Tokyo Bay, September 1945

On the morning of September 2, 1945, the battleship USS Missouri lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay, surrounded by the ships of the Third Fleet. Shortly after nine o'clock the Japanese delegation came aboard, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu in a top hat and General Yoshijiro Umezu in uniform, and signed the Instrument of Surrender on a mess table covered with a green cloth.

General Douglas MacArthur signed for the Allied powers and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz for the United States. Representatives of eight other nations followed. The ceremony took twenty-three minutes.

As it ended the clouds broke, and a formation of B-29s and carrier aircraft, hundreds strong, passed over the bay. The war was over.

A ring of officers in khaki and whites stands around a small table where one man sits writing, another leaning over him, on a deck that reflects the sky like water. Beyond the rail the fleet rides at anchor, gray silhouettes against a bank of cloud that fills two thirds of the picture and is breaking open into gold at the left. Every figure is still. The eye is drawn past the crowd to the sea and the light, which is where the men are looking too.