War!

This is the second action project for my Humanities class called, “Policy”. In this unit we learned about the executive branch of our government. One of the things we did in this unit was create a timeline that shows the different cabinets in our government. In this action project we had to create an essay that explains a war that was fought by Americans and find out whether it’s just or not.). One of my struggles during this action project was finding out how the war changed in morality throughout the war. I ended up choosing to World War 2 because I immediately believed that it was a just war but I was interested in going into it further. Enjoy my project!

The beginning of World War II for the United States started with Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and ended after the bombing of Nagasaki on September 2, 1945. This war was right because the United States was trying to protect itself from future attacks from Japan and hopefully any other country. It is possible that there would have been another way to solve the issues between Japan and the United States, but after being attacked it is very human to want to fight back.

The United States got involved in World War II because of the attack on pearl harbor in 1941. This made us declare war on Japan and put us in the world war. Four days later Germany declared war on the United States. During this time Franklin D Roosevelt was the United States president. He delivered a speech that hugely impacted the mindset of the American people called the "Infamy Speech" which was spoken an hour before the United States declared war on Japan. This Speech was his reaction to the Pearl Harbor bombing and previous conflicts with Japan.

The first executive action of the war was the declaration of war on Japan when it was signed by Congress on December 8. Knowing that we were attacked just a day earlier, this set a policy that The United States has to be ready to defend itself if we were ever to be attacked. It was proposed by President Roosevelt because he believed that the attack from Japan on Pearl Harbor was what he called "a date which will live in infamy", meaning that he didn't want the United States to have this embarrassment. This policy was intended to protect the U.S. from future attacks as well as future embarrassment. The end of the war in Japan was fully decided in 1945 when the Japanese signed the Potsdam Declaration on September 2.

This policy was of course applied by sending troops to fight the Japanese. I personally think that the beginning of the war was justified since the Japanese did the first physical attack. Even though this was justified there were still serious consequences. One of them was the bombing of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These bombings killed over 129,000 people and is still affecting others with radiation.

The reasoning for this war initially was right but eventually it was taken too far. At first the war was meant to protect the United States from Japan, but eventually it turned into an unfair massacre. I believe that it is pretty logical to fight back if you are being fought. Even though we had to fight back, the bombing on Japan killed hundreds of thousands of people. If you compare that to the initial attack which started with over 2,000 deaths then you start to realize how far United States went to win the war. This was too far because it was more about ending the war instead of protecting the United States. If the United States had kept up with it’s original reasoning for the war then it would have been justified throughout the entire war, but at some point during the war America became too focused on winning.