In a ceremony at Pearl Harbor, where Imperial Japan’s surprise Dec. 7, 1941, attack drew the United States into World War II, a crowd gathered Tuesday on the pier beside the battleship USS Missouri — the ship where Japanese diplomats signed the unconditional surrender that finally ended the war.
Few of the men who were there that day remain, but on Tuesday eight surviving crew members were present at Pearl Harbor.
One of them was Edgar Buffman, 100, who served as gunner’s mate 2nd class aboard the Missouri. Buffman, who hails from Rhode Island, is a “plank owner” of the ship — meaning he had been a crew member when it was commissioned in June 1944 and served aboard throughout the war.
He and fellow gunners shot at Japanese planes that tried to sink the warship during some of the fiercest naval battles in history.
“We manned this station every morning at dawn and at general quarters,” he said. “During my service aboard, fellow sailors and I experienced some of the most intense kamikaze attacks of the war.”
Buffman recalled that as they prepared to host the delegation of Japanese officials, who would surrender to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, there was pressure for everything to be perfect. Crew worked to give the ship a fresh paint job and ensure everything was to their
superiors’ liking.
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“The paint supplies ran short, (so) the Missouri had to borrow some gray paint from the USS Iowa to ensure the starboard side would show off for when the delegates came aboard,” he said. “Since we didn’t have enough paint to paint the port side of the ship, it was imperative we brought the Japanese contingent on board on the starboard side.”
The crew of the British Royal Navy’s HMS King George V sent the Missouri a table that was to be used for the ceremony, but when it arrived commanders decided it was too small and wouldn’t suit the occasion. At the last minute, commanders ordered two crew members — including Buffman — to go down into the ship’s mess hall to grab a table from there for the ceremony.
“It was on this modest table that the formal documents that ended World War II were signed,” Buffman said.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, the current commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told attendees at the ceremony that the “the greatest generation gave their blood, sweat and tears — and so many gave their lives — to secure the greatest gift of all: peace.
The gift of peace is the eternal legacy of the greatest generation.”
According to numbers from the state of Hawaii, 36,777 island residents served in the U.S. military during the war.
World War II proved to be the deadliest conflict in human history to date. New technologies were unleashed both on the battlefield as well as on cities and civilian population centers as the
Allied and Axis powers pounded each other with new tanks, artillery, aircraft and other tools of war across the globe.
The United States ultimately became the first country to develop a nuclear weapon, dropping two bombs on Japan in the last weeks of the war that leveled the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is still the only war in which nuclear weapons have been used.
By the time the Japanese surrender was signed on the deck of the Missouri, at least 75 million people died in the conflict — more than 40 million of them civilians.
Emma Baksic, a senior at Hawaii Technology Academy, won the Battleship Missouri Memorial’s speech contest and also addressed the audience. She recalled growing up seeing images of war on TV at her grandparents’ house “when I was too young to understand the images — flashes of gunfire, tanks rolling across deserts, grieving families clinging to each other in rubble.”
She reflected on the deaths of more recent wars and the devastation of ongoing wars raging today in Ukraine and the Middle East.
“We must work together, learn from history, and ensure that sacrifices made by those before us are not in vain,” she said. “Today is a call to action, a call to build a future free from conflict, hate and fear. To build bridges of understanding, compassion and solidarity — so that future generations never have to cross the same battlefields again.”
The anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific comes at a time when tensions in the region have once again been on the rise.
American military leaders in Hawaii have been keen to boost military alliances with other countries across Asia and the Pacific. Since the end of World War II, American leaders have come to see
Japan itself a particularly key ally.
“Our highest duty remains to deter aggression,” Paparo said. “We do our utmost to prevent war and to preserve the peace. But if we must fight, we will fight with overwhelming force, shoulder to shoulder with our allies and partners, and we shall prevail.”
In Beijing, Chinese leader Xi Jinping marked the occasion with a massive military parade, where he was joined by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other world leaders. In his remarks before the parade he declared that “the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable and humanity’s cause of peace and development will prevail.”
China has been stepping up military maneuvers around Taiwan, a self-ruled island democracy that it regards as a rouge province. Xi has said that bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control — by force if necessary — is critical to that “rejuvenation.”
Chinese forces also have occasionally attacked vessels from neighboring countries in the South China Sea — a critical waterway that more than a third of all the world’s trade travels through and which Beijing regards as its exclusive sovereign territory.
Meanwhile, American forces have continually conducted “freedom of navigation” operations in the South China Sea in the face of fierce objections from Beijing, while providing weapons to Taiwan.
President Donald Trump slammed China’s commemoration parade in a post on Truth Social, a social media platform that Trump personally owns, asking rhetorically whether Xi will acknowledge American troops who died in China assisting Chinese troops and guerillas in the fight against Imperial Japan. In the post, Trump wrote “please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against America.”
As the last veterans of World War II die, the number of people with firsthand memories of the horrors of the conflict are quickly dwindling. Buffman said that “most of us were in our late teens or early 20s. We didn’t stop to think much about fear, we simply did what needed to be done for our country.”
In closing the ceremony at Pearl Harbor, Capt. Garry Thornton — the chaplain for Navy Region Hawaii — gave a benediction that called on attendees to reflect on the cost of war.
Thornton warned that “although there are countless examples of human virtue, of demonstration of honor, courage and commitment to be found, may we exercise caution in order not to fall prey to the tendency in retrospect of glorifying or romanticizing the act of armed human conflict.”
“Amidst wars and rumors of wars and regional conflicts, our world is in a relative but very fragile state of peace,” Thornton said. “May the lessons learned and the losses suffered from World War II compel us to pray for the day when our swords shall be beaten into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. A day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn or wage war anymore.”
