Victory over Japan Day

During the night of 14–15 August 1945 people on one continent after another learned that Japan had accepted the Allied terms and that the Second World War – six years after Germany’s attack on Poland and more than eight years after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War – was coming to an end. Crowds poured into the streets of New York, Washington, London, Sydney, Wellington and Toronto, and in many cities the celebrations went on for two days. The day went down in history as Victory over Japan Day (VJ Day), although – unlike VE Day – it does not fall on the same date everywhere.

To say that it was celebrated “all over the world” needs two qualifications. First, because of the time difference, the news reached the two hemispheres on different days: President Harry Truman announced it in Washington at 7 p.m. on 14 August, as midnight was striking in London and when it was already the morning of 15 August in Tokyo and Sydney. Americans therefore celebrated mainly on the evening of 14 August, while the British, Australians and New Zealanders celebrated on 15 August, which became their official victory day. The United States later designated a different date as the official VJ Day – 2 September 1945, the day the instrument of surrender was signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Second, in many places there was nothing to celebrate: in Manchuria, on Sakhalin and in the Kurils Soviet troops were still fighting for several more days, Japan was gripped by shock and mourning, and hundreds of thousands of prisoners and internees in Japanese camps learned that the war was over only weeks later.

From telegram to announcement

The road to that day was short and violent. After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August, the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on 8 August and the destruction of Nagasaki on 9 August, the government in Tokyo declared on 10 August its readiness to accept the Potsdam Declaration with a reservation concerning the prerogatives of the Emperor. That news alone, spread by the press agencies, set off premature outbursts of joy in many cities. The Allies replied on 11 August with a note from Secretary of State James Byrnes, and Washington received Japan’s final acceptance, conveyed through Switzerland, on the afternoon of 14 August.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time Truman gathered reporters in the Oval Office and read a statement: “I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.” He added that the proclamation of VJ Day must wait until the surrender terms had been formally signed. The American armed forces were ordered to cease offensive operations, and Truman gave federal employees two days off work. A few hours later, at noon Tokyo time on 15 August, Japanese radio broadcast Emperor Hirohito’s recorded address – the first time his subjects had heard their sovereign’s voice.

America: Times Square and the streets of San Francisco

A crowd gathered outside the White House, and Truman came out to it with his wife. The largest gathering formed in New York’s Times Square, where the illuminated news ticker on the New York Times building carried the announcement of the surrender. Press estimates at the time spoke of some two million people passing through the square and the surrounding streets in the evening and during the night – the largest crowd in its history.

That evening the Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took a picture in Times Square of a sailor kissing a stranger in a white uniform. The photograph, published in Life at the end of August in a section of a dozen or so pages devoted to the victory celebrations, became over time the best-known image of the end of the war and is known as “V-J Day in Times Square”. Over the decades many people came forward claiming to be its subjects; the sailor George Mendonsa and the dental assistant Greta Zimmer Friedman are most often named, though even this identification has been disputed. Friedman herself recalled years later that the stranger had simply grabbed her, and in the 21st century the photograph has also come to be viewed critically.

The rejoicing was not peaceful everywhere. In San Francisco, full of sailors and soldiers waiting to ship out to the Pacific, the celebrations turned into three nights of rioting, with looting, assaults and acts of violence, including sexual violence. According to figures cited by the San Francisco Chronicle, more than a dozen people were killed and over a thousand injured. On Okinawa, where American troops had greeted the first, premature reports of the Japanese offer of 10 August with celebratory gunfire, several servicemen were killed by stray bullets and dozens wounded.

London: “The last of our enemies is laid low”

In Britain the news was announced at midnight on 14–15 August in a radio broadcast by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who had headed the government for less than three weeks following Labour’s election victory. “Japan has today surrendered. The last of our enemies is laid low,” he said. Because of the late hour, many Britons learned of the surrender only from the morning papers. The government declared 15 and 16 August public holidays.

15 August also saw the State Opening of the new Parliament. As King George VI and Queen Elizabeth drove to Westminster, crowds cheered them; in the King’s Speech the monarch said that Japan’s surrender had brought six years of war to an end. In the evening the King spoke on the radio, and outside Buckingham Palace, in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus thousands of people celebrated late into the night; Regent Street was strewn with scraps of paper. Many families, however, did not share the euphoria: hundreds of thousands of British soldiers of the Fourteenth Army, known as the “Forgotten Army”, were serving in South-East Asia, and tens of thousands of prisoners were still held in Japanese camps in Burma, Thailand, Malaya and Japan itself.

Sydney, Wellington, Ottawa, Chongqing

In Australia, which the Pacific war had threatened directly, the relief was especially strong. On the morning of 15 August Prime Minister Ben Chifley – successor to John Curtin, who had died in July – announced Japan’s unconditional surrender on the radio. There the day was named Victory in the Pacific Day (VP Day). In Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane the streets filled with people despite the authorities closing the pubs; in Sydney crowds packed Martin Place and Elizabeth Street, where newsreel cameramen filmed a man in a suit dancing – a shot that became the symbol of the end of the war in Australia. There were similar celebrations in Peter Fraser’s New Zealand and in William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Canada.

In China, which had fought Japan the longest, joy erupted as early as the evening of 10 August, when news of the Japanese offer to surrender reached the wartime capital, Chongqing: according to witnesses, firecrackers went off in the streets and people cheered late into the night. On the morning of 15 August, even before the Emperor’s broadcast, Chiang Kai-shek delivered a victory address over the Central Broadcasting Station. In it he called on his compatriots not to seek revenge or harm innocent Japanese people, who – as he put it – deserved pity rather, having been deceived by their militarists. These words went down in history as the policy of “repaying evil with good”.

In Japan itself 15 August was a day of shock and mourning; that same day Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki led a last kamikaze flight towards Okinawa, from which he did not return. In Korea, freed after 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, 15 August became Liberation Day.

Poles: the end of the war without victory

For Poles, Japan’s surrender closed a war in which they had been the first to fight. Formally, Poland was also a party to the conflict in the Far East: on 11 December 1941 the Polish government-in-exile declared a state of war with Japan, and individual Poles fought against it in arms – such as the airman Witold Urbanowicz, who flew with the Americans in China in 1943. According to historians of Polish–Japanese relations, the state of war was formally ended only by the agreement of 1957 restoring normal relations between the two countries.

In August 1945 the soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the West – General Władysław Anders’s II Corps in Italy, the divisions and brigades in Germany and Britain, the airmen and sailors – celebrated with their allies, but their situation was uncertain. Since 5–6 July Britain and the United States had recognised the Provisional Government of National Unity in Warsaw rather than the government in London to which the soldiers had sworn their oath. The end of the war with Japan meant that the Allies would no longer need Polish units, and it raised the question of their future: return to a country ruled by Communists, or emigration. In the following years most of them chose to remain in the West.

In Poland itself 15 August was not marked by any special celebrations – Victory Day had been set for 9 May. On 2 August the authorities had declared an amnesty intended to persuade underground soldiers to come into the open, while arrests continued at the same time. The next day, 16 August, the agreement on the Polish–Soviet state border was signed in Moscow, sealing the loss of the eastern territories. Victory over Germany and Japan brought Poland neither full independence nor its pre-1939 borders.

What followed

The rejoicing of 14 and 15 August did not end the fighting everywhere. The Red Army continued its Manchurian operation, and the landings in the Kurils and on Sakhalin were still going on at the end of the month. The formal instrument of surrender was signed on 2 September aboard USS Missouri, and Truman proclaimed that day the official VJ Day; the USSR made 3 September its day of victory over Japan, and China also marks the anniversary of victory in the war against Japan in September. Britain, Australia and New Zealand kept 15 August, which in Japan is a day of remembrance for the war dead and in Korea a liberation holiday. At the same time the end of the war opened new conflicts: in China, Indochina, Indonesia and Korea the collapse of Japanese rule set off struggles for power that would last for years to come.