General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander, and General Wainwright, who surrendered to the Japanese after Bataan and Corregidor, witness the formal Japanese surrender signatures aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
Editors note: 75 years ago, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and many other U.S. and Allied officers accepted the unconditional surrender of the Japanese at the end of World War II on the USS Missouri. Here is our look back at the Missouri from a piece written on the 50th anniversary of the surrender.
The official end of World War II - it took place on Sept. 2, 1945, - packed a special symbolism for Americans:
What had begun with battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor ended on a battleship triumphant in Tokyo Bay. There, the Japanese signed the instruments of surrender. Their quick scratching ended six years and one day of warfare.
The president himself, Harry S Truman, had dictated that the ceremony take place aboard a warship.
First, he said, signing on an American man o'war would drive home to the Japanese the extent of the military power that had defeated them.
Second, signing in the middle of Tokyo Bay would head off any chance of a banzai attack by hotheaded Japanese soldiers.
An aircraft carrier might have been a better setting than a battleship.
After all, aircraft carriers had done the heavy lifting of the Pacific war - and the flat, open deck of a storied carrier like the Enterprise would have accommodated the ceremony with less elbow-bumping than a battleship's cramped deck.
Still, a battleship's looming guns would add a dramatic backdrop. And then, of course, there was the memory of the battleships lost at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
So a battleship it was.
The Pacific had several battleships with splendid war records - the Washington, for example, and the South Dakota.
But the Navy had only one battleship christened by the president's daughter and named for the president's home state.
So the battleship Missouri it was. After loitering nearby for three days, the Missouri steamed into Tokyo Bay on Aug. 29, 1945.
Its skipper, Capt. Stuart S. Murray, anchored as close as possible to the spot where, 92 years earlier, Commodore Matthew Perry had anchored after bulling his way into Tokyo Bay and opening Japan to the outside world, whether the Japanese liked it or not.
Word arrived here at 2:30 a.m. Aug. 14, 1945, and the revelry started soon after.
If the Missouri's presence wounded Japanese pride - well, in September 1945, few Americans cared. The aim was to awe and cow the Japanese, even in the little things.
For example, the Japanese delegates would pass between "sideboys" - the enlisted sailors who stand at attention on the quarterdeck as an honor to arriving dignitaries. The officer who chose the Missouri's sideboys made sure that each towered above 6 feet - and thus above the diminutive Japanese.
The original plan called for General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to sign for all the Allied powers. That plan greatly upset one of those Allied powers, the United States Navy.
The Navy had borne the brunt of the Pacific war. Now, it wanted a slice of the glory.
So the plan was changed. MacArthur would sign as the supreme commander of the Allied powers. Then, Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz would sign below MacArthur for the United States.
Adding a signatory for the United States meant adding signatories for the other Allies. In the end, the Missouri's starboard veranda deck would be crowded with representatives from China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands and New Zealand.
On the gray, overcast morning of Sept. 2, 1945, they filed aboard the Missouri. The Japanese party arrived on time, shortly before 9 a.m., but Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu didn't arrive on the veranda deck until 9:03.
He stood before a simple mess table. (The British battleship King George V had sent over a fancy mahogany table, but it proved much too small. So a party of sailors wrestled a table up from the Missouri's crew mess. When covered with a green cloth from the officers' wardroom, the table wore a proper look.)
The setting cowed some of the Japanese. "Never had I realized," diplomat Toshikazu Kase said later, "that staring eyes could hurt so much."
And then, as Kase listened to MacArthur's remarks, the pain softened.
Through the years, MacArthur's prose ranged across the scale from eloquent through melodramatic to mawkish. His remarks on Sept. 2, 1945, were MacArthur at his best, and they deserve to be recalled:
We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues, involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the Earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred....
It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past - a world founded upon faith and understanding - a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish - for freedom, tolerance and justice...
As supreme commander for the Allied powers, I announce it my firm purpose, in the tradition of the countries I represent, to proceed in the discharge of my responsibilities with justice and tolerance...
Then each national representative signed two copies of the instrument of surrender, one in English and the other in Japanese. When the last name was affixed, MacArthur said:
Let us pray that peace now be restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are now closed.
With that, MacArthur draped an arm around the shoulder of Adm. William "Bull" Halsey and whispered, much less eloquently:
"Start 'em now."
His words triggered an order to orbiting warplanes - Navy fighters and Army Air Forces B-29s, hundreds of them. In wave after wave, they overflew the Missouri just as the sun broke through the overcast sky.
World War II was over.
A few hours after the ceremony, somebody remarked to the Missouri's skipper that the mess table on the veranda deck ought to be preserved for posterity. The captain agreed and dispatched a work party to secure it.
The sailors found the green tablecloth wadded up and tossed against a bulkhead. But the table was gone. A mess cook had sent a work party topside to wrestle it back below decks for noon chow.
Years later that green cloth would sit in the Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Md. It would be spread over a mess table from the Missouri - a table that the museum said was the table. Others had their doubts.
But of the Missouri itself, there can be no doubts. Its bulk lies moored in slumber today at Bremerton, Wash. The Navy mothballed the Missouri after its last campaign, the Persian Gulf War.
The Navy decided that the Missouri and its three sister ships of the Iowa class simply cost too much to keep on active duty.
Still, the Missouri was the last to quit. Months after her sister ships went into mothballs, the Missouri sat moored at Pearl Harbor, the backdrop to a presidential speech on Dec. 7, 1991 - the 50th anniversary of the attack that put America into World War II.
The Missouri's presence was surely not arbitrary. Out in the middle of the Pearl Harbor, under the water, rests the hulk of the battleship Arizona - the symbol of early defeat.
And there, on this solemn anniversary, rode the Missouri - the symbol of final triumph.
Epilogue: In 1999, the USS Missouri returned to service as part of the Battleship Missouri Memorial in Pearl Harbor. In 2010 the USS Missouri attack submarine was commissioned, and in 2018 it sailed to her new port at Pearl Harbor.
