VJ Day: The Record That Only Exists Because Somebody Wrote It Down

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 ceremony was over in about twenty minutes, and the Second World War was formally finished. (See also my review of A World at Arms)

Japan had announced its surrender on 15 August. That’s 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. Of all the dates on this calendar, this one affects me most. A twenty-minute ceremony on a battleship gets the photographs and the anniversaries, while the men it freed had to find out on their own schedule, from guards or from rumor. I think the way we remember the day gets the proportions backward.

The Gap Between the Ceremony and the Gate

News didn’t 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’s a formal date, which is 2 September, and there’s a personal one. That’s 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 don’t know exactly which day his war ended, and I’ve come to think that gap is honest and not a failure of research.

Watch: VJ Day 1945: The Bravest Generation Celebrates WWII's End (Archive), The DEVELOP Tube Photography Video Channel on YouTube

The Diaries That Were Not Allowed

The camps didn’t permit prisoners to keep diaries. That’s a small administrative fact with an enormous consequence, and it’s 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 he wrote it down. 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.

That fact is an outrage. The people who ran the camps controlled the paper, and the only answer the prisoners had was to survive long enough to write it down themselves afterward. I read every one of those accounts as a small act of defiance against the people who wanted no record at all.

Why Written-Down Beats 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’s told, and then it gets passed to somebody who wasn’t 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. It’s a different event. It wasn’t 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’s 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’s the argument for writing it down, and it’s a stronger argument than sentiment.

I find that reassuring and a little frightening. A page holds its ground for fifty years while everything around it drifts, and yet most families are relying on memory alone and have no idea how far it’s already bent.

What VJ Day Asks of You

The men who could tell you about 1945 firsthand are almost all gone. That’s arithmetic, and it has a practical consequence I find hard to accept: whatever nobody wrote down is now gone with them. If you have somebody in your family who served, in any war, and who’s still here, the useful thing to do is 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’ve heard about this is the same shape. Somebody meant to sit down properly one day, and the day didn’t come. That regret is the saddest one I know, because it’s so ordinary. Nobody decided not to ask. They just assumed there’d be a better afternoon for it.

The Other Reason to Mark the Date

There’s a version of remembrance that’s only about gratitude, and it’s fine, and it’s 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 a particular arrangement of a particular hold on a particular voyage. Three years and four months is one thousand two hundred and some days, each of which had to be got through individually.

I’ve never been moved by a generic tribute to the fallen, and I doubt many people are. A count of days, each one survived separately, is what moves me, and it’s the detail a reader keeps long after the speech is forgotten.

Which is why the journals outweigh 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’s the best option available if you have it.

If you don’t, 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’re not comfortable reading and they weren’t written to be. And if there’s somebody in your family who was there and has never been asked, ask this year. The window on that closes without warning.

A little awkwardness now costs far less than years of wishing you’d asked. The ceremonies will come back every September, and I’d hate for anybody reading this to learn the hard way that the people who remember 1945 won’t.

VJ Day FAQ