On this day in 1945, the battleship Missouri lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay, and the whole business of ending the Second World War came down to a table, a deck plate and a clock. The table was an ordinary mess table brought up from below and covered with a green cloth, because nobody aboard had furniture suited to an occasion of that size. The documents were laid open on it. The signing began a little after nine in the morning, ship's time, and was finished a little over twenty minutes later.

The Japanese delegation, led by Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu, was brought out to the anchorage by the destroyer Buchanan and came up the starboard ladder. General Douglas MacArthur signed for the Allied powers and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz for the United States, and the representatives of the other Allied nations followed in turn. Then the delegation went back down the ladder and the Buchanan took them off, and the men who had set out the table cleared it again.

In the photograph below you can see how little ceremony the ceremony had: a cloth-draped table on bare wood, a microphone stand, officers standing in the ordinary uniforms they had on that morning, and the photographers packed onto a railed platform above, doing their work. The newsreel below has the Buchanan and the aircraft overhead. Six years of war, and twenty-odd minutes to write the end of it down.