So, obviously this is the meaning of total war.
There's a huge dispute over whether it was
necessary to bomb these countries, to bomb their cities.
In both cases, the Allies were desperate to
use any means they had to attack these countries.
They began to see cities as military targets.
If it seems to you then that both sides are
becoming debased in their attitude toward human life, you're right.
It doesn't equate the Americans and
the British with Nazi Germany to notice that all the sides involved in this
war were taking an increasingly callous attitude
towards human life and felt brutalized by it.
The Allied military commanders were under no illusions of this score; they knew, as
George Marshall knew, that we were doing horrifying things in order to win the war.
They still thought that there was a significant moral distinction between
bombing cities to try to end the war and constructing death factories to carry
out the genocides of whole people whom they hope to enslave and then kill.
But nonetheless, the horrors being perpetrated really underscores that
this war is pushing the whole meaning of civilization to the very brink.
You're really at the point where people are creating destructive powers
that are just about beyond the capabilities of human reason, human spirituality
to control or understand. And then the war ended.
It ended in Germany with an austere military ceremony.
There was no German government to take a surrender.
The Americans regarded the German government as nothing, as wreckage.
They just took a surrender from German generals in the field,
in a simple little ceremony in a French schoolhouse.
On the other side of the world, though, in Tokyo Bay,
the Americans and their allies did allow a Japanese government to remain.
They allowed the Japanese emperor to remain in power.
So there actually was, then, a formal surrender
ceremony on the battleship Missouri in early September 1945.
You see the sailors and others gathered all around
to see the sight. The Japanese dignitaries coming onto the
deck for the ceremony where they will sign the surrender documents.