Lawrence Moore Cosgrave accidentally signed the Japanese copy on the wrong line during Japan's 1945 surrender ceremony.
Cosgrave represented Canada at the signing aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945. When he signed the Japanese version of the Instrument of Surrender, he placed his signature one line too low, on the line intended for France. U.S. general Richard K. Sutherland corrected the document by crossing out and rewriting the country names.
The error was associated with Cosgrave's blindness in one eye, an injury he had suffered during World War I. The corrected document was accepted by the Japanese representatives, and the ceremony proceeded. Cosgrave did not make the same mistake on the Allied copy.
This episode is sometimes mistakenly described as invalidating the surrender. It did not: the error was corrected at the ceremony, and the document remained the formal record of Japan's capitulation.