Sunday
Twenty-three minutes on a battleship in Tokyo Bay
The surrender was signed on the deck of the USS Missouri and broadcast live to the United States by shortwave. It is the only formal end to a world war that anybody has ever been able to hear as it happened.
Opening the day…
The night of
Morning, Tokyo Bay
The instrument of surrender was signed shortly after nine in the morning Tokyo time — a little after 7:00 pm Eastern on the 1st — with MacArthur presiding and the pool microphones open on the deck. The whole ceremony runs about twenty-three minutes. MacArthur's announcement of the surrender and his closing remarks were carried worldwide.
Daytime ET
Truman broadcast to the nation on victory over Japan and proclaimed the following day a day of prayer. CBS World News Today assembled the correspondents; NBC ran a recap of the surrender broadcast for the audience that had missed it overnight.
Evening
AFRS put out a Command Performance V-J Day special with Truman; Bob Hope and Ernie Pyle material on the war's end went out to a service audience that was suddenly, administratively, going home. Within a year most of these programmes were cancelled — the war had been their reason for existing.
Where this comes from
