Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "" video.

Scooter Campbell Nonsense. Japan had rejected surrender, and Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion of Japan, would have resulted in millions of casualties. The show of force to the Soviets was icing on the cake, but Operation Downfall would have caused the type of carnage to dwarf any other operation in history. The United States alone expected upwards of a million casualties, not to mention Japanese military and civilian casualties. When I was in the Marine Corps from 2003-2007, the rumor was (and I don't know if this is true or not, but it was certainly the rumor) that the Purple Heart medals being awarded to our wounded in Iraq were purchased by what was then the War Department in anticipation of casualties from Downfall. 70 years later, after Korea and Vietnam and a number of other minor fights, they still had medals left to award to wounded servicemen. Think about that.
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Alundaio Is the civilian working in an ordinance factory, assembling fuses that will set off artillery shells being fired at your side not a legitimate target? Look, I'm sure some old mama-san working in a factory turning out artillery fuses or Nambu machine guns or whatever was a perfectly nice person, but the place she works needs to go, and if she dies in the process, it's still worth it.
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Scooter Campbell That's a very narrow-minded view. Those two atomic bombs killed about 100,000 people. The invasion of Japan would have killed millions of Japanese and Allied troops. Beating an enemy into submission and saving uncounted lives in the process is by no means terrorism.
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Scooter Campbell Nothing you're saying has any grounds in reality whatsoever. It's just basic anti-American nonsense, based solely on the premise that since you don't like the US, nothing that the US does can be good. Then you come up with all manner of bizarre revisionism to justify your ridiculous premise. Japan was not about to surrender. US troops were not (and are not) in the habit of murdering civilian populations, although Japanese propaganda certainly claimed they were to whip up hatred amongst their civilian population. Strategic bombing is not a "war crime", it's the prosecution of strategic objectives. The bombing of cities was considered well within the realm of legal warfare, especially as precision bombing did not exist at the time. Your arguments are nothing but debunked fantasy in a desperate attempt to discredit the US. Japan had ample opportunity to surrender before Hiroshima, and refused. They had opportunity to surrender after Hiroshima, and still they refused. After Nagisaki, they finally realized that continuing to fight was no longer an option, and surrendered. Your claim that they were "about to surrender" is disproven by the fact that they didn't surrender until the second atomic bomb (abound by virtually every historic account, but we won't even get into that). The Japanese knew the war was unwinnable after their defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal, and they continued to fight. After Leyte and Okinawa, when their navy was at the bottom of the sea and their army had been crushed, they still refused to quit. They intended to fight on to the last man, and it took the drastic measures of two atomic bombings to convince them otherwise. Your premise is utter nonsense, you clearly have zero grasp of the history of the Pacific Campaign, and you have nothing of interest to say. I get it, you don't like the US. That's cool and edgy and all that, I'm sure. But teenage angst does not make for good history, and the fact remains that the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to an end and prevented unimaginable carnage in Operation Downfall.
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Scooter Campbell The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not "war crimes". The Katyn massacre was a war crime. The rape of Nanking was a war crime. Everything the Einsatzgruppen did were war crimes. Bombing a strategic target to beat an enemy into submission and thereby save literally millions of lives is by no means a "war crime". It is the prosecution of a strategic objective. There is a VERY big difference.
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Алина Старковa (Alina Starkova) 2nd Account Industrial areas are legitimate strategic targets. This was before the era of precision guided weapons, the famous Norden bombsight was the closest thing there was, and it wasn't nearly what was advertised. The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were well within the established rules of war, and saved an order of magnitude more lives than they took.
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Scooter Campbell Nonsense. The Soviets lacked the force projection ability to truly threaten an invasion of Japan. The Japanese were (and rightfully so) worried about an American invasion, and were preparing to make it as bloody as possible, and had no qualms about throwing civilians, including women and children into the breech. Had the bombs not ended the war, the planned invasion would have, but at the cost of millions more lives. Read history and not nonsense, this is very basic stuff here.
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Roland Deschain During WWII, precision bombing did not exist in any real sense. To destroy military/industrial targets within a city, it usually required destroying large parts of the city they were in. This was a fact that the USAAF figured out very quickly after attempts at surgical strikes failed miserably with huge losses. Nowadays, when you want to destroy a target in Raqqa or wherever, you use a single GPS guided bomb which is gonna hit within a couple feet of the point it's aimed at. Back then, to take out a specific target within a city required hundreds of bombs dropped all over the general vicinity of the target. What the nukes did was one plane with one bomb taking the place of entire squadrons dropping hundreds of tons of bombs. One blow as opposed to a prolonged attack which risks the lives of the crews and ends in the same utter destruction (look at what we did to Tokyo). Plus, after two bombs, Japan surrendered, thereby avoiding Operation Downfall, and the bloodbath that such an operation would have entailed.
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The Japanese didn't actually do any strategic bombing in the Pacific, so I'm not sure where that's coming from. If you're talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor, that wasn't a war crime because of the target, it was because of the surprise attack without warning (though it's true that people should've known) or a declaration of war or anything like that. Nobody claimed that the Japanese bombing of American ships or land positions (which were basically all the Japanese bombed) was a war crime. If we're talking about bombing in China, that's not a subject I know all that much about and will have to look further into it before expressing an opinion. The Japanese had attempted to negotiate surrender through the Soviets, that much is true. But that's only half of the story. The terms that the Japanese proposed were ridiculous, and included things like supervising their own disarmament, trying their own war criminals, and keeping their government intact. These were obviously not acceptable terms of surrender, and thus they were rejected. Until the atomic attacks, the Japanese had never seriously contemplated unconditional surrender - they knew they were losing, and intended to make the remainder of the war as bloody as possible in the hope that extensive American casualties would bring the US to accepting a peace agreement short of unconditional surrender. This is why the mobilization of the civilian population for Operation Downfall. The Japanese wanted a bloodbath. The fact that their army and population was ill-equipped is irrelevant - banzai charges don't require any fuel. The Japanese knew where the landings would come (because the geography of Japan leaves very limited options for landing sites), and would have thrown everything they could at the landings in an attempt to create as much mayhem as possible. Casualty estimates vary, but at least a million Allied casualties (that includes wounded, by the way) is a pretty well agreed upon number, plus countless Japanese. Nobody threatened Japan with nuclear weapons, because they were top secret, and letting the enemy know you have them works to his advantage, not yours. The difference between the bombing of strategic targets and terrorist attacks on civilians ought to be very stark. Dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima - the headquarters of an army - is a legitimate military act, especially in the days before precision bombing. Detonating a car bomb in a marketplace is not. The two are very, very different. One destroys an enemy army and demonstrates to the enemy government that further resistance is futile. The other just kills random people to no concrete objective other than to terrorize the survivors. The idea that the atomic bombs were not the reason Japan surrendered is ludicrous; Hirohito even mentioned them in his radio address to the nation, and an American pilot, under torture, had claimed that the US had 100 more of the bombs (we had one more and were readying a second).
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The plane that nuked Nagasaki was called Bockscar. Enola Gay (which I believe was the name of Paul Tibbets' mother) bombed Hiroshima.
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Bonfire The Potsdam Declaration called for unconditional surrender. The Japanese did not consider that an option. The difference you came up with has nothing to do with anything. The Japanese wanted a negotiated peace, the US was not willing to take that option, and shouldn't have. The way it happened, we solved the problem of Imperial Japan permanently, as opposed to just for a few years. Yeah, the Tokyo bombing destroyed most of the city, including homes. Like I said, precision bombing wasn't a thing back then. The air campaign over Germany had already showed that attempting to bomb point targets was an exercise in futility, and so by then, we were back to the tactic of destroying the entire city. This was a reasonable tactic given the limitations on bomb aiming technology available at the time. You can't judge actions of the past based on modern technology. Your whole argument here seems to be based on misunderstanding.
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Sweeney was a Major, not a Major General, when he bombed Nagasaki.
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