Percival and American General Jonathan M. And alongside MacArthur-in a conscious nod to the role General Lincoln had taken at Yorktown-stood British General Arthur E. But then, of course, Truman had tapped MacArthur to lead the occupation of Japan, so his acceptance of the surrender was only natural. General Douglas MacArthur’s selection to oversee the ceremonies was not uncontroversial-annoying, among other people, Admiral Chester Nimitz, who thought that the general’s prominence slighted the Navy and Marine Corps which in his view had done the most to win the war. Most appropriately, it was named after President Harry Truman’s home state and had been christened by his daughter Margaret. The vessel on which the surrender ceremony would take place, the battleship USS Missouri, had been commissioned in 1944 and seen action at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
It consisted of over 300 ships of all varieties and from many nations, all of them carefully tabulated by the US Navy for posterity. The armada that sailed into Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, was much more massive than the one that had appeared there almost a century earlier. Ships sailing into Tokyo Bay for the surrender and occupation of Japan. Both men conducted the surrender through a formal exchange of letters, with Grant’s concession that his former adversary officers could keep their swords, and the men their horses, standing out as an act of generosity. Victor and defeated unknowingly met in the home of farmer Wilmer McLean, who had fled there after having had the opening Battle of First Battle of Bull Run fought around his house on July 21, 1861. Although this surrender meeting was much more spur of the moment, it still was charged with symbolism that would last down through the ages.
Likewise on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Robert E. The whole event was highly ritualized-although Cornwallis refused to appear, sending his subordinate Charles O’Hara out instead-with Rochambeau and Washington sternly directing O’Hara to tender his sword to American General Benjamin Lincoln, who had the previous year himself been forced to surrender to the British at Charleston, South Carolina. Such was the case on October 19, 1781, when General George Washington and his colleague, French General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, accepted the surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis’s British forces at Yorktown. Each time it happens, the event is charged with deliberate-and sometimes inadvertent-symbolism.
The United States has always been particularly formal about how it accepts the surrender of defeated enemies.
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