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On This Day: VJ Day marks end of World War Two as Japan surrenders
Jubilant crowds are seen swarming down Whitehall after Japan finally laid down its arms in a fight that had cost the lives of 52,000 Britons
AUGUST 15, 1945: Britons marked VJ-Day with wild celebrations across the country on this day in 1945, after the surrender of Japan officially ended World War II.
In a British Pathé newsreel, soldiers and sailors are seen dancing on top of Queen Victoria’s statue while thousands of people sang outside Buckingham Palace.
Elsewhere in London, jubilant crowds are seen swarming down Whitehall after Japan finally laid down its arms in a fight that had cost the lives of 52,000 Britons.
These included 12,000 prisoners of war who were starved, worked and beaten to death, with most perishing while building the Thailand to Burma railway.
The Pacific War, which also cost the lives of 106,000 Americans, only ended after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With almost three million of his subjects dead and his country virtually laid to waste, Japanese Emperor Hirohito finally agreed to surrender to the Allies.
In his first ever radio broadcast on what became VJ – or Victory over Japan Day - he told his people: “The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon.”
The emperor, who the Japanese considered a god, also begged his people “to endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable”.
However, although his generals had signed surrender documents, the allegedly divine ruler never once uttered the word “surrender” in his address.
And tens of thousands of dogged Imperial Japanese Army troops, who had been implored to fight until either victory or death, carried on fighting.
They continued waging the war in China, Guadalcanal, Peleliu and in various parts of the Philippines until 1948.
The last Japanese soldier to surrender was Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who finally lay down his arms on March 9, 1974 - almost 29 years after the war ended.
[On This Day: First nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima]
The now 91-year-old was the last of a band of four soldiers to hold out in the jungles of the Philippine island of Lubang.
Humanitarian missions were sent to try and persuade Lieutenant Onoda and his companions that the war really was over after attempts to flush them out failed.
But the resolute intelligence officer thought these efforts were just enemy tricks and believed he had to keep on fighting until he received official orders.
Eventually, Lieutenant Onoda’s commanding officer Major Yoshimi Taniguchi flew to Lubang to personally relieve him of duties and request him to surrender.
His doggedness is an extreme example of Japanese soldiers’ grim determination, which had been grossly underestimated by British and American forces.
Within weeks of destroying the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan had humiliated Britain too by seizing its colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong.
[On This Day: Pigeon G.I. Joe given the Victoria Cross]
But America’s mighty industrial machine ensured that it was better armed and its soldiers – and eventually the British – took the fight to the Japanese.
The Imperial Army were largely forced back to their home islands by the time the atom bombs were dropped in a bid to save up to a million American lives.
