It was 75 years ago on Sept. 2 that the Second World War officially ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender aboard the 45,000-tonne battleship, the USS Missouri, in Tokyo Bay.
In stark contrast to the austere, late-night ceremony several months earlier in France that ended the war against Nazi Germany in western Europe, the capitulation of Imperial Japan was a triumphant public demonstration of U.S. military might that was personally choreographed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
More than 250 warships of the U.S. Pacific fleet crowded into the bay and hundreds of US Navy and US Army Air Force bombers and fighters flew overhead, having launched hours earlier from islands until previously held by Japan and from 38 nearby aircraft carriers.
A keen student of history with a high regard for his own place in it, MacArthur had the Missouri drop anchor where Cmdre. Matthew C. Perry had come ashore in 1853 to force Japan to open its ports to U.S. shipping. To underscore the point, Perry’s flag was brought over from the U.S. for the surrender and 300 journalists were brought on board the Missouri to witness the event.
It was an almost entirely American show that day on the Missouri as it was for most of the battles in the Pacific. However, unbeknownst to many Canadians, their troops played a role in the war in the Pacific for nearly four years and were to have made a significant contribution to the invasion of Japan.
All the countries which were allied with the U.S. in the Pacific and Indian oceans were represented in Tokyo Bay by a general or an admiral, except for Canada. Signing the instrument of surrender for Ottawa was Col. Lawrence Cosgrove who had been Canada’s military attaché for the South West Pacific.
Infamously, Cosgrove put his signature on the wrong line, obliging all the allied officers who went after him to sign one line below where they were supposed to have.
Canadian troops were also to have been part of the invasion of Japan that was aborted after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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With tensions on the boil again in the Indo-Pacific, the potential for Canadians becoming somehow drawn into a conflict between the West and China is rising. It is therefore perhaps a good time to revisit Canada’s part 75 years ago in the war against Japan.
Most Canadians are broadly familiar with Canada’s great contribution to the war in Europe from Dieppe, Southern Italy and Normandy to the Falaise Gap and the liberation of Belgium and Holland.
Far fewer Canadians know much about their 10,000 countrymen who fought in Alaska, flew missions over the Burma Hump with troops, ammunition and other supplies, and were pilots, navigators and gunners attached to Royal Air Force squadrons that attacked the Japanese in Malaya, Java (Indonesia) and elsewhere
Or that it was from a Canadian base in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) that the RCAF conducted surveillance missions using Catalina flying boats, including one patrol led by Squadron Leader Leonard Birchall which crucially spotted a Japanese fleet south of the island. Before being shot down and taken prisoner, they were able to give a warning that allowed for the preparation of defences that likely saved that British colony from invasion.
Even less is known in Canada today about the 25,000 Canadians that had begun to gather in the summer of 1945 to prepare for the invasion of Japan. Part of MacArthur’s plan was for a fleet of Canadian warships that had fought in Europe to head for the western Pacific and for several hundred RCAF Lancaster bombers to fly missions over Japan in the fall of 1945 as part of what was called Operation Downfall.
A full Canadian division was to go ashore the following spring near Tokyo as part of Operation Coronet.
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Canada’s Pacific war began three weeks after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, when 290 of 1,975 Canadians from the Quebec-based Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were killed defending Hong Kong, which fell on Christmas Day in 1941.
Almost as many Canadians subsequently died of starvation, disease and brutality in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
Canada’s war dead in the Pacific are remembered in Commonwealth cemeteries in the former British territory and other hauntingly beautiful, bucolic graveyards that I have seen from Katherine in northern Australia to Singapore, Thailand and Yokohama.
I heard about Canada’s intended role in Operation Downfall from my father. He had volunteered for the Pacific theatre and was on his way home from Germany to remuster for the invasion of Japan, where Canadian ground forces were to fight alongside American, British and Australian troops.
Invading Japan and the waves of kamikaze attacks that they might face while trying to land there was not something any soldier looked forward to. Based on the ferocious resistance of Japanese troops and civilians who fought the Americans in often savage hand-to-hand combat at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and especially Okinawa, and an order that no Japanese soldiers or civilians should ever surrender, the U.S. War Department estimated that as many as 800,000 allied troops and between five and 10 million Japanese civilians would die during the invasion of Japan.
Fortunately, it was not to be. My father’s war, Canada’s war and the Second World War itself ended within a couple of weeks of the U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on Japan after Emperor Hirohito defied many of his generals and ordered that Japan surrender.
My father took no joy in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he was grateful for the nuclear bombs because he agreed with U.S. assessments regarding the potential casualties in the allies were to invade Japan. He reckoned that as horrific as those bombs were, their use saved a far greater number of lives, including his own and that of many other Canadians.
Tuesday’s remembrances mark the end of the latest round of major Second World War memorials. A few elderly Canadian survivors of the wars in Asia are still alive. This remaining handful of Canadian warriors in the Pacific will all be gone within a couple of years.
Matthew Fisher is an international affairs columnist and foreign correspondent who has worked abroad for 35 years. You can follow him on Twitter at @mfisheroverseas
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