General MacArthur's USS Missouri Surrender Speech

Speech
War Speech Analysis

On September 2, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur made two statements during the Japanese surrender ceremony on the deck of the battleship, U.S.S. Missouri. Both statements were short. The first statement before the signing of the surrender documents was tighter in composition, more concrete in its tone, having almost a contractual focus. The latter was both more theological and more apocalyptic in its focus, and ultimately more disjointed.
The first focused on the agreement to be signed, an agreement “to restore peace.” General MacArthur emphasized that the conflicts between the nations were no longer to be debated; the battlefield had determined the winners and loser, and the goal among the parties was not vindictiveness but rather compliance with the document’s terms. MacArthur ended by stating his hope that a better world would result from the agreement. This statement conforms to the scope of the signing itself.
The second was darker, describing the mood in the early “grim” days of the war, when “an entire world lived in fear” and when “democracy was on the defensive”, when “modern civilization trembled in the balance”. MacArthur then abruptly shifts to the future, not merely discussing preservation of what had been won in the war but rather the “destructiveness of the war potential,” the risk it posed to civilization’s survival. He discussed the possibility of Armageddon, that humanity had already had its last chance. Survival of humanity required changes in human character to parallel the advances of knowledge over the prior two thousand years. All of this apparently references both the general destructiveness of the war and the specific development and use of the atomic bomb as the first true weapon of mass destruction. MacArthur’s two themes in the comments, the threats of the early war years and the risks of the new technology, do not tie together, making the second statement much weaker in composition.
Nonetheless, the message he provides here is quite important. Although the drafting of the speech is somewhat poor, the individual statements he makes are powerful. He writes in a simplistic enough way that any audience would understand and leave the deck of this ship with the same notion that peace must be maintained.

Submitted by Ben Shambon