Tuesday
Seven o'clock, and the war ends on a Tuesday evening
Truman read the Japanese acceptance in the Oval Office at 7:00 pm Eastern and American radio abandoned everything for the street. The off-air transfers of this evening carry their transmission times — you can follow the announcement across the networks minute by minute.
Opening the day…
The night of
Before 6:30 pm ET
Japan's conditional offer had come on the 10th and the networks had spent four days on standby, running bulletins about a surrender that kept not arriving. By this Tuesday afternoon the newsrooms were fully staffed and waiting for one sentence from the White House press room.
6:30 – 7:30 pm ET
Mutual has surrender news at 6:30 and again at 7:15. Truman announced Japan's acceptance at seven; Robert Trout reported the end of the Second World War for CBS; ABC has it at 7:45 and NBC at 8:30. Hearing the same news arrive four times in two hours is the closest thing radio has to a photograph of itself.
Evening ET
Ben Grauer in Times Square for NBC. CBS live in the streets of Hollywood. KMBC live from Independence, Missouri, where the President was from. WISN in Milwaukee, twice. Kaltenborn commenting, and Norman Corwin's “Fourteen August” on CBS that same night — written in hours, and still the best-written thing broadcast about the end of the war.
Where this comes from
