TRX
June 23rd, 2013

Down near the bottom there's a photo of the signing of the Japanese surrender. It's the same picture you see most places, except this one is in color.

MacArthur is the one at the desk with the pen. The two guys standing right behind him... the nearest is Jonathan Wainright, US Army, the guy beside him is Arthur Percival, British Army. They'd spent the previous five years in various Japanese prison camps. The liberating forces had dragged them out, hosed them off, and flown them out to the USS Missouri.

Wainright surrendered his forces at Corregidor, in direct contravention of George C. Marshall's orders. Percival had surrendered Malaya against Winston Churchill's direct orders.

Both men had been put into impossible situations and then royally screwed by their higher-ups, particularly Wainright. Pretty much everyone in the Allied forces knew it. And they didn't like it at all. Which is why Wainright and Percival are standing there in the prime spots; a slap in the face to the swivel-chair officers in DC and London.

Unfortunately, you have to do some reading on the Pacific theater in WW2 to get an idea of how badly those two guys were set up to fail. The Wikipedia entry on Wainright doesn't even mention how he and his men got bottled up and had to surrender. The entry on Percival is written by someone who wants him to look incompetent, which he wasn't. Percival's situation was vastly more political and complex than Wainright's.

But enough people knew what had really happened, and people knew other people, and the wheels turned, and there they were. Small recompense for seeing their commands slaughtered and then spending five years in a POW camp to dwell on it. And eventually the official US Army photographers recorded their presence at the end of the war, like Death in medieval paintings.

Most people don't know who those two guys were, or why they were standing there. And now you do.