Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why did that not make them put them in the mind frame of a sort of total death ground? A, I don't know, but B, Japan had been at war since 1931 in China. They had been sending large armies. This isn't like recent U.S. wars, the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here they are sending hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Manchuria. The Chinese don't give up. It goes on and on and on. So by the time you're getting to 1945, it's a long time. Also, they had committed atrocities in China and they knew all about it. And the atrocities got even worse. When there were wounded Japanese soldiers, their commanders ordered their fellow soldiers to execute them because they didn't want cripples going home. They couldn't deal with them there. And so rather than have the allies pick them up, they executed them in place. Can you imagine how Japanese soldiers felt about this? How then do we explain the famously high morale of the Japanese military, where they would refuse to surrender even after given orders by their superiors? Despite knowing about these things that you're talking about.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.