Movietone News Quotes
We have killed ½ million Japs, and we have only faced ten percent of their army. They don’t give up. We have to fight the other ninety percent and they won’t give up.
This quotation is important because the American public and their leaders saw only one course of action—invasion of the Japanese Mainland. The debate was whether to attempt the invasion right away or bomb and blockade Japan into destruction and starvation weakening the population so their resistance would not produce the kind of casualties that we had experienced with the Invasion of Okinawa. The bombing and blockade strategy was selected and 80 percent of Tokyo was obliterated. Yet the Japanese refused to surrender even after all its manufacturing capability was destroyed and the agriculture was beginning to be destroyed. Most Americans did not realize it but the atomic bomb was being made ready for use. After the test bomb in New Mexico, we had enough fissionable material for 2 bombs and it would take several months for each additional bomb. The use of the atomic bomb at the time seemed not much different from the massive bombing that had already taken place. More Japanese were killed in some of these conventional bombings than with the Atomic Bomb. The key believe was that the Japanese would not give up. After the first A bomb, they still would not surrender, and when the Emperor decided on surrender after the 2nd bomb, there was a military insurrection in the palace to stop the Emperor’s surrender message to the people from being broadcast. It was just minutes too late, and the Emperor had to be obeyed. Invasion, with its terrible casualties—many more than the atomic bombs—was unnecessary.
Movietone News, Film newsreels shown in American Theaters after the bloody WWII battle of Okinawa
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
When the United Nations partitioned Palestine into separate Jewish and Muslim states, the armies of all the Arab countries attacked the new nation which did not even have a formal Army. The Israelis were able to win the war.
After the Hiroshima bomb there was still no surrender by the Japanese. The decision was made to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki.
In the earliest prediction of the World War II conflict between America and Japan:
This quotation has been used by many criticizing the policy of massive bombing of Japanese Cities towards the end of the war. At first it appears that there was a racist disregard for Japanese Civilian lives. However there was legal logic. The Japanese had already bombed cities throughout Asia and did not adhere to the rules of war. The Japanese government “invited” all Japanese to join the military to defend the homeland to the death in the coming invasion. All adult civilians were mobilized. There were no adult civilians left in Japan. Perhaps more important was the industrial organization of Japan which exists in large part to this day. There were tens of thousands of small & tiny factories distributed throughout all the Japanese cities. These were distributed in civilian areas & in many cases were actually in homes to take advantage of available labor and not have to transport people. There was no way to bomb the munitions factories without bombing civilian neighborhoods.
The note was found in an abandoned Japanese camp on Bataan. There are some who believe that this note was a forgery. However, most think it genuine as it reflected one of the Japanese
“aces in the hole” to defend against an allied invasion of the Japanese mainland. It was one of the reasons that some American planners advocated use of the Atomic Bomb. Of course that was a real risk of using the bomb. The Japanese might be so angry and feel morally abused and kill the many allied prisoners they had. Many thought it was a lesser risk because it did not have the symbolic animus that foreigners occupying the Japanese homeland had. The quotation illustrates the amazing complexity that the American and allied leadership faced trying to end WWII in the Pacific.
Some say that President Roosevelt had instructed the war department to issue warnings to the military forces in the Philippines and the Pacific. Military intelligence argued against the Japanese attack on the Philippines—and did not think any attack anywhere very likely. When the president insisted, warnings went out and this is what was sent to General Short. The warning was ambiguous and Short did very little and was caught unprepared shortly thereafter. How much reliance should be placed on intelligence estimates has been a question that has been argued before World War II and after.
He was describing a meeting that he and General Marshall had conducted with FDR, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and others. In less than two weeks, the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor without any declaration of war, as Marshall had predicted.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
This was the group that decided who was to be executed in the Reign of Terror
After the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Stimson drafted the Declaration of War that President Roosevelt would ask Congress to vote for. However, there was a small but very vocal group of extreme Republican conservatives who opposed assisting England against Hitler and saw German and Italian Fascism as positive forces. They would oppose any administration declaration of war against Germany and Italy who had not yet attacked any American facilities. The President realized that German and Italy had a Mutual Defense Treaty with Japan, and when we declared war against Japan, would have to ally with Japan or reneg on their treaty. So FDR removed Germany and Italy from the Declaration and Congress just declared war against Germany. In the next days, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States, and the de facto situation was as Stimson had drafted it, but FDR had not given the right wing American Fascist sympathizers any issue to criticize the administration.
Movietone News is a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1979, In France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Australia and New Zealand until 1970, and Germany as Fox Tönende Wochenschau.
