An impressive swarm of hundreds and hundreds of fighter planes in formation continuously flew over the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945 during the signing ceremony of Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. Everything was highly symbolic that day, which for the Anglo-Saxons was VJ-Day: after the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet another demonstration of force that had destroyed Japanese military power, reduced two cities to ashes as a demonstration and would have defeated the empire if it had not bowed to unconditional surrender. The Missouri was a superb battleship, flagship of the 3rd US Fleet, it belonged to the category of ships attacked and sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was the name of President Harry Truman’s nation, and the day before it had authoritatively entered the inviolate Tokyo Bay. On September 2 it had been surrounded by a gigantic fleet with the stars and stripes, with at least a dozen aircraft carriers. An eloquent warning that Japan had no escape, not even with the planned recourse to thousands of kamikazes ready to sacrifice themselves for the Fatherland and the Emperor.
The surrender ceremony like in a movie set
For a day, Missouri had become a film set, to immortalize from all angles and points of view the signature on the definitive conclusion of the Second World War, with the defeat of the last of the nations that had provoked it: Italy had been defeated in 1943, Germany annihilated in May 1945, but the Japanese empire had resisted until mid-August, determined to resist everywhere and to the last if it had not experienced nuclear holocaust firsthand.
On the Missouri, diplomatic protocol was respected in all its solemnity, because the more one adhered to the rules of legal civilization and international law, the more burning would be the capitulation of Japan, which had never lost a war and had never been invaded. Diplomat Mamoru Shigemitsu had shown up at that ceremony, humiliating for him and for his country, according to the protocol, dressed in Western style, with a top hat. He had a leg amputated in 1932 as a result of an attack by a Korean nationalist, and walked with the help of a stick that supported an artificial limb. During the two-year war, 1939-1941, he had been ambassador to London. He was appointed foreign minister on August 17, 1945, when Japan had already laid down its arms. His task was to seal the unconditional surrender that saved only the figure of Emperor Hirohito, sacrificing his anachronistic divine nature. In addition to the cameras and lenses positioned everywhere with Hollywood professionalism, on the crowded battleship anyone who owned a camera or a small movie camera had not spared the film that day. Shigemitsu, accompanied by General Yoshigijro Umezu, had placed his signature on the parchment, in front of General Richard Sutherland standing before him, closing an era and opening another.
Stalin’s Role and Hirohito’s Radio Speech
In the summer of 1945, Japan had hoped to avail itself of Soviet mediation to reach acceptable peace conditions, or at least negotiable with respect to the Allied proclamations of unconditional surrender reiterated at the Potsdam Conference (17 July-2 August 1945). Tokyo was confident in Stalin’s willingness to cooperate, considering the Japanese-Soviet non-aggression pact signed in Moscow on 13 April 1941, valid for five years, and that this had allowed the USSR to be able to pour all its military resources into facing Hitler’s Wehrmacht without having to fight on two fronts. On the one hand, Stalin had temporised with the Allies in entering the war against Japan (he had committed himself at Yalta to do so within three months of Germany’s defeat), on the other hand, he had very clear political and territorial expansion objectives, waiting only for the right moment to activate his plans.
The moment came after the explosion of the first American atomic bomb, on August 6 in Hiroshima. On the 8th, in violation of the neutrality pact, he declared war on Japan and the Red Army attacked Manchukuo and the Kuril Islands. The countdown had begun for the Japanese empire. On August 15th, Hirohito made his voice heard by his people for the first time with a proclamation on the radio announcing the surrender and on the 28th, the supreme allied commander Douglas MacArthur proceeded with the military occupation. The outcome of the conflict would be consecrated with the trappings of international law with the protocol ceremony on the deck of the battleship that was the flagship of the US fleet.
The fate of the ship and that of Minister Shigemitsu
The USS Missouri (BB-63), launched in 1944 by Mary Margaret Truman, daughter of the then state senator who would become the thirty-third president of the United States in 1945, is also the last battleship built in American shipyards. 270 meters long and with a displacement of 58,000 tons, it was used for the last time on a war scenario in 1990, in the first Gulf War, to be decommissioned in 2009 and become a museum ship in Pearl Harbor. A commemorative plaque was placed at the exact spot where Shigemitsu had signed the surrender of Japan. The Japanese diplomat was tried as a war criminal and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment. Released in 1950, he was recalled to service and in the two-year period 1954-1956 he held the role of Foreign Minister. He died at the age of sixty-nine in 1957.