Flashback to WWII - Canadian screws up Japanese Surrender Document - GoFuckYourself.com

Machete_ · 10-25-2010, 02:22 PM

It?s a paper that tells the story of Canadian Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave blundering his way into the history books by messing up the signatures on the official document of surrender:

The New York Times correspondent, Robert Trumbull, in a special dispatch to the Globe and Mail wrote, ?Colonel Cosgrove emerges as the feature player in an incident [that] ? put a touch of humor in the gravest ceremony of our time.?

For some inexplicable reason ?and who among us has not had the same difficulty in filling out a form ? Colonel Cosgrove wrote his name not on the line above ?The Dominion of Canada,? as was intended, but on the line below. It was a blunder that set off a chain reaction, forcing the remaining signatories to sign below the place designated for their country. The New Zealand representative, the last to sign, had to affix his signature in the bottom margin of the page. ?Col. Cosgrave?s botch ? will rank high among the historic bobbles of our time.? hooted correspondent Turnbull in the Globe.

Several months later, the captain of the USS Missouri recounted what happened when the signing ceremony was over. ?The Japanese came forward to pick up the Japanese copy of the surrender papers,? Capt. Murray recalled, ?and (they) started to question something on it. General (Walter) Sutherland (MacArthur?s chief of staff) took a pen and drew a line on the thing and said ?Now that?s fine. Now it?s all fixed?. So (the Japanese representative) took his copy and folded it up and went on down the gangway.?

What the famously abrupt Sutherland had done was amend the august surrender document with a series of cross-outs and scribbles. It is the Japanese copy of the surrender, the botched copy, that now resides in the Edo-Tokyo Museum. On the other copy, the one the Americans took back to Washington, Col Cosgrave got it right.

http://www.japanprobe.com/2010/10/25...nder-document/

10-25-2010, 02:22 PM	#1
Machete_ WINNING! Industry Role: Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 14,579	Flashback to WWII - Canadian screws up Japanese Surrender Document It?s a paper that tells the story of Canadian Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave blundering his way into the history books by messing up the signatures on the official document of surrender: The New York Times correspondent, Robert Trumbull, in a special dispatch to the Globe and Mail wrote, ?Colonel Cosgrove emerges as the feature player in an incident [that] ? put a touch of humor in the gravest ceremony of our time.? For some inexplicable reason ?and who among us has not had the same difficulty in filling out a form ? Colonel Cosgrove wrote his name not on the line above ?The Dominion of Canada,? as was intended, but on the line below. It was a blunder that set off a chain reaction, forcing the remaining signatories to sign below the place designated for their country. The New Zealand representative, the last to sign, had to affix his signature in the bottom margin of the page. ?Col. Cosgrave?s botch ? will rank high among the historic bobbles of our time.? hooted correspondent Turnbull in the Globe. Several months later, the captain of the USS Missouri recounted what happened when the signing ceremony was over. ?The Japanese came forward to pick up the Japanese copy of the surrender papers,? Capt. Murray recalled, ?and (they) started to question something on it. General (Walter) Sutherland (MacArthur?s chief of staff) took a pen and drew a line on the thing and said ?Now that?s fine. Now it?s all fixed?. So (the Japanese representative) took his copy and folded it up and went on down the gangway.? What the famously abrupt Sutherland had done was amend the august surrender document with a series of cross-outs and scribbles. It is the Japanese copy of the surrender, the botched copy, that now resides in the Edo-Tokyo Museum. On the other copy, the one the Americans took back to Washington, Col Cosgrave got it right. http://www.japanprobe.com/2010/10/25...nder-document/