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.
Far Outliers 