Don Anderson - The signing of the Instrument of Surrender

Transcript

We moved out and anchored a few days before the signing of the peace. It might have been a couple of days, I don't know. As I say, we were fortunate enough to anchor within a short distance to see all the goings on on the battleship Missouri but after a while, the toing and froing of every representative of every nation including Russia, every nation that could had their representative there, the big wheelers and dealers making a name for themselves, I wasn't very interested in that. It was interesting.

See, there were 2,000 crew members on the Missouri, and they were sitting on the great guns. How they sat there for hours straddling those guns, I don't know. I lost interest. You couldn't hear what was going on, of course, but you could see every so often some big wig would walk up to the table where they sign, sign the thing, then walk away again with a great show of pomp and so on.