September 2 · This Day in America
Just after nine in the morning, in Tokyo Bay, the deck of the battleship Missouri is crowded with sailors clinging to gun turrets to see. Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu limps forward and signs the Instrument of Surrender. General Yoshijiro Umezu follows. Then Douglas MacArthur signs for the Allied powers, using several pens so he can give them away. In twenty-three minutes it is over — the deadliest war in human history, ended on a folding table with a green felt cloth. "These proceedings are closed," MacArthur says. Above the bay the clouds break and hundreds of American planes roar overhead in formation. In a broadcast home that day he would tell the country, "Today the guns are silent." Sixty million people did not live to hear it. The men who did stood very still, and then the ships' whistles began to scream all across the harbor.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1963
The CBS Evening News doubles from fifteen minutes to thirty, and Walter Cronkite becomes anchor of network television's first nightly half-hour newscast. For the debut, President Kennedy grants an exclusive interview from Hyannis Port. The longer broadcast changes how a country learns about itself — and, eleven weeks later in Dallas, how it would learn the worst and grieve together, watching the same man's face.
Source: www.cbsnews.com
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death.”Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 1945