The documentary went into quite a bit of detail on the issues you raised. I don’t fault it at all in that regard. My objection is based on its framing of our late-war bombing decisions as resulting entirely from tactical considerations. Would we have used incendiaries on cities in 1942 if we could have? I doubt it; certainly it would have been less likely. So the question is, what happened during the course of the war that loosened our inhibitions on the use of such brutal tactics? The documentary’s weakness was in not addressing that question.

In this regard the documentary wasn’t unusual, and I probably shouldn’t single it out. Revisionism about the atomic bombings has been common for decades, as have doubts about the morality of bombing cities. But now such revisionism has become almost the standard position, at least in popular media. That’s partly because many people are too ignorant about the war to understand the context in which democratic nations, after several years of brutal war, could decide that killing hundreds of thousands of civilians was the lesser of evils. Those who forget the past. . .

Coox is an awesome historian, isn’t he? Have you read Nomonhan?

In Kobe city, for example, workers dropped their tools as soon as an air raid alert sounded, so they would have enough time to flee to the hillsides immediately behind the metropolis before the bombers could arrive. Consequently the mere sounding of the alert signal in the Kobe region caused an immediate drop in industrial production. According to information reaching the War Ministry about May 1945, the attendance rate at munitions factories, throughout the country immediately after an air raid dwindled to 20-30%. The average rate of absenteeism at factories in devastated areas approximated 40%. In unraided zones the absentee rate averaged 15%, but even in unbombed Kyoto lost man hours totaled 40% by July 1945.

An indirect result of the raids was the dispersal of the labour force because of housing problems, thereby affecting both control and efficiency.

…

According to Home Ministry data, the following Japanese civilian losses were the minimum incurred as the result of all air raids on the Homeland: 241,309 killed, 313,041 injured, 8,045,094 homeless, 2,333,388 buildings destroyed, 110,928 partial destroyed. The number of houses razed represented at least 30% of the national total. It should also be noted that the Japanese themselves demolished 615,000 buildings as firebreaks, 214,000 of which were located in Tokyo. In all about 13,000,000 people were driven from their homes by the destruction of dwellings; a substantial additional number were rendered homeless by the bombing of factory dormitories.

Large-scale evacuation of Japanese civilians from urban areas began in 1944. Between January and September of that year, 1,000,000 moved out of Tokyo. The capital’s population fell from 5,000,000 in January of 1945 to 2,453,000 in June. About 55% of the Nagoya area inhabitants were evacuated; 60% of the Osaka-Kobe complex. Probably 8,295,000 persons of all categories were evacuated throughout Japan. Dispersal of the urban school population, began slowly in mid-1944, was intensified after the raids of March 1945. By April, over 87% of urban school children had been moved

2 – The figure for Hiroshima of 140K is fictitious. I’ve kept the newspaper reports on Hiroshima for a while and every year the number keeps increasing. Just because someone was in Hiroshima and dies in 1998 doesn’t mean there’s a causal relationship, but they is the game they’ve been playing. The Bombing Survey wanted to know exactly the consequence of the new weapon. A census as conducted using as the baseline the rice ration allocations that the Japanese government had been using. Then a person to person interview process was conducted, not only to identify residents, but their neighbors, to get as good an idea of who was were on that day – a census, not a sampling. The final number arrived at was around 65K with another 5k or so tracked for radiation poisoning. Since then the number somehow keeps increasing from the 60s to the 90s, then over a hundred, and in the most recent release around that 140K. It’s the victim game. It works. Go look at how many Philippinos were butchered by barbed wire, bullet, and bayonet of the Japanese Imperial forces in Manila in February of 1945. Somehow that second ‘Nanking’ doesn’t get the press. Of course the Americans didn’t do it, maybe that has something to do with the lack of coverage.

The fireworks are spectacular, though.

There might be parallels with the present-day situation.