So your view of the costs of the war is a little myopic, presentist and self-referential, Spartacus.
Was it necessary? No one can say. Would the mere threat of a Soviet invasion combined with a crippled industry due to the embargo force the japanese government to see sense, no one can say. Too often Americans assume that the japanese people had a say in the war. The reality is that Japan was a dictatorship, and the higher ups could not care about the people. The firebombing of Tokyo did not convince the war council to surrender.
US morale bombing has not ended a war. Be it in Japan, Germany, Korea, Vietnam Syria or against the Yemenis now. In autocratic regimes, the ego of the top brass is more important than the lives of thousands.
@@take2762No one thought civilians had a say, we were appealing to the military to see reason and not selfishly throw away lives for their own pride and ego. But it was futile as it was ingrained in both the civilian population and the military to fight to the bitter end. I'd say they absolutely were necessary and were quite useful in showing the emperor the futility of the situation and to finally take control. You mention the Soviets and the embargos, yet don't mention that even after all of this and going against the entire world they still wouldn't give up.
Thank you for this episode.
Great episode, the war nears its end yet the deathtoll intensifies. Thanks again.
you didn't mention it here, but weren't the transatlantic fire balloons made with the consideration that they could later be equipped with the biological warfare agents of unit 731? I've heard of such a connection before, and it would make sense to me that they first would launch trial balloons with incendiary loads because that was the load most likely to enable the japanese to identify where the balloons were landing. reports of disease outbreaks would likely be more effectively suppressed, and I imagine there would have been some concern about balloons releasing their payload on the japanese territory from which they were launched that made it more prudent to use incendiary trial balloons first to test how likely they were to hit places where a plague bomb would be impactful, in order to be able to weigh the risk against the reward.
My understanding is unit 731 was not actually an effective bioweapons program, in the same way Mengele was not an effective medical researcher. It was a sick torture playground with only the slightest dressing of a research program, and people as high up as the emperor knew that reality.
It's a reality of war and wartime governments that beaurocracy and state dogma creates pathways and justifications for just about anything humans want to do, free of morality and ethics, and reason or thought.
The Chinese did one recently and the dum*ss Biden sat there like a lump of shiite!
Brilliant. Thank you.
Brilliant insight
Thank you! And thanks for your comment, it helps for the algorithm -TimeGhost Ambassador
80 years later I’m certainly pleased they are on our side.
I had to replay the outro part a few times. The narrative talent is impeccable, it truly brings to light the tragedy and mindset of the war. Thank you
JUST recite the FACTS !!! I'm not so infantile that I need to nurse upon some half-baked actor to set my mood !!!
As always, expertly done, and very interesting. Thank you.
Thanks a lot for the compliments! We literally pour our hearts into the creation of those videos! Never Forget! -TimeGhost Ambassador
LeMay found that high level bombing did not work due to the jet stream at 20-30k feet. And the Japanese didn't have any 57mm AAA thus at 5000 ft there was a gap in their defenses... also found that most of their machine shops were in shacks in the houses all over the cities (mom & pop machine shops) where parts for their guns, tanks, planes, etc.. were made. Thus firebombing was the only way to really destroy all their production. And thus he did destroy it. As for civilians.. they were the ONES RUNNING THE SHOPS. Unfortunately they kept their families with them... and thus children & the old perished with them.
War is hell but keeping kids near the production centers is asking for even more hell.
I'm jumping the timeline here but there is a great book called "Downfall" that goes over a lot of the Tokyo bombing, the A-Bomb, the coup etc. In the book it touches on the fact that the US still couldn't believe that the Japanese didn't even consider surrendering to them even after the fire bombings. It also goes over the fact that the Japanese tried to get the Soviets involved to broker some type of peace. It is wild (to me) that they just refused to surrender.
With their militarism and highly stylised code of honour they had convinced themselves that surrender was worse than death. Surrender meant disgrace to them, while death granted honour. With that mindset, surrender was almost impossible to them.
@@Kevin-mx1vi Yep
Instead of brokering a peace deal the Soviets declared war and quickly overran huge swaths of China and Manchuria. Japan feared Soviet occupation more than American and influenced their decision to surrender.
The problem was the Japanese system of government was not set up to behave rationally. The decision to launch the war was irrational; the same dysfunction prevented a rational decision to end the war.
@@Kevin-mx1vi Or, they sat watching the collective west rape India, South-East Asia and China and thought "we're next"
Your presentation is effective and emotional, Spartacus. And your English is impeccable.
Damn. I keep coming back to this video and I keep getting goosebumps at the last monologue by Spartacus. He could read the phone book and I would still gladly listen.
We know that in Nazi Germany there was at least a subset of civilians who opposed Hitler knowing he was leading them to destruction. And of course there were brave souls in the military who risked theirs lives to take him out, to no avail. Japan was on the same destructive path. Did they have any internal resistance? I’d love to know the answer if anyone has insight into that area.
You know we have enough problems today to deal with. Without going back 80 to 200 years back and deal with something we can no longer fix.
Or… we can look into the mirror that is our common past and see where similar things that are problems today as well were handled, where it led to, and choose a different, better path. Just a thought.
Thank you.
Textbook example of how to fight a war to win. We forgot this lesson along the way. War is Hell. Anything less is defeat.
And de feat stink!
My great uncle was stationed in the Marianas at the end of 44. Sadly his plane suffered a mechanical failure and crashed into the pacific. All but one was lost at sea.
If I remember from Martin Caidin's book _A Torch to the Enemy_ , American diplomats who lived in Japan pre-1940 noted that Japanese cities were very crowded with mostly wooden structures and small workshops within those wooden structures. That's why during the first major incendiary raid, Operation _Meetinghouse_ , some 16 square miles of central Tokyo crowded with those structures burnt to the ground, with the Asakusa and Nihonbashi areas effectively razed to the ground with a death toll many say was far above the official reported figure of just over 82,000 dead.
The biggest tragedy was _this need not have happened_ . The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake's death toll over circa 120,000 had most of them die from the massive fires caused by the spilt cooking stoves all over the city, since the quake occurred just before lunchtime. Tokyo authorities should have banned wooden structures in the center of the city and realigned the streets to serve as better fire breaks in light of this earthquake; if they implemented that plan, Tokyo would not have suffered such a horrible loss from the 9-10 March 1945 bombing raid.
Happy New year Spartacus
I love it when Sparty gets almost biblical in his ending speeches . Gives me chills .
The US Air Force is rehabbing the airfield on Tinian Island after almost 75 years
Likely in recognition of North Korean intensions rather than Chinese belligerence. Like who knew parking a whole fleet in one forward spot (Pearl Harbor) might have been a bad idea. Having only one key airfield on an island to be targeted for having important naval as well as USAF assets is also not great war-planning. Alternates are helpful before things get hot..
Great episode. Only bit I disagree with is that the Americans knew that the war was nearly won. Almost everyone at the time, including the very few who were aware of the Manhattan project, believed that an invasion of mainland Japan was mostly inevitable and hundreds of thousands of American casualties would come from it. These bombings could also have been seen as necessary to weaken the Japanese ability to defend their home island for that invasion. These weren't seen as bombings to save a handful of American lives and shorten the war a few days, they were seen as saving vast American lives and shortening the war by years. We now know the invasion would not happen, but that was not the case at the time.
The USSR wasn't yet at war with Japan, and Germany wasn't yet defeated. Once Germany was defeated, if Japan hadn't surrendered by that time due to the blockade, the United Nations knew they could turn up the pressure by diverting all Allied forces against the Japanese. This is true even disregarding the atomic bomb.
Regarding the atomic bomb, it is unclear that they contributed to Japan's surrender. Both bombs were dropped within days, and yet Japan didn't surrender till the USSR declared war. Moreover, the atomic bombs did less damage than firebombing had done.
The CZcams channel Shaun has a good video on the atomic bombing.
@@alphamikeomega5728 You've got your timeline wrong. The Soviet invasion began on the same that the 2nd bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. And the Emperor specifically mentioned the atomic bombs, but not the fire bombings or the Soviet attack, in his broadcast to the nation ordering and explaining the surrender.
@@brucetucker4847 You're right that the USSR declared war before the bombing of Nagasaki, but there were only a few hours between the two. One piece of evidence that the USSR's invasion might have been key was that Japan had been trying to use the USSR as an intermediary in peace talks for a conditional surrender, thinking their non-aggresion pact made them somewhat friendly with Japan.
That the atomic bomb was cited as a reason for surrender is perhaps the strongest evidence we have that the bombs worked. However, this is still a statement from a monarch directed at their public, and so it deserves the same pinch of salt as does any public statement by a politician.
At the same time, we lack the counterfactual evidence for what would have happened had Japan's government had time to react to the USSR's invasion before the bombs were dropped, or for what would have happened had the bombs been dropped near, but not on, cities.
@@alphamikeomega5728 What United Nations?
@@WilliamMurphy-uv9pm The Allies refer to themselves as the United Nations in 1944. The organisation of today is descended from this alliance.
Those 6 civilians killed happened in my state of Oregon. I believe it was kids on a field trip who found it and were killed. Kinda ironic kids made the ballons then ended up killing kids.
I hope you guys will find time to cover most of what you find essential. At this point, it almost feels like War Against Humanity needs its own sub-series'.
I saw your last episode being re-posted as "censored", that is madness. History should be spread to all, for such massacre should never happen again.
Thank you Spartacus, researchers and writers for this coverage!
Thanks a lot for those kind words. We see eye to eye regarding the reuploads, unfortunately, this view is not universal. Never Forget. -TimeGhost Ambassador
Bataan???
Whoa. Amazing speech at the end. I will be showing my high school students that when I get to WWII in March
Thanks a lot, it is a pleasure! -TimeGhost Ambassador
Something not widely known about the "kamikaze" pilots is, the majority of them were NOT fanatical soldiers who volunteered
The military at the time hated the intellectuals & university students; when they required pilots for this program, they shut down large parts of the universities and force drafted students directly into the suicide programs
I don't remember actual numbers and don't want to just make something up, but I believe it was a large majority that were either conscripted in this way, or ordered to join out of the regular pilot ranks to serve as squad leaders to the recruits
This had important consequences for Japan after the war, as all the young intellectuals who Japan needed to guide them forward were dead. Only the former military was around to lead things for the first while.
... And LeMay is just getting started.
The Tokyo firestorm gets a mention in Oppenheimer.
And on the topic of movies, I highly, highly recommend Godzilla Minus One, which is set post-war with the aftermath having considerable focus.
My dad met Curtis LeMay when he was in SAC.
That monologue at the end... Never fails to speak volumes...
"For the Americans it must be clear that victory is a question of time"
The issue was literally the question of the time needed...
Without the benefit of hindsight, no one could know how well the blockade was working and how long Japan could have kept fighting.
After the war was over and after having the chance to asses the situation in Japan firsthand, the Allies estimated they would have probably been forced to surrender in november-dicember 1945 but
-it was almost 1 year from now (and 4-5 months after August) and this estimate was the result of the combined effect of the naval and aerial campaign
- each extra month of war meant hundreds of k of civilians and PoWs dying all over Asia due to abuses, massacres and starvation (Japan itself was close to a famine in August 1945)
- Japan strategy was actually to make the war last as long as possible and waiting for the American home front to get tired of the war economy, the rationing, the deaths, etc (which they were starting to be after the fall of Germany)
- we can't know if the Military would have forced the soldiers and civilians to fight and die to the bitter end regardless of the bombs, the blockade and the famine (which meant even more months of fighting and even more millions of deaths in Asia and Japan)
Being defeated doesn't mean being willing to surrender.
Both Germany and Japan were defeated but both kept fighting until Berlin fell and until the emperor made his speech.
Look what it took to force Japan to surrender. Everything that happened was needed, including the strategic bombing
It was a lot more ambiguous than “we have no idea what’s going on on the Japanese side!” It was a whole lot more complicated than “let’s just throw the whole lot and the kitchen sink at them to be safe!”
Stick around on our channel for the next few months, and you’ll see.
The first question of victory in war is determined by the constitution of your enemy look no further than France vs Russia in WW2 and cross reference with WW1. Japans war strategy from the outset was always a gamble that it's constitution (or stomach for bloodshed) could exceed America's.
Japan doesn't deserve sympathy, it's people who were unwitting pawns to the state maybe and the state I can empathize with it's desire to be held as a peer amongst the Imperial nations but it's suffering in the war was it's just due and in the end it was treated well by a foe far more gracious in victory than it had been.
For some reason Japan receives an incalculable measure of sympathy not afforded to Germany for it's role and fate in WW2 despite the fact that it ended up in far better place after the war than it was in before.
@@MarikHavair only people can receive sympathy. Nations are not people, people make nations. Those people are not the Borg, they are individuals. I’m sure that you can appreciate the absurdity of holding a Kamikaze pilot to the same standard of responsibility as a two month old infant. I’m certain that you understand that a six year old school kid has no agency for what their emperor does. Please tell me that you get such basic logic and human decency. I really hope you do, for the sake of anyone that might depend on you in even the smallest way…
@@spartacus-olsson Perhaps the Emperor should remember that the next time he invites war into his house?
@@MarikHavair I’m failing to see the relevance of that to your sympathy comments…
That part at the end. If the child hangs their head in shame at what you did to survive, at least they are alive to do so. As horrifying as it can be, the alternative is the raging inferno often enough. It does become "us or them". Thats what war is. Even with lofty ideas and ideals and principles at the end of the day war is hell and at some point you have to get your hands dirty somehow. All we can do is hope to avoid war, but once is war is a reality, victory is the only goal because the alternative is typically awful.
The firebombing of Japan's cities may have played a role in Hirohito's and some of the military's decision to end the war, in that they were concerned that the civilian population wouldn't support the war effort much longer. Some new scholarship points in that direction, although I am not sure what would have made the Emperor and the military think that way--Japan didn't have polling of its citizens--except for one thing: when Hirohito visited the firebombed part of Tokyo after the terrible March 9-10 raid, he was visibly shunned by the civilians. Ultimately, Japan's decision to end the war amounted to changing one guy's mind: Hirohito's.
Sir, it's easy to be an armchair quarter back. The object was to defeat the enemy at all costs.
Your name is Spartacus Olsson? Wow, right on.
I saw the shipyard in Kobe in 1956 from the deck of our destroyer, it was STILL a rusty pile of iron....
Well done,very good analysis of the bombing campaign against the Japanese home islands. Touches upon the lack of civilian preparedness by the government of Japan, a fact not often presented. For further reading I suggest 'Whirlwind' by Barrett Tillman.
Looking very sharp - but what a shocking subject to cover.
I hope you will mention the naval mining campaign the B-29s also carried out. It is estimated that had the war not ended when it did, up to 7 million Japanese would have starved to death because no merchant shipping could approach the home islands.
@@fortpark-wd9sx And even today, forgiveness from the countries Japan liberated from the colonial powers still have ill will towards the Japanese. They lived it. Most commentators here only theorize about it all.
@@WilliamMurphy-uv9pm "Liberated" hahahahahaha
Just like the russians have "liberated" us eastern europeans from the germans?🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@thegarfield2414 Very much the same. Japanese propaganda defined it best they could to make it sound like it benefitted the inhabitants. Never was true; but that is the nature of propaganda: lies that benefit the teller more than anyone else. It often makes your own people think that they are the good guys and not evil invaders. Lots of reasons to lie to your own people. In a democracy, it gets you votes to stay in power.
My Dad was in the Marines on Okinawa during WWII. There was an incident where Okinawan civilians were fired upon when they mistook a mass surrender for an attack. When the truth was discovered the firing ceased and many of the Army and Marines were heartsick about these people being killed and wounded. It wasn't our desire to harm Okinawan civilians or even Japanese civilians. The enemies were the military and the Japanese government that started the war.
Thanks a lot for sharing this story with us! It must have been heartbreaking to realise what happened by accident -TimeGhost Ambassador
I'm so sorry for your ignorance
You raped that island.
@ 5:21 'DooLittle' damage... I see what you did there, Sparty. Well played.
Nice catch! And thanks for watching and commenting! -TimeGhost Ambassador
LeMay was the fellow who said he would "...bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age..."
War, if you will, is like the tallest ladder placed into the deepest, darkest hole to hell. Any acts of savagery by the opponent are one step deeper into the hole and darkness. And humans being humans, the response to such savagery is usually even more horrifically savage than the first...so step downward one more rung into hell. Over a 4 to 6 year war, it's easy to understand how any soldier, Marine, sailor or pilot is changed...wounded forever even if not with projectiles. When it's over, we may climb upward on the ladder out into the light after having endured all of that, but we'll never be the same again. There is no gentlemanly way to fight a war. God bless all of our veterans.
I remember there at the State Historical Museum in Iowa were parts of a Fu Go balloon that fell in a field near Oskaloosa.
I'm surprised this wasn't covered, but there's a bit of dark irony on this topic that wasn't fully touched on.
The B-29 had excellent range, a very high combat ceiling with a pressurized cabin, utilized the Norden bombsight, and was armed with remote-controlled and computerized defensive gun turrets. This state-of-the-art technology made it the single most expensive program of WWII, and 50% more costly than the Manhattan Project.
Due to attrition, technological limitations, and inefficient allocation of limited resources, Japanese air defenses were highly ineffective by the time LeMay began the firebombing campaign. This ineffective air defense network, coupled with the accuracy shortcomings in high-altitude precision bombing, prompted the switch to low-altitude incendiary bombing at night. As US bases became operational in the Marianas, and without the need to climb to 30,000 feet, less fuel was needed per sortie. The gun turrets were also removed since the nighttime darkness rendered them moot. These reductions in weight allowed the B-29s to maximize their incendiary payloads.
With this new approach, 279 B-29s were responsible for the single deadliest air attack in history on March 9, 1945 when over 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo were killed. The incendiary munitions created a firestorm that caused canals to boil, metal to melt, and people to burst spontaneously into flames. Crew members from the final wave of bombers reported vomiting in their airplanes above the city because of the smell of burning flesh below. The devastation was so significant that this became the standard operating procedure for B-29s for the rest of the war.
In short, all that fancy new technology was unnecessary for the role that the B-29 ended up excelling at most. LeMay said that if the US had lost the war, then he would have fully expected himself to be charged for international war crimes.
Great video again... as usual. That Sparty is one snappy dresser, though!
One of the few, if not only, colored airborne units in the US army (the 555th PIB) pioneered allot of the modern smokejumper tactics fighting the fires set by the Japanese balloon bombs
The japanese obviously didn't realize how many volunteer fire departments there are in America 😂
A Japanese pronunciation note: The J is pronounced like the English J. But otherwise I'm pleased with the pronunciation of Japanese names from Spartacus.
Yeah, Sparty's Japanese pronounciation is great... except that odd "Nakayima". It's "jima" just like "Iwo Jima".
Yeah that was kind of grating 😅
Sometimes the scale of these bombings is hard to comprehend.
When Spartacus said, "only 48 bombs manage to hit the factory", I couldn't help but think what it would be like to be in a factory that was hit by 48 bombs. It would be absolutely horrifying.
And that counted as a miss.
Lemay believed that the justification of any war policy is judged solely by who emerges victorious. As recounted by Sec. MacNamara, Lemay told him that if the U.S. had been the loser in the war agaist Japan, then U.S. officers would be tried as war criminals, and there would be justification for that.
Among those tasked with addressing the balloon bomb threat were the men of the segregated 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, the first African-American paratroopers. While they hoped to be able to prove themselves in combat, they were instead seconded to the US Forest Service to serve as some of the first smoke jumpers.
I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment in your conclusion. As an avid history buff, I have spent 35 years studying the Great War and the Second World War yet I still struggle with understanding the rationale for such deliberate atrocities - especially those conducted when the end of the war was so clearly in sight. I have family that have fought for and against Japan (I am Canadian but my wife is Japanese) so it has been interesting to see how my perspective on the Pacific War has changed - especially after visiting both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima the same year. Politically, it is as if Japan and the USA switched roles post-war: modern Japan is now isolationist like the USA in the 1930s and the USA is now militarist like Japan was in the 1930s.
Despite the fire-bombings AND the first A-bomb, it took another A-bomb before the Japanese surrendered. Some even say it's the Soviet's invasion of Manchuria that hastened the surrender. What does that say about the Emperor's and the IJA"s mindset in 1945?
My grandfather had Curtis LeMay as a patient during his 20 years as a microbiologist for the Air Force.
La May was an absolute animal, he was portrayed in "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," a dark comedy satirizing the Cold war and fears of nuclear conflict. His character was the crazy general who starts WW3! He consistently wanted to use nuclear bombs! (Cuban missile crisis!)
I was a good friend with an old B-47 pilot that served under LaMay and he told me when they use to run drills if in anyway you screwed up, within 24 hours you and your crew would be in front of his desk explaining why.
Brilliant summary of the dichotomies between National “survival” and basic human mortality. It feels so prescient in the age in which we currently live….
Never Forget. -TimeGhost Ambassador
An English language pedant writes: Sparty & co do fantastic work, and I'm a big fan. One small niggle though - human lives (like any multiple items) are measured in numbers, not amounts (16:45) which helps the listener distinguish between "lives" and "life".
My sister-in-law's father was a combat photographer based out of Tinian. He was tasked with photographing Japanese cities before and after the bombs were dropped including Hiroshima. He knew the crew of the Enola Gay and said they were never the same after they dropped the bomb. My great uncle George on my dad's side flew B-29s in Europe. After the war tried to get into civil aviation but systemic antisemitism prevented him from getting a job. So he re-enlisted to train future pilots. After the Korean War broke out, he was put back into active duty. His plane was shot down over the Yalu River and the general sent by the Pentagon told my grandfather that his brother and the entire crew was killed in action. This was in fact a lie. George and all of his crew except for the bombardier parachuted safely out of the plane but were captured by North Korean troops. The officers were separated from the enlisted men, who were returned home to the States following the armistice. Meanwhile George and the other officers were sent first to Beijing and then to Moscow where they were interrogated by the KGB. George died in a gulag in 1960. In 1993, his body was returned from Russia with an explanation of all that had occurred to him during his long captivity. In a word, he was deemed expendable by the country he'd served.
Since all the buildings were wooden and close together the fire spread out of control.