Don Anderson - Surrender in Tokyo Bay

Running time
1 min 26 sec
Date made
Copyright
Department of Veterans' Affairs

Transcript

Captain Buchanan with part of the ship's crew went ahead to Yokosuka Navy Base which was part of Tokyo Bay and he was given the job of representing the combined British and Australian forces and he took surrender of the base. After that we moved our ship out and anchored about a 100-metres away from the battleship Missouri and we watched the signing of the peace which is a long-drawn-out process.

I got sick of watching it. It was rather boring. It was quite interesting and a point of discussion among the ship's crew that was we knew the big wigs from Canberra wanted desperately to get up there and they would take the case of the surrender but they were too far away, they didn't have aircraft to fly the distance. They did have the repaired cruiser Hobart and they came rushing up in the Hobart, but they were too late. Captain Buchanan had done the job.

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