In The Bombing of Japanese Cities as Omen, Jonathan of Chicago Boyz describes the tail end of a public-TV documentary he caught:
I have no doubt that our bombing of German and Japanese cities was one of the most terrible things ever done. But what made the documentary tendentious was that it left out the political and military context; there was no more than superficial discussion of what led the USA to adopt such brutal tactics. The remarkable tenacity and cruelty of the Japanese fighters we encountered in our island-hopping campaign weren’t discussed, nor was the terrifying prospect of invading the Japanese home islands — a prospect which, until the atomic bombings, appeared certain and would have certainly killed millions. Instead the documentary framed our decision to burn the cities as having been based on Curtis LeMay’s desire to find a more-effective alternative to using inaccurate high-explosive bombs against Japanese factories. Of course, when you present the story in such a narrow way it makes it look like we went too far. The documentary might have been redeemed if someone had said: Yes, we did terrible things, but they only became conceivable late in the war after we learned what the enemy was capable of, and the alternatives were all much worse. But no one said that, at least not that I heard.I don’t think this documentary could have been made in the 1960s or 1970s. It would have been widely seen as revisionist. Too many people were still aware, either from direct experience or from having learned about the war from family elders or in school or from the media, of the rationale for destroying the Japanese cities. But nowadays probably a lot of the people doing film production, and certainly a lot of the viewers, are too young and too scantily educated about World War II to recognize an incomplete historical treatment when they see one. This is a great pity in the context of the current war, because people in the democracies need to understand that insufficient seriousness in fighting radical Islam now could in the long run lead to a situation in which we kill millions in order to get the fight over with and protect our people. It could happen. The history of our war with Japan makes clear what we are capable of doing to an enemy who provokes us sufficiently. The Islamists, who are as cruel as the Japanese were, need to understand this too, but probably won’t until it’s too late.