Navy battleship Missouri, effectively ending World War II. On September 2, Allied supreme commander General Douglas MacArthur, along with the Japanese foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and the chief of staff of the Japanese army, Yoshijiro Umezu, signed the official Japanese surrender aboard the U.S. In one particularly iconic photo taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life magazine, a uniformed sailor passionately kisses a nurse in the midst of a crowd of people celebrating in New York City’s Times Square. Images from V-J Day celebrations around the United States and the world reflected the overwhelming sense of relief and exhilaration felt by citizens of Allied nations at the end of the long and bloody conflict. This is the day when Fascism finally dies, as we always knew it would.” Jubilant Americans declared August 14 “Victory over Japan Day,” or “V-J Day.” (May 8, 1945–when the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s official surrender–had previously been dubbed “ Victory in Europe Day,” or “V-E Day.”) Truman announced news of Japan’s surrender in a press conference at the White House: “This is the day we have been waiting for since Pearl Harbor. In Washington on August 14, President Harry S.
By 1945, in an attempt to break Japanese resistance before a land invasion became necessary, the Allies were consistently bombarding Japan from air and sea, dropping some 100,000 tons of explosives on more than 60 Japanese cities and towns between March and July 1945 alone. Over the next three years, superior technology and productivity allowed the Allies to wage an increasingly one-sided war against Japan in the Pacific, inflicting enormous casualties while suffering relatively few. Japan’s ally Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, then declared war on the United States, turning the war raging in Europe into a truly global conflict. naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, capped a decade of deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States and led to an immediate U.S. Japan’s devastating surprise aerial attack on the U.S. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki Coming several months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Japan’s capitulation in the Pacific brought six years of hostilities to a final and highly anticipated close.
For an older generation, the aircraft meant the end of World War II for younger people, it ushered in the nuclear age. Since then, both August 14 and August 15 have been known as “Victoryover Japan Day,” or simply “V-J Day.” The term has also been used for September 2, 1945, when Japan’s formal surrender took place aboard the U.S.S. The Enola Gay symbolizes the end of one era and the beginning of another. On August 14, 1945, it was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World War II. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.