This Day in American History: V-J Day, Japan's Surrender Announced
- ForAmerica
- 1 day ago
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On this day in 1945, a president stood behind his Oval Office desk and told a room full of reporters six words that ended the deadliest war in human history: Japan had surrendered.
By early August 1945, Japan's position was hopeless. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, combined with the Soviet Union's declaration of war and invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria, pushed Emperor Hirohito to cast a tie-breaking vote within his own war council to accept the Allies' surrender terms. That evening, General Korechika Anami, the war council's most fervent holdout against surrender, took his own life by ritual seppuku rather than hear his emperor speak the words of defeat aloud.
On August 14, 1945, at 7 p.m. Washington time, President Harry Truman stood at his desk in the Oval Office and read a message just received from the Japanese government to the assembled press: Japan had accepted the Allies' terms of unconditional surrender laid out at the Potsdam Conference. "This is the day we have been waiting for since Pearl Harbor," Truman told the nation. "This is the day when Fascism finally dies, as we always knew it would."
The news detonated across the country. Crowds that had gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House to wait for word erupted, and by nightfall the streets of Washington, New York, San Francisco, and cities across the nation were jammed with celebration -- what one Yank Magazine correspondent described as combining "all the features of New Year's and Mardi Gras." The moment produced one of the most famous photographs in American history, Alfred Eisenstaedt's shot of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. Truman proclaimed a two-day national holiday. Both August 14 and 15 became known as V-J Day -- Victory over Japan Day -- though the formal, written surrender wouldn't be signed for another two and a half weeks, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
The celebration was as bittersweet as it was enormous. More than 400,000 Americans, and an estimated 65 million people worldwide, had died in nearly six years of war. As one man told a Yank reporter that night in Washington, watching the celebration with tears in his eyes over his own two lost sons: "It's a nice celebration, but I lost two sons -- two sons." For a nation exhausted by more than three years and eight months of war since Pearl Harbor, August 14, 1945 was, at last, the day it ended.
Also on this day:
1935 -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law.
1947 -- Pakistan gains independence from British colonial rule.
1969 -- British troops are deployed to Northern Ireland as sectarian violence escalates.
1971 -- President Nixon announces a 90-day freeze on wages, prices, and rents.
Six years, 400,000 American lives, and finally, six words from the Oval Office: Japan has surrendered unconditionally. The long night was over.
Source: National Archives, National WWII Museum, HISTORY.com
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