That had happened on Aug. 15 — V-J Day — when U.S. President Harry Truman announced that Japan's Emperor Hirohito had called it quits after the leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs.

Only the formal surrender remained.

When that ceremony took place on the morning of Sept. 2, Missouri navigator Lt. Cmdr. Jim Starnes, 24, was the officer of the deck and in charge of making many of the day's arrangements.

"We carried off this ceremony by the book," said Starnes, of Atlanta, Ga.

Still, Starnes admitted the book didn't detail the specifics of how to go about arranging an unconditional surrender and the termination of a global conflict that claimed 55 million lives.

There was, for instance, the issue of which of two five-star flags should fly — that of fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz or that of the general of the Army, Douglas MacArthur.

You improvise and fly them both, said Starnes. "They were equals — neither outranked the other."

As the ceremony began on the Missouri's Veranda Deck, America's last battleship was surrounded by an armada of Allied firepower, consisting of nine additional battleships, two aircraft carriers, a dozen submarines, 48 destroyers, and more than 170 light and heavy cruisers, tank landing ships, gunboats, attack transports and other combat and support vessels.

On board, some 3,000 officers, sailors, soldiers, Marines and members of the press had claimed every available inch of deck space to watch the 11-man Japanese delegation formally admit defeat and put pen to surrender papers.

Before the signing, MacArthur made a brief conciliatory speech which called for "freedom, tolerance and justice," and asked "both victors and vanquished to rise to a higher dignity."

The end of World War II came at 9:04 a.m. when the Japanese foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, signed on behalf of the emperor and the Japanese government.

'A pitiful scene'

Jiro Yukimura got a prime view of the historic ceremony as a 24-year-old Army lieutenant assigned as a translator for the press corps on deck. Jan Tenbruggencate | The Honolulu Advertiser

Army Lt. Jiro Yukimura was one of only three Americans of Japanese ancestry on board, and the only AJA present who had been in Honolulu when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

The former University of Hawai'i student recalled seeing black smoke and enemy planes over Pearl Harbor that fateful Sunday morning 1,364 days earlier.

But on the Sunday of the surrender, what caught his eye was the humiliation borne by the wooden-legged foreign minister.

"It was kind of a pitiful scene to watch him being carried up to the deck and limping along with a cane to his position at the table," said Yukimura, who lives on Kaua'i.

As a 24-year-old interpreter assigned to the press corps, Yukimura had been among the first visitors to arrive at the Missouri that day.

At 7 a.m., a destroyer maneuvered alongside the Mighty Mo and 150 reporters, photographers, motion-picture cameramen and radio broadcasters scrambled up the gangplank to their assigned positions on the Missouri's main deck.

"Of course, MacArthur made sure he had good coverage," said Yukimura. "He took care of the news people, and fortunately I was attached to them. We were right up there on the deck."

Tale of two tables

Meanwhile, a quarter-mile away Royal Navy Lt. Reginald Draper squinted to make sense of the proceedings from the deck of HMS Duke of York, one of the two British battleships in Tokyo Bay. HMS King George V was the other.

Recent Waikiki visitor Reggie Draper — who was a lieutenant on a British battleship attending the surrender — wrote in his diary that day: "Peggy's Birthday (24) Peace with Japan signed on USS Missouri ..." Bruce Asato | The Honolulu Advertiser

"I was assigned to the Duke of York, which carried Adm. Bruce Fraser, who signed the Japanese surrender for Great Britain," Draper said.

Other than the comings and goings of vessels around the Missouri, Draper said, it was not possible to make out what was happening at the surrender ceremony.

But he said he was aware that the British had brought a table on which the papers were to be signed — "a beautifully polished mahogany table."

However, that table was deemed too small to hold the leather- and canvas-bound surrender documents. So Lt. Bob Mackey, the Mighty Mo's disbursing officer, hurriedly ordered a table from the mess hall to be brought to what would be known as the "Surrender Deck" and covered with a green baize cloth from the wardroom.

"So, the historic table on which all the signatures were signed was just an ordinary mess table from down below," said Draper, who suspects that in truth, the Americans simply disliked the idea of a British table being used for the historic signing.

Following the formalities, Starnes recalled the skies over the anchorage being blackened by a low and long-lasting flyover by 450 Third Fleet carrier planes and a roaring formation of Army Air Corps B-29 bombers.

Six decades after the moment, Starnes remains struck by the abrupt change from war to peace that morning.

"The memory I have that is the most profound is how quickly we went from being enemies of Japan to being friends — how we can change our attitudes so quickly," he said.

But to this day, Yukimura thinks about the irony of MacArthur's professed hope that Sept. 2, 1945, might have brought a lasting world peace.

"The disappointing thing is that right after that, there was the Korean War, and then the other wars, Vietnam, and even now we are stuck with wars," he said.

"It's kind of sad that we haven't learned from our mistakes."