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Daily Archives: 27 December 2025

by Joel | 27 December 2025 · 6:17 am

Humiliating Surrenders in 1942, 1945

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 295-296:

At 8.56 a.m. the eleven Japanese representatives were brought to the ship on a small launch, headed by the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, dressed in formal morning coat, stiff collar and top hat. As they stepped aboard they passed through a corridor of ‘sideboys’, enlisted sailors standing to attention who had all been chosen because they were at least six foot tall. Everything about this ceremony was meant to demonstrate the vastly superior might of the Allies, and especially the United States. As if to further underline this physical discrepancy, Shigemitsu had a wooden leg – he’d lost the one he’d been born with when a Korean rebel threw a grenade at him in Shanghai. It meant he now limped across the deck to stand in front of the surrender table.

Then, at 9.02, MacArthur and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz emerged. MacArthur stood at the microphone to the side of the table and began the proceedings, but before he sat down he said, ‘Will General Wainwright and General Percival step forward while I sign?’

Wainwright and the British General then emerged from the dignitaries lined up behind the table and stood either side of MacArthur as he sat down and signed the surrender documents. The Supreme Commander had also brought with him five fountain pens with which to sign the documents, and after writing his first signature turned to Wainwright. ‘He gave me the pen,’ noted Wainwright, who saluted awkwardly and took it, ‘a wholly unexpected and very great gift.’

MacArthur gave the second pen used to Percival, and the two generals returned to their places after the Allied signatures had been completed and it was the turn of the Japanese. First Shigemitsu hobbled forward and, bending over the table, signed. Then General Yoshijirō Umezu, the Chief of the Army General Staff. ‘We were, I felt,’ noted one of the Japanese delegates, the diplomat Toshikazu Kase, ‘being subject to the torture of the pillory. A million eyes seemed to beat on us with the million shafts of a rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire. I felt them sink into my body with a sharp physical pain.’

They were experiencing the humiliation of defeat. Of surrender. It was a terrible thing to endure, and yet General Wainwright, watching this, was unique among American senior commanders there that day in having signed an instrument of surrender of his forces – to the very regime that stood before him now. So too had General Percival, who stood alongside him; it had been Percival who had surrendered the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore – Britain’s largest ever defeat – in February 1942. And Wainwright had surrendered the whole of the Philippines three months later, in May; that also ranked as one of the worst military defeats in American history. The difference was that Percival had been the British C-in-C in Singapore from the outset, whereas Wainwright had not. Rather, the American was handed the poisoned chalice of command of the Philippines when MacArthur was ordered out by the President. And the defeat and surrender that had followed had been in part down to MacArthur himself and to the lack of preparation by the United States. It was certainly not Wainwright who was to blame, although in the long years since that day of infamy he had suffered plenty for it.

Rare Japanese Battlefield Surrenders

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 266-268:

For Japanese commanders, surrender was in itself unacceptable and suicide preferable – death, however it came, either fighting on to the finish or taking one’s own life, was the way battle should end. In the combat on Iwo Jima from 19 February to 26 March, the Americans took a total of 216 prisoners from a Japanese Army and Navy force of 20,000, at which the Americans had had to throw 110,000 troops in total, costing them 6,821 dead as well as 19,217 wounded. On Okinawa civilians hurled themselves from the cliffs rather than be taken prisoner – this can be seen to be believed in American footage.

Only one Japanese unit broke the taboo and surrendered in the entire war: the 1st Battalion of the 329th Infantry on New Guinea, also known as the Takenaga Unit, who had been chased into the interior by the Australians. They numbered only fifty men. In April 1945 their officers decided that enough was enough – Japanese troops tended to travel light, hoping that their victories came quickly and they could scavenge supplies from their enemies or the local inhabitants wherever they were fighting. Prolonged campaigns being hunted down didn’t sit well with this tactical style. The Australians were astonished to discover one of their own leaflets, which suggested the Japanese surrender, with a scrawled offer to do just that, left on a pole in the jungle. Contact was made on 2 May, and Lieutenant-Colonel Masaharu Takenaga parlayed terms; the next day five officers, four warrant officers, thirty-three NCOs and other ranks went into the bag. It was a unique triumph for the Australian forces, and one they made much of – new propaganda leaflets dropped on the enemy spread the word, causing the commander of the Eighteenth Army, General Hatazō Adachi, to break down and cry at the dishonour they had shown the Emperor.

As Emperor, Hirohito was where the bushidō buck stopped. At least, within the kokutai, that was the rule the highest echelons of Japanese politics claimed to observe. Following Okinawa, though, the Emperor found himself strangely out of step with the recently created Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the Gunji Sangiin. This core council, known as the Big Six, was running the war and advising the Emperor. The Big Six consisted of the Prime Minister, retired Admiral Kantarō Suzuki, seventy-seven – he had been Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet in the 1920s; Minister of Foreign Affairs Shigenori Tōgō, sixty-two, Minister of the Army General Korechika Anami, fifty-eight; Minister of the Navy Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, sixty-five; Chief of the Army General Staff General Yoshijirō Umezu, sixty-three, and Chief of the Navy General Staff Admiral Soemu Toyoda, sixty. These men had been part of the Japanese higher echelons throughout the war and intransigence sat at the heart of their thinking – their resolve remained intact in spite of their attempts to marshal a Plan B with the Soviets.