General Douglas MacArthur presided over a 23-minute ceremony on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, accepting Japan's unconditional surrender before a fleet of Allied warships. The document was signed by representatives of nine Allied nations and Japan, closing six years of global war that had killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people. MacArthur declared, 'These proceedings are closed,' and the war was over.
MacArthur used six pens to sign the surrender document, distributing them afterward as keepsakes: one to West Point, one to the National Archives, one to the wife of a general killed early in the war. Above the deck flew the American flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol on December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, sent specially for the occasion.
Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who walked with a cane due to a leg lost in a 1932 assassination attempt in Shanghai, struggled visibly as he signed. Behind him, General Yoshijiro Umezu, representing the military, refused to look up. As the ceremony ended, some 1,900 Allied aircraft roared overhead in a deliberate show of force, a final, thunderous punctuation mark on the deadliest conflict in human history.
Key people: Douglas MacArthur, Mamoru Shigemitsu, Yoshijiro Umezu, Chester Nimitz