The ceasefire order

At 4 p.m. on 16 August 1945 Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued Army Order No. 1382, together with its naval counterpart, Navy Order No. 48. They instructed all Japanese armed forces to cease hostilities immediately. The only exception was “unavoidable self-defence” until local ceasefire agreements had been concluded. The day before, the Japanese had heard Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast on the radio announcing the acceptance of the Allied terms. The broadcast itself, however, was not an order to the armed forces. Only the orders of 16 August translated the Emperor’s decision into military terms, and over the following days they still had to be got through to several million soldiers scattered from Manchuria to Indonesia.

It is sometimes written that on this date Emperor Hirohito issued a rescript ordering his forces to cease fire. This is a simplification. Orders of Imperial General Headquarters were formally issued in the Emperor’s name, but what was issued on 16 August was not an imperial rescript. A separate rescript addressed “to the officers and men of the imperial armed forces” was proclaimed by Hirohito a day later, on 17 August.

From broadcast to order

The government of Kantarō Suzuki accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration on 14 August, after several days of disputes over the fate of the Emperor that had begun with Japan’s conditional reply of 10 August. During the night of 14–15 August a group of War Ministry officers made a last attempt to seize the Imperial Palace and destroy the recording of the broadcast, but the coup collapsed before dawn. The War Minister, Korechika Anami, committed suicide that morning.

On the afternoon of 15 August Imperial General Headquarters, by Order No. 1381 (Navy Order No. 47), halted only offensive operations. Units were to “continue their present tasks until further orders”. This reflected caution: acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration was not yet a surrender, and no one in Tokyo knew how commanders on distant fronts would react. The order of 16 August went further and required fighting to stop at once, though it set no specific deadlines. In a message passed to the Allies, the government and Imperial General Headquarters estimated that the order would reach every unit in the home islands within 48 hours, and those on distant fronts later.

Subsequent orders fixed final deadlines. Under Order No. 1386 of 19 August, ground forces in the home islands were to cease all use of arms from midnight on 22 August. Order No. 1388 of 22 August laid down the same for armies outside Japan from midnight on 25 August, except for local self-defence in China. Order No. 1385 of 18 August stated that soldiers who had fallen into enemy hands after the broadcast were not prisoners of war. The historian Akira Yamada saw this as an attempt to save face: an army that had for years forbidden its soldiers to surrender presented the laying down of arms as obedience to an imperial command rather than captivity.

Princes as messengers

The General Staff feared that the commanders of the great formations overseas would not believe an order from Tokyo or would take it for a trick. For this reason, according to Japanese studies, on 16 August the Emperor summoned three princes of the imperial family serving in the armed forces and instructed them to convey his will in person. On 17 August Prince Yasuhiko Asaka flew to Nanjing, to the headquarters of the China Expeditionary Army. Prince Tsuneyoshi Takeda went to Changchun, then called Xinjing and the capital of Manchukuo, to the headquarters of the Kwantung Army. Prince Haruhito Kan’in flew to Saigon, to the headquarters of Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi’s Southern Expeditionary Army Group. English-language literature sometimes gives the date of the princes’ dispatch as 14 August. The presence of a member of the imperial family was meant to deprive doubters of the argument that the order was the work of “traitors” around the Emperor.

A new government

The Suzuki cabinet resigned on 15 August, immediately after the broadcast. On 16 August the Emperor entrusted the task of forming a government to his uncle by marriage, General Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni. The cabinet was sworn in on 17 August. For the first time in Japanese history a member of the imperial family became prime minister. It was believed that only such a figure could bring the army to obedience and forestall further coup attempts. The government included the former prime minister Fumimaro Konoe as minister without portfolio, Mamoru Shigemitsu as foreign minister and Mitsumasa Yonai, who kept the Navy Ministry. Until 23 August Higashikuni ran the War Ministry himself, because General Sadamu Shimomura, appointed to the post, was still on his way back from China.

Suicides and mutinies

For many officers brought up to believe that surrender was a disgrace, the end of the war was a personal catastrophe. On the afternoon of 15 August, after the broadcast, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of the 5th Air Fleet, took off from the airfield at Ōita on Kyushu with eleven Suisei dive bombers on a final suicide flight towards Okinawa. According to Japanese sources he took 22 airmen with him, five of whom survived. There is no record of any of the aircraft hitting an American ship. During the night of 15–16 August Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, the originator of the kamikaze attacks, committed seppuku in Tokyo. He took more than ten hours to die, refusing medical help. In his farewell letter he apologised to the souls of the fallen pilots and urged young Japanese to submit to the Emperor’s decision and work to rebuild the country. Japanese studies speak of several hundred servicemen, politicians and civilians who took their own lives in those days, some of them in the square in front of the Imperial Palace.

There were also those who wanted to fight on. On 16 August, at the Atsugi naval air base near Tokyo, airmen of Captain Yasuna Kozono’s 302nd Air Group dropped leaflets calling for continued resistance and wrecked aircraft intended for armistice flights. The mutiny petered out after a few days, when Kozono, ill with malaria, was taken to hospital. Before that, on 17 and 18 August, Japanese fighters from Atsugi and Yokosuka attacked American B-32 Dominator bombers that were photographing the Tokyo area and checking compliance with the ceasefire. On 18 August one crewman was killed – according to American sources, the last American to die in air combat in the Second World War. The Americans had halted offensive operations earlier, immediately after the last raids on Japan, on the orders of President Harry Truman.

Fighting that went on

The order from Tokyo did not end the war where the enemy was the Red Army. The Soviet Union had declared war on Japan on 8 August, and its forces had been advancing in Manchuria since 9 August. On 16 August the Red Army General Staff announced that the Emperor’s broadcast was merely a “general declaration” of surrender, that Japanese forces had received no order to cease fighting and were still resisting, and that the Manchurian operation would therefore continue. The commander of the Kwantung Army, General Otozō Yamada, and his staff decided during the night of 16–17 August to comply with the order from Tokyo. On 19 August his representatives agreed the terms of surrender with the headquarters of Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky. Some cut-off garrisons nevertheless held out for several more days, while Soviet airborne landings seized further cities in Manchuria.

On southern Sakhalin the Red Army had been attacking since 11 August, and on 16 August it put a force ashore at the port of Tōro on the island’s west coast. The commander of the 5th Area Army in Sapporo, General Kiichirō Higuchi, ordered the 88th Division under his command to defend the island. Fighting and the evacuation of civilians continued there until a ceasefire agreement was concluded on 22 August. On 18 August Soviet troops landed on Shumshu, the northernmost of the Kuril Islands, where the Japanese garrison resisted until 23 August. Japanese studies state that Tokyo had to warn the Sapporo command separately not to continue fighting under the pretext of self-defence.

Instructions from Manila

On 15 August Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. MacArthur at once demanded that the Japanese cease fighting and send to his headquarters in Manila a delegation empowered to discuss the details of the surrender and occupation. The summons was transmitted by radio and, according to Japanese sources, also through neutral Switzerland. On 16 August the Japanese government informed the Allies that the ceasefire order had been issued. On 19 August a sixteen-man delegation led by the Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, General Torashirō Kawabe, took off from Kisarazu in two white G4M bombers marked with green crosses for Ie Shima, from where an American aircraft flew it on to Manila. There MacArthur’s staff handed it the surrender documents, the timetable for the landing of the occupation forces and the text of General Order No. 1. The delegation returned to Japan on 20 August, and its members reached Tokyo the following day.

Significance

The order of 16 August was the first step towards actually ending the war in the Pacific and Asia. More than two weeks were still to pass between the acceptance of the surrender terms and the signing of the instrument aboard the battleship USS Missouri on 2 September. Some six million Japanese soldiers and civilians were then estimated to be outside the home islands, and military commanders had to negotiate surrender themselves with their local adversaries: the Chinese, the British, the Americans, the Australians and, in Manchuria and the Kurils, the Red Army. Despite the fears in Tokyo, the great majority of units obeyed the order without resistance. The exception was the fighting with Soviet forces, which went on until Moscow considered its objectives achieved. The details of the surrender of Japan in the individual regions were settled over the following weeks.