Victory over Japan Day

• 1. Introduction

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  Victory over Japan Day marks the moment the deadliest conflict in human history finally stopped. On the 15th of August 1945, Emperor Hirohito's voice came across the radio in Japan, announcing that his country would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. On that same day, but on the other side of the international date line, it was still the 14th of August in Washington, D.C., where President Harry S Truman broadcast the news to the American people at seven o'clock in the evening. Weeks later, on the 2nd of September 1945, the formal paperwork was signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, and Truman declared that date the official V-J Day for the United States.

  Three separate days, two conflicting names, and a world that had been holding its breath for three years, eight months, and seven days since the attack on Pearl Harbor. How did people react when the war was finally over? What happened aboard that battleship in Tokyo Bay? And what became of a single photograph taken in Times Square that would come to define the moment for generations? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Days Before Surrender

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  On the 6th of August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb named Fat Man fell on Nagasaki. A third strike was not possible before the 19th of August. On that same the 9th of August, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and sent forces into Manchuria, the Kuril islands, and Sakhalin, with the threat of occupying Hokkaido looming over the Japanese leadership.

  The Soviet entry into the war had been agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The arrangement required Moscow to join the Allied fight against Japan within three months of the end of the European war, and it did so almost to the day. On the 10th of August, the Japanese government communicated through Swiss diplomatic channels its intention to surrender, with one condition: that the Emperor be allowed to remain in place.

  Before Truman made any formal announcement, the news of Japan's offer began moving around the world. Allied soldiers in London danced a conga line on Regent Street. Americans and Frenchmen paraded together on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, singing "Don't Fence Me In". In Chongqing, Chinese residents fired firecrackers and what witnesses described as almost burying Americans in gratitude. On Tinian island, B-29 crews were told their next mission over Japan had been cancelled but that they could not celebrate, because a third atomic strike might yet be rescheduled.

• 3. Chaos in the Streets

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  Life magazine later described the public mood in the hours after Japan's acceptance became known as something like joy that had been rationed and saved up for three years, eight months, and seven days. In Washington, D.C., a crowd surged toward the White House and attempted to break into the grounds, shouting for Harry Truman.

  On Okinawa, American soldiers grabbed every weapon within reach and fired into the sky. Ships sounded general quarters and opened anti-aircraft guns because crews believed a kamikaze attack was underway. Six men were killed and dozens wounded in the celebration.

  In San Francisco, the scene was darker. Thousands of drunken people, the San Francisco Chronicle later summarized in 2015, launched what it called a three-night orgy of vandalism, looting, assault, robbery, rape, and murder, describing it as the deadliest riots in the city's history. More than 1,000 people were injured, 13 were killed, and at least six women were raped. Not one serious criminal charge resulted. No civilian or military official was sanctioned. The Chronicle concluded that the city simply tried to pretend the riots never happened. The vast majority of those involved were Navy enlistees who had not served in the Pacific.

  In New York, the celebrations in Times Square were joyful rather than violent. Workers in the Garment District threw cloth scraps and ticker tape into the streets, leaving a pile five inches deep on the pavement. The largest crowd in the history of Times Square had gathered, and the news rolled across the zipper ticker at One Times Square: "OFFICIAL TRUMAN ANNOUNCES JAPANESE SURRENDER ". The six asterisks stood for the six branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.

• 4. The Photograph in Times Square

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  Alfred Eisenstaedt had gone to Times Square on the 14th of August 1945 to take candid photographs when he spotted a sailor moving through the crowd. In his own words: "He grabbed something in white. And I stood there, and they kissed. And I snapped four times." The resulting image became one of the most famous photographs ever published by Life magazine.

  The same moment was captured almost simultaneously by Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen, whose version ran in the New York Times. Over the following decades, multiple people came forward claiming to be the sailor or the woman in white, who was long assumed to be a nurse.

  It was eventually established that the woman in the Eisenstaedt photograph was Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dental assistant. In a later interview, she explained the moment in her own terms: she had been grabbed by a sailor and it was more of a jubilant act than a kiss, because he was so relieved that he did not have to return to the Pacific, where he had already served. She said the reason he grabbed someone dressed like a nurse was that he felt grateful to nurses who had cared for the wounded.

  Far from Times Square, another image claimed its own place in the record. In Elizabeth Street, Sydney, a press photographer and a Movietone newsreel camera both captured a figure who became known as the Dancing Man. Those film frames and stills took on an iconic status in Australian history as a symbol of the Pacific victory.

• 5. Japanese Reaction and Holdouts

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  On the 15th and the 16th of August, some Japanese soldiers, devastated by the news of surrender, took their own lives. More than 100 American prisoners of war were murdered in those same days. In Borneo, Australian and British prisoners were killed at Ranau and Sandakan by the Imperial Japanese Army.

  At Batu Lintang camp, also in Borneo, liberating forces discovered death orders proposing the murder of some 2,000 prisoners of war and civilian internees, scheduled for the 15th of September 1945. The camp was liberated four days before those orders were due to be carried out. Japanese forces in the field continued fighting Soviet forces on several fronts for two weeks after V-J Day.

  The resistance did not end with the formal ceremony. Some Japanese soldiers on isolated Pacific islands kept fighting for decades. The last known Japanese soldier did not surrender until 1974.

• 6. Ceremony Aboard USS Missouri

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  On the 2nd of September 1945, representatives gathered on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender. The choice of the Missouri was deliberate: the ship bore the name of Truman's home state. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Truman declared September 2 the official V-J Day for the United States.

  The formal signing closed a chapter that had begun at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, been set in legal motion by the Potsdam Declaration of the 26th of July, and survived Japan's initial rejection of that declaration on the 29th of July. Japan had issued its conditional offer to surrender on the 10th of August; the Allies had signaled their acceptance on the 11th. The paperwork signed aboard the Missouri gave the war its official end.

  Yet the peace treaty between Japan and most of the Allied countries was not signed until the Treaty of San Francisco on the 8th of September 1951, and that treaty did not go into effect until the 28th of April 1952. A separate peace between Japan and the Soviet Union did not come until 1956.

• 7. A Day Observed Differently

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  The 15th of August is the official V-J Day for the United Kingdom. In Japan, the government adopted an official name for the day in 1982 by ordinance, though the country commonly refers to August 15 simply as the day of the end of the war. In Australia, the preferred term from the outset was V-P Day, standing for Victory in the Pacific; The Canberra Times of the 14th of August 1945 already used V-P Day in its coverage, and the Australian government gazetted a public holiday under that name that same year.

  In South Korea, the day is Gwangbokjeol, a public holiday marking liberation from Japanese colonial rule. In China, September 3 is recognized as V-J Day, growing from the three-day holiday the Nationalist Government declared starting on that date in 1945. Hong Kong observed Liberation Day on the 30th of August, marking the date the Imperial Japanese Army handed the territory to the Royal Navy in 1945; that holiday was removed from the list of public holidays in 1999.

  In the Philippines, V-J Day is observed on September 3 as the Surrender of General Tomoyuki Yamashita Day. The province of Ifugao marks September 2 separately, commemorating the informal surrender of Yamashita to joint Filipino-American forces led by Captain Grisham in the municipality of Kiangan. In 2023, Russia renamed its observance from "Day of the End of World War II" to "Day of Victory over Militaristic Japan and the End of World War II", a change Japan called extremely regrettable.

  Ho Chi Minh chose the 2nd of September 1945, the same day as the formal surrender ceremony, to declare the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In that one calendar date, the end of one era and the beginning of another arrived simultaneously.