Chapter 11: Stand on the Deck at Nine

In the first grey light of 2 September 1945, Mamoru Shigemitsu left his house in the capital in a dark car, wearing a morning coat and a tall silk hat. The streets outside the car window were grey and empty, and burned districts passed by in silence. He was the foreign minister, and he walked with a cane, because thirteen years earlier an attack at a public ceremony had cost him a leg. Beside him in the small line of cars rode the chief of the army general staff in his uniform, and behind them came nine other officers and diplomats of the island empire.

The long table covered with green cloth, which the sailors had carried across the battleship's deck on the evening before, was waiting. The cars were driving toward it now, along the shore road to a port on the bay, where the anchored ships still lay in their long grey lines.

I would like you to ride with these eleven men through that early morning, because they knew better than anyone what they were going to sign. If you sit beside them in your mind, you will see the ceremony from the side that is less often described.

The sailors had prepared a plain mess table for the signing.

You might expect that a table for such a moment would be a fine piece of furniture, carried out from an admiral's cabin. In fact the first table the officers tried was too small for the two large documents. The sailors then brought up an ordinary folding table from the crew's mess, the kind at which young men ate their breakfast every morning. It was covered with a green cloth taken from one of the officers' rooms, and two chairs were set behind it, one on each side.

Around the table the deck had been scrubbed until every plank and fitting was spotless, and platforms had been built for the photographers and the cameras. Every rail, every turret and every ladder within sight of the table was given to a group of officers or sailors, so that you would have seen men standing in layers, like spectators on the steps of an old stadium. The sailors in white had been told to keep perfectly silent during the ceremony.

I like to remember that the end of the ocean war was signed on a mess table, the same table where the youngest sailors drank their coffee.

The delegation climbed a steep ladder from a small boat.

At the port the delegation boarded a destroyer, which carried them out across the bay for about an hour. Nobody on board spoke much. The sky was overcast, and a light wind moved over the water. Shortly before nine o'clock the destroyer came alongside the battleship, and the eleven men crossed in a small boat to the foot of a steep ladder on the ship's side. Climbing it was hard for the foreign minister with his artificial leg and his cane, and you can imagine how long those few metres must have felt to him. Sailors watched from every rail and from the tops of the great gun turrets, and photographers stood on platforms built for the morning.

When the delegation reached the deck, they were led to their place in front of the table and told to wait. They stood in three rows, the diplomats in black coats and the officers in uniform, facing the table in silence. Hundreds of eyes rested on them. One of the younger diplomats later wrote that he had never known minutes to pass so slowly.

A chaplain spoke a short prayer. A recording of the national anthem of the western ally was played over the loudspeakers. Then the deck fell still again, and everyone waited.

The supreme commander spoke of a better world at two minutes past nine.

At about two minutes past nine, the supreme commander of the Allied powers stepped out to the table with the admirals and generals of the Allies behind him. He stood at a microphone and spoke in a calm voice for a few minutes. He said that the issues of the war had been decided on the battlefields, and that they were not now to be argued here. He asked that both sides rise to a higher dignity in the hour of signing. Then he expressed a hope that you may read in full one day in a quiet room. It was his hope, he said, and the hope of all mankind, that a better world should emerge from this solemn occasion, a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man.

The young diplomat who had felt the slow minutes later wrote a report for his emperor. He said that these words had surprised him, and he wondered whether his own nation, if it had won, would have spoken so generously. I find that question one of the most honest sentences written on that deck, and I invite you to sit with it for a moment.

On the bulkhead nearby, in a frame, hung an old flag with only thirty-one stars. It had flown on the ship of a commodore who had come into the same bay nearly a century earlier, when the island empire first opened its ports. Somebody had brought it across the ocean for this morning, so that the two moments might stand side by side.

The foreign minister signed first at four minutes past nine.

There were two copies of the instrument of surrender. The Allied copy was bound in leather, and the other copy, which the island empire would keep, was bound in plain canvas. At about four minutes past nine the foreign minister came forward, took off his silk hat and gloves, and sat down. For a moment he seemed unsure of the right line, and the supreme commander's chief of staff stepped forward and pointed to it. He signed both copies. The chief of the army general staff came after him. He did not sit down but leaned over the table and signed standing, quickly, as if he wished the moment to be over.

You should know that this general had argued against surrender during the imperial councils of August. He had come to the deck only because the emperor himself had asked him to go.

At about eight minutes past nine the supreme commander sat down to sign for all the Allied powers together. He used several pens, one after another, writing a few letters of his name with each. He turned and handed the first pen to a thin general standing behind him, and the second pen to another. These two men had commanded the defenders of distant places in 1942 and had spent more than three years as prisoners of war. They had been freed only a few weeks before, and they had flown to the bay to stand on this deck. Their uniforms hung loose on their shoulders.

When you look at the photographs of that moment, look past the man at the table to the two thin generals behind him. I think they say more about the cost of those years than any speech.

Nine Allied representatives signed one after another.

After the supreme commander, the representatives of nine Allied nations came forward, one by one. The fleet admiral of the western ally signed at about twelve minutes past nine. Then came a general for the republic of the old ally in the war in Asia, an admiral for the island kingdom of the western Allies, and a general for the eastern ally. After them signed a general for a great southern dominion, a colonel for a northern dominion, a general for the republic of the western Allies on the continent, an admiral for a small kingdom of the sea and the dikes, and an air vice-marshal for a southern island dominion. Each man walked to the table, sat, signed both copies, and returned to his place in the line.

The order of signing had been agreed in advance by the Allied governments. You can read in that long line of uniforms how wide the war in Asia and the ocean war had been. Men from every continent stood together on one crowded deck.

The whole signing took less than twenty minutes. Yet each name on those two documents stood for millions of people at home, for the soldiers buried far away, and for the families who were still waiting for news.

Draw the order of the signatures on a sheet of paper.

Pick up your pencil once more, take a sheet of paper and draw a long rectangle for the document. Near the top, write two short lines for the two signers of the island empire. Below them, write one line for the supreme commander. Below that, draw nine more lines, one under another, and write beside each line the title of a signer as I gave them above: the fleet admiral, the general of the old ally in Asia, the admiral of the island kingdom, and so on down to the air vice-marshal.

Now take your pencil and imagine that the colonel, who was the sixth of the nine, signs one line too low on the canvas copy. The general who comes after him then finds his own line already taken and signs one line lower still. Do the same for the admiral and the air vice-marshal, and look at your paper. The last man has no line left at all and must sign below the printed lines.

That is exactly what happened on the canvas copy that morning. When the delegation of the island empire noticed the error, a diplomat came back to the table and asked politely whether the document could be accepted in that form. The supreme commander's chief of staff sat down, crossed out the printed titles, wrote the correct ones by hand, and added his initials beside each change. You can still see those handwritten corrections today, a little crowded, like a timetable that has been altered by hand after the train has already left.

I find great comfort in that small mistake. Even on the most solemn deck of the war, the people were only people, nervous and tired, and they put it right with patience instead of anger.

A short prayer closed the ceremony at twenty-five minutes past nine.

When the last signer had returned to his place, the supreme commander stood at the microphone once more. He asked those present to pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God would preserve it always, and then he declared the proceedings closed. It was about twenty-five minutes past nine. The diplomats of the island empire bowed, collected the canvas copy, and were led back to the ladder. A little later the clouds parted, and sunlight fell across the bay.

The boat carried the eleven men back to the destroyer, and the destroyer carried them back across the water to the port. In the afternoon the foreign minister and the chief of staff reported to the emperor at the palace. The young diplomat's written account, with its honest question about generosity, was also laid before him. It is said that the emperor read it and quietly nodded. You may notice that nobody on either side, in all the reports of that day, describes the hour as a happy one.

Soon afterwards, in a radio address to the people at home, the supreme commander began with words that you may recognise from the title of this book. Today the guns are silent, he said, and a great tragedy has ended. He also said that he spoke for the thousands of silent lips stilled forever in the jungles, on the beaches and in the deep waters. If you read his address today, you will notice how much of it is about the dead and how little about the fighting.

On the eastern coast of the western ally, it was still the evening of 1 September when the papers were signed. The president spoke to the nation on the radio that night and named 2 September as the official day of victory in the war in Asia. For those listening there, the signing was already part of yesterday's news by the time they woke.

I once stood beside the plaque where the table had been.

Years later I walked across the same deck. The battleship had long since been retired and was moored as a quiet museum ship in a distant harbour. It was a warm afternoon, and a few visitors moved slowly along the rails. In the planks of the deck, where the table had stood, a round bronze plaque had been set, with the date and the words of the occasion. A girl of perhaps eight years old was standing on it, reading the letters aloud to her father.

She asked him who had signed there, and her father thought for a moment before he answered. He said that men from both sides had signed, and that they had all been very tired. I have rarely heard a better summary of that morning.

I stayed beside the plaque for a few minutes after they left. The deck moved very slightly under my shoes, as a large ship always does, even when it is tied up at a pier. I thought of the foreign minister on his cane, of the general signing without sitting down, and of the two thin generals with their pens.

The surrenders spread across the islands and the mainland in September.

The ceremony in the bay was the great general surrender, but the armies of the island empire were spread across thousands of kilometres. Each region now needed its own ceremony, where the local commanders laid down their arms before the Allied commanders of that area. You can think of it as a great railway system after a central decision: the order comes from the main station, but every branch line must be closed one by one, by hand, at its own signal box.

On 3 September a general who had commanded the defence of a large island group came down from the mountains to sign in the residence of a hill town. On 6 September two senior commanders of a great island base in the south signed on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, at a table placed between the parked planes. On 9 September, at nine in the morning, the commander of the armies on the mainland of Asia signed in the auditorium of a military academy in an old southern capital, before the commander of the old ally. On the same day, in a government hall on a peninsula, the flag of the island empire was lowered for the last time.

On 12 September a general signing for the commander of the southern armies put his name to the document in the council chamber of a city hall in a great harbour city near the equator, in front of the Allied supreme commander for that region. On 16 September another surrender was signed in a governor's residence above a famous harbour. On many smaller islands the ceremonies took place on the decks of frigates and in tents near the beach, often with only a few dozen men present.

If you mark these dates in your notebook, you will see that the endings of September moved like a ship turning slowly in a wide harbour, one degree at a time.

Each ceremony was short, and each was the end of years.

In several lands the end of the war was also the beginning of a long and difficult struggle for independence. For their peoples, September 1945 did not close a story but opened another.

The swords were laid on tables in town halls and tents.

In many of these ceremonies the officers of the island empire handed over their swords, which were laid in rows on tables. For these men the sword was not a weapon only but an heirloom, often carried by a father or grandfather before them. Some had been made by smiths centuries before the war, and families had kept them in a special place in the house. You may imagine how heavy that small movement of the hands must have been, from the belt to the table.

The Allied officers who received the swords had often lost friends in the jungle and on the beaches of the same islands. Some later wrote that they had expected to feel triumph and had felt only tiredness, and a kind of sadness that surprised them. If you have ever finished a very long journey, you may know that feeling: the engine stops, the noise ends, and for a while you do not know what to do with your hands.

Across the vast area of the war in Asia, millions of soldiers of the island empire were now gathered into camps. Millions of civilians who had lived abroad for years waited with them. On the islands of the south, in the evenings, they sat outside their huts and looked toward the sea, where the ships that would one day carry them home had not yet appeared.