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The Japanese Surrender: A Sailor’s Perspective

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What the end of a long war might have been like for a sailor in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
In remembrance of the day Japan first agreed to surrender, Aug.15, the latest article from “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series by The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war, is a look back by James Stavridis, a retired United States Navy admiral and former supreme Allied Commander of NATO. He imagines how a sailor anchored in Tokyo Bay might have experienced the official surrender ceremony on Sept.2. As World War II ended, the huge U. S. and Allied fleets gathered in Tokyo Bay in the days leading up to the surrender ceremony, a carefully orchestrated event that would be held on Sept.2,1945, on the deck of the massive battleship U. S. Missouri. In the broad reaches of the bay, the U. S. fleet numbered more than 200 warships: fast carriers, huge battleships, powerful heavy cruisers and sleek, fast destroyers, the “greyhounds” of the fleet. From a distance they looked like gigantic gray machines of war, but inside the steel hulls were tens of thousands of U. S. Navy sailors. They were young men — most in their early or mid-20s — and they would have experienced almost endless days at sea throughout the war years; port calls were very few, and most provisions, ammunition and fuel were simply transferred at sea from supply ships to the carriers, battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Let’s imagine a gunner’s mate onboard the Missouri. He would have enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor, as did many of his shipmates. After a few weeks of boot camp, he was sent to gunnery school and taught the basics of maintaining the heavy guns of a big ship. After an assignment or two on other ships in the Pacific Fleet, our gunner’s mate would have been thrilled to be assigned to the Missouri. On the morning of surrender day, he would have found himself awakened by the scratchy, high-pitched warble of the boatswain’s pipe announcing an early reveille. There was a lot to be done on surrender day, he might have thought, as he hauled out of his canvas bunk and padded to the head, which he shared with 20 other sailors, to shave. He might have whistled to himself as he walked the long steel corridors to the mess decks, thinking about eggs and bacon and wondering when they could all go home. It had been a long war for him. If he had served on other ships, he probably remembered the monotony of the long cruises, punctuated again and again by battles that were often short but always brutal — from early disasters at Guadalcanal to crucial victories at Midway and eventually the enormous naval battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf in the summer and fall of 1944, which sealed the ultimate defeat of the Japanese imperial fleet. But he knew that today was different because the battleship’s captain had addressed the crew yesterday explaining the historical importance of the ceremony and the role each of the sailors would play.

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