The surrender documents were signed on the deck of the USS Missouri on the morning of 2 September 1945. Representatives of the Allied powers signed in turn. The whole thing was over in about twenty minutes, and the Second World War was formally finished.
Japan had announced its surrender on 15 August, which is why some countries mark VJ Day then. The United States marks the signing. Both dates are defensible and they describe different things, one an announcement and one a document.
Neither of them is the day the war ended for the men in the camps.
The Gap Between the Ceremony and the Gate
News did not arrive everywhere at once. Camps were scattered across Japan and its occupied territories, and word reached them at different times and through different routes. Some men learned from guards. Some worked it out from the guards’ behavior before anybody said anything. Some waited days for anyone to arrive.
So there is a formal date, which is 2 September, and there is a personal one, which is different for every prisoner who was still alive to have one.
My grandfather, Frank Hoeffer II, was liberated in 1945 after three years and four months. He was a Navy ship’s cook, captured at Corregidor in 1942, marched through Manila, moved by ship, and held at Osaka and later Matsumoto.
I wrote his memoir. I still do not know exactly which day his war ended, and I have come to think that gap is honest and not a failure of research.
The Diaries That Were Not Allowed
The camps did not permit prisoners to keep diaries. That is a small administrative fact with an enormous consequence, and it is the reason most of what happened in those years exists only as memory.
He wrote it down after he came home. Not during. Afterward, from recollection, with no notes to work from because keeping notes had been forbidden.
Think about what that means as a document. Everything in it passed through a man’s memory first, then sat there for however long it took him to be ready, and then got written. No contemporaneous record exists to check it against, because the existence of such a record was the thing being punished.
The same holds for an enormous amount of what we know about those camps. The official record is thin because the people in a position to keep records had reasons not to. What survives is testimony written later by men who decided it mattered.
Why Written-Down Matters More Than Remembered
He could have simply told the family. Plenty of men did, and plenty told nobody at all.
What happens to a spoken account is that it gets shorter and smoother every time it is told, and then it gets passed to somebody who was not there, and then it becomes a family story instead of an account. It stops being evidence and becomes a shape.
Our family had a version like that. The march through Manila had been remembered for decades as the Bataan Death March, which is a different event. It was not Bataan. His own written recollections said so plainly, and they had been saying so the whole time while the family told each other something else.
Nobody is at fault for that. It is what oral history does. Two things that happened in the same war in the same year to the same kind of men merge, and after fifty years nobody can say when the merge happened.
The written record held. That is the argument for writing it down, and it is a stronger argument than sentiment.
What VJ Day Asks of You
The men who could tell you about 1945 firsthand are almost all gone. That is arithmetic, not tragedy, and it has a practical consequence: whatever was not written down is now gone with them.
If you have somebody in your family who served, in any war, and who is still here, the useful thing to do is not to plan a project. It is to ask one question and record the answer on whatever device is in your pocket.
Not the whole story. One question, answered once, captured. Where were you when it ended. What did you eat first. Who did you tell.
Almost every regret I have heard about this is the same shape. Somebody meant to sit down properly one day, and the day did not come.
The Other Reason to Mark the Date
There is a version of remembrance that is only about gratitude, and it is fine, and it is not enough on its own.
The reason to know what happened in those camps is that the details are specific and the specificity is the point. A hell ship is not a general horror. It is a particular arrangement of a particular hold on a particular voyage. Three years and four months is not a long time in the abstract. It is one thousand two hundred and some days, each of which had to be got through individually.
Generalized remembrance slides off. The details stay.
Which is why the journals matter more than the ceremonies, and why 2 September is worth marking as the day the paperwork caught up with what those men had already survived.
How do you mark VJ Day?
Some people attend a service. Some read. Some have a relative to call, and that is the best option available if you have it.
If you do not, the next best is to find a first-hand account instead of a summary. There are a great many of them, written by men who came home and decided the record should exist. They are not comfortable reading and they were not written to be.
And if there is somebody in your family who was there and has never been asked, ask this year. The window on that closes without warning.