I watched Pearl Harbor, which I hadn't seen in a number of years.
This time it felt totally different about the whole thing than I did before. The love story is cool, the inaccuracies of technology here and there don't bother me, nor interest me.
What does bother me, tremendously so, is the way it is brought as "we (America) are the victim." And a bit later, "How victorious we have been since Pearl Harbor!"
A sense of self-aggrandisement that I find rather sickening.
The retaliation, bombing Tokyo, is utterly disgusting.
2403 died in P. Harbor, but except for 68 civilian, these were US army personnel who chose that and knew they could get in harms way.

Then there's what the US did to Tokyo: 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.
You don't deliberately set out to kill that many civilians, it's inhumane. You don't set out to kill civilians. Period.
And to know people in those days cheered about their "victory"...

Funny how you can feel so different about a movie. I guess before I was more focused on the love story and the action. Now I had questions come up and I Googled them to find answers.

I also don't get why it took the US so freaking long to respond when under attack? They're trained for that. And sure it was early and a surprise, blablabla. It's not a 9 to 5 job, is it, so they should've done something much sooner.
And I also don't get how you can have men in your navy that cannot even swim. What the hell are they doing on a ship for work if they can't swim? I hope these days it's a requirement.

And there likely were clear signs/suspicions/knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor yet they didn't act upon that.

All very weird. I guess one more event we won't ever hear the truth about.
But I doubt I'll ever watch Pearl Harbor again. It left a real bad taste in my mouth.

My father was at Pearl during the attack.
His ship was sank and many of his friends died that day.

Sailors do know how to swim (tread water actually). Much of that movie was made to appeal to the viewers. The reality was much worse.

The bombs dropped on the two cities in Japan were due to a culmanation of events leading up to the actual mission. The Japanese were ruthless and extreme in their war efforts. Not only against the US but against all of the Allied participants. Like the Nazis, They had to be stopped.

I asked my dad about the bombs and he told me it wasn't revenge as much as it was relief. Revenge was a factor but the bombs put Japan out of the war and that was a relief. The victory celebration at the end of the war was celebrated by all the Allied nations. It was a victory over the World War, the deadliest war humans have ever fought.

There's more than 1300 movies that have been made about WW2. There are about 15 films about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The most realistic WW2 movies, according to IMdb are:
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls000069914/

1. Come and See (1985)
2. Before the Fall (2004)
3. Europa Europa (1990)
4. The Bridge (1959)
5. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
6. Play Dirty (1969)
7. Joy Division (2006)
8. Cross of Iron (1977)
9. Days of Glory (2006)
10. The Victors (1963)
11. A Woman in Berlin (2008)
12. Downfall (2004)
13. Two Women (1960)
14. The Pianist (2002)
15. A Bridge Too Far (1977)
16. Black Book (2006)
17. Defiance (I) (2008)
18. The Bridge at Remagen (1969)
19. Stalingrad (1993)
20. Enemy at the Gates (2001)

For actual footage of the Attack at Pearl Harbor
"The War" includes a curriculum for educators and "Victory at Sea" uses actual footage in various episodes including the Pearl Harbor episode, "The Pacific Boils Over." ~ http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-pearl-harbor-visuals-st-1207-20161206-story.html

I know the movie isn't realistic, that's what I learnt with Google and what I wanted to find out, is it or not.
But mostly the unrealistic stories from experts was about things like using a radio that hadn't been invented yet, the planes doing things they couldn't do and so on.

And I still don't see why you set out to knowingly kill that many CIVILIAN lives.
Maybe Americans feel that Japan had to be stopped, but I got the impression it was more Roosevelt feeling PO because the mighty US had been attacked, ego, than anything else.

And thing is, the Japanese felt the US had to be stopped.
Each side has his own story of what they feel is true.
And the Japanese were after destroying the US Pacific fleet for a reason, not after killing thousands of civilians.

Not saying I like how Japanese have behaved in times of war, just saying the counter measure was totally out of proportion and totally not right.
Had the US gone for something that was military of nature, but they didn't.
I'll see if I can find the Roosevelt speech, but if they got that correct in the movie I think it's just a case of an oversized ego.

Nothing personal, and I do feel for what your dad and others went through.

You need to educate yourself more thoroughly if you're going to understand this Crystal.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima were both miltary targets.

Nobody set out to bomb Japan with an atom bomb.

I'm sure some ego played a part in the final decision to drop them but at that time, the war was costing lives on a grand scale.

The Japanese also sunk Allied merchant ships and killed civilians long before the bomb plan was in action.

It was WAR.

The Manhattan Project began around 1939. It was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom (which initiated the original Tube Alloys project) and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs.

On December 7, 1941, Japan staged a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, decimating the US Pacific Fleet. When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States days later, America found itself in a global war.

On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists—many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe—became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany.

Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device—a plutonium bomb—at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat.

Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end.

On August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, from Tinian. Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki

1. The bombs were not a revenge strike against Japan for Pearl Harbor.
2. The targets were war manufacturing cities.
3. It was nearly 4 years between the attack on Pearl Harbor till the bombing of Hiroshima.
4. The First threat of nuclear weapons came from Germany.
5. Japan threatened to continue fighting even to the last man.

Tom, I was talking about the Tokyo bombing:
Seventy years ago today, US forces firebombed Tokyo to force the Japanese to an early surrender in the dying months of World War II. The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have dominated the retelling of WWII history, but as a single attack the bombing of Tokyo was more destructive.

It was napalm bombing: The US military had waited for a clear and windy night to inflict maximum damage, and on March 9, 1945 the conditions were perfect.

Three hundred B29 bombers dropped nearly 500,000 cylinders of napalm and petroleum jelly on the most densely populated areas of Tokyo.

The raid, which came a month after the firebombing of Dresden, brought mass incineration of civilians to a new horrific level.


......

It was also seen as payback for the Pearl Harbour attacks and the mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war.

In just two days, more than 100,000 people were killed, a million were maimed and another million were made homeless.


Also, Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren't military of nature. They were both cities. Esp Hiroshima barely had any military anything. It was just civilians yet again.
Nagasaki had a military port but nothing substantial. As such it wasn't even the first choice.
Again in both bombings thousands and thousands of civilian lives were lost.

Truman made up some bollox story how these bombings had saved lives which was just propaganda and later on renounced. Just to get away with mass murder as that's what it was in all 3 cases.

And I know war isn't pleasant, and civilians do lose there lives too, but to deliberately and knowingly attack civilian goals... that is sickening.

A link where I got some info from, just in case. It also has an eyewitness story of a Japanese women: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-09/tokyo-wwii-firebombing-remembered-70-years-on/6287486#:~:text=Seventy%20years%20ago%20today%2C%20US,of%20Tokyo%20was%20more%20destructive.

Tom has done a excellent job of explaining the facts.
I had a uncle (by marriage), P.D. Edwards by name who was a nuclear physicist right out of the University of Chicago and worked right alongside Edward Teller and the rest of the gang developing the atom bomb and spent the last 25 years of his career as administrator of the nuke facility in Los Alamos, we went there several times on summer vacations.

He of course gave us some details that you wouldn't know as part of the general public but we all know they were successful developing the bomb.

One important fact that Tom didn't mention was the projected loss of American lives if we would have had to invade mainland Japan with conventional weaponry.
Some of the estimates where in the range of 500,000 Americans KIA.

War is hell which is been said is a good thing lest we like it too much!

Japan started it by the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor and yes the loss of civilian life was regrettable but remember they were the aggressors and I have to say; better that than the loss of another half million American lives.

I should add that Crystal you clearly don't like our country and I'm not basing that on your posts just on this thread and I'm not sure exactly how to address that other than to say....................don't invade us!

Or in the words of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

I don't know why you have to make this personal by judging me, based on nothing.
You haven't read what I posted, all I see is a knee-jerk reaction, I assume because you feel personally attacked as an American. Really typical...
I wasn't talking about nuclear attacks even, but the bombing of Tokyo. Also typical this is totally ignored. I was not the one to raise Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I do happen to feel the same way about that, but it was not in my OP at all.

I am talking about the behaviour of one group of people towards another group of people and the total disregard of human life.
But apparently it is now a pro or anti American discussion.
Not what my postings were about.

At the start of the twentieth century, of those killed during wars, 90% were soldiers and 10% civilians.
By the middle of the century, the numbers were roughly equal at 50% soldiers and 50% civilians.
At the end of the century and now, war casualties were composed of 10% soldiers and 90% civilians.
The deliberate targeting of civilians was and is a war crime and a crime against humanity, no matter who does it. By this reckoning, the Blitz that targeted every port, manufacturing town and centre of cultural and historic significance in the UK was a war crime. By this same token, the fire-bombing of Dresden that killed thousands of civilians was equally a war crime. The basements that people tried in vain to shelter in were brim-full of rendered human fat but I suppose the victors don't need to subject themselves to judgement.
If the Axis powers had won the war, many allied leaders would have been tried and executed, just like the Nazis at Nuremberg and surely with at least as much justification. Oddly enough, despite their hideous crimes (have a look at the Japanese occupation of China and the Nan Jing Massacres) remarkably few Japanese military commanders were tried and executed for their crimes and the Japanese Emperor escaped punishment altogether.
WAR KNOWS NO NATION but if the victors accept no responsibility for their decisions how are they any different from the losers?

I'm no pacifist and war is sometimes the only response available against an existential threat but let soldiers fight soldiers and leave the civilians out of it.

Crystal good try at sidestepping the issue.
I read everything and I understand your point was Tokyo.
I don't need to judge you and yes when you are obviously anti America it feels very personal. As I said I'm not basing that on this post alone, far from it. Any opportunity that arises you take a shot at my country, unlike yourself I've only been on this site a couple of years but I've noticed it many times.
That is of course your right to do so just like it's mine to not like it.

Back to the bombing of Tokyo, this is your quote:

I am talking about the behaviour of one group of people towards another group of people and the total disregard of human life. [end quote]


I don't pretend to have all the answers but I don't think that a regard for human life and war, especially war from a country that had recently been the victim of an unprovoked sneak attack that saw ANY of it's citizens killed belong in the same sphere of conversation.

None of the people involved in decisions regarding this are alive today to defend their reasoning so it seems like a moot point and one for the history books.