“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”
By Marc Gallicchio
IN THE UNITED States, Sept. 2 is V-J Day – the official date commemorating the surrender of Japan to the Allies in 1945. Yet curiously, many Americans mark Aug. 14 or even Aug. 15 as the end of the Second World War. Why the discrepancy? The reason can be found in a complicated set of historical circumstances.
The story begins in Japan. Shortly before dawn on Aug. 15, 1945, national radio announced that Emperor Hirohito would speak to his subjects later that day. It was an unprecedented event: few Japanese had ever heard their monarch speak. But of course, these were not normal times. The country, which had declared war on the United States not four years earlier, was now in its death throes. Imperial forces had been driven back all across the Pacific and Asia and American warplanes were firebombing Japan around the clock. Earlier that same month, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been blasted by atomic weapons that killed more than 170,000 inhabitants instantly. Thousands more perished from radiation poisoning in the next few days. And even then, the home islands were bracing for an all-out Allied invasion. The Aug. 8 declaration of war from the Soviet Union sealed the nation’s fate.
With all hope extinguished, the Japanese waited with uncertainty that morning for “the jewelled voice” of their divine sovereign. What they eventually heard was a pre-recorded, high-pitched voice speaking in an archaic form of Japanese that few could comprehend. It was only afterwards that an announcer explained that the emperor had agreed to surrender. The war was over.
It was still the evening of Aug. 14 in the eastern United States when news of Hirohito’s broadcast reached Washington, D.C. Shortly after 7 p.m. local time, U.S. President Harry Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The president declared a two-day holiday for federal employees, but added that a proclamation of V-J Day was contingent upon the formal signing of the surrender terms by Japan. The British did not stand on such formalities; at midnight on Aug. 15, Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced Japan’s surrender and declared that date as V-J Day.
Back in the U.S., the celebrations began immediately after Truman’s press conference. In some cities, notably San Francisco — the point of debarkation for soldiers and sailors heading to the Pacific — spontaneous celebrations were marred by looting, brawling and vandalism. Numerous people were injured, some even killed, by stray gunfire, surging crowds and flying debris. Truman pronounced Sunday, Aug. 19 a Day of Thanksgiving.
“The nation could do with some prayer,” he commented in the aftermath of the turmoil.
The president’s reluctance to outright declare V-J Day was understandable. The Japanese military remained in control of the empire’s home islands and millions of imperial troops still occupied territory throughout Asia. No one, not even the heads of the Japanese armed forces, could be sure that their soldiers, sailors, and airmen would obey the emperor’s orders. Indeed, a small clique of military officers even attempted to overthrow the government and continue the war.
Over the next two weeks, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, planned for Allied troops to begin what was hoped would be the peaceful occupation of Japanese soil. A delegation of the emperor’s officers arrived at MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila on Aug. 19. The Americans quickly rebuffed Japanese entreaties to limit the scope of the Allied occupation to a few remote regions of the country and laid out their plans for the full-scale occupation of Tokyo and surrounding areas.
On Aug. 28, an advance party of the U.S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division landed at Atsugi airfield to find buffet tables and pitchers of orange juice waiting for them. The American troops feared the food might be poisoned and waited for their hosts to drink first. The mood improved only slightly after that.
“It seemed like a party that wasn’t going off very well,” one American who was present later recalled.
MacArthur arrived at Atsugi two days later and proceeded to his temporary quarters in Yokohama.
The formal ceremony ending the war began on Sunday, Sept. 2, 1945.
Shortly before dawn, MacArthur proceeded by limousine and naval launch to the USS Missouri, a 45,000-ton battleship that served as the stage for Japan’s surrender. The document of surrender declared the unconditional capitulation of the Imperial General Headquarters and all the armed forces under Japanese control. It further dictated that all civil and military officers were to obey MacArthur’s orders and made the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government subject to the American general.
When the last representatives of the Allied powers and Japan finished signing the surrender document, MacArthur offered a brief prayer for peace and pronounced the proceedings closed.
At that moment, the sun broke through the clouds and a flight of as many as 400 B-29s and another 400 carrier planes filled the skies above Tokyo. MacArthur moved to a microphone and began a radio address to a world audience.
“Today the guns are silent,” began the now famous message. “A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”
The surrender received lengthy coverage in America’s newspapers for the next several days, but for many, the ceremony somehow felt anticlimactic. Delayed by two days because of severe weather, the surrender took place on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. In New York, a crowd gathered in Times Square to mark the occasion, but the Times reported that many New Yorkers had left town for the holiday. In other papers, stories about the surrender competed for the reader’s attention with full page ads announcing Labor Day sales on home furnishings and the fall season’s new fashions.
It was time to move on. Americans had already spontaneously celebrated the end of the war two weeks earlier. For the millions of servicemen and women in uniform and the millions more of their kin, the powerful emotions triggered by emperor’s announcement remained more personal and immediate than the solemn events of Sept. 2. Seventy-five years later many Americans still commemorate August 14 as V-J Day.
Marc Gallicchio is professor of History at Villanova University and the author of the newly released book Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II from Oxford University Press.
