USS Missouri served as the setting for Japan’s formal surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945.
Missouri was an Iowa-class battleship commissioned by the United States Navy in June 1944. She joined the Pacific Fleet in 1945 and participated in operations against Japanese positions before becoming the symbolic venue for the surrender. The ship anchored in Tokyo Bay near Yokosuka for the ceremony.
General Douglas MacArthur selected Missouri partly because President Harry Truman’s home state was Missouri, giving the event an additional American political symbolism. The ship’s forward deck held a small table where Japanese and Allied representatives signed the Instrument of Surrender.
Missouri remained in service after World War II, fought in the Korean War and was later modernized. It returned to the fleet in the 1980s and served during the Gulf War before becoming a museum ship at Pearl Harbor. The battleship is preserved near the USS Arizona Memorial, linking the war’s beginning and end in the Pacific.