World War II was the biggest and deadliest war in history, involving more than 30 countries. Sparked by the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, the war dragged on for six bloody years until the Allies defeated the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy in 1945. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies—China, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita formally surrendered the remaining Japanese troops in the Philippines to United States Army General Jonathan M. Wainwright, the same commander who was compelled to surrender to Yamashita at Corregidor in 1942.[2]
Emperor Hirohito personally opened a new session of the Japanese Diet with an appeal to his people to "win the confidence of the world" and "establish firmly a peaceful state."[4]
In an important early event of the Cold War, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada, defected with 109 documents on Soviet espionage activities in the West. Gouzenko's defection would be kept secret from the public for five months, but it would force Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada.[6]
Japanese General Hideki Tojo attempted suicide when American troops arrived at his home to arrest him as a war criminal. Tojo shot himself below the heart with a revolver, but survived.[8]
A U.S. Senate resolution requesting a congressional probe of the Pearl Harbor attack was unanimously approved in the House of Representatives.[9]
The Belsen Trial began. Josef Kramer and 44 SS aides went on trial in British military court in Lüneburg on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in Nazi concentration camps.[9]
Died:Jack Thayer, 50, American survivor of the sinking of the Titanic; Eduard Wirths, 36, German SS doctor (suicide by hanging while in British captivity)
General George S. Patton complained in an interview that he had "never seen the necessity of the denazification program" and compared "this Nazi thing" to a "Democratic and Republican election fight."[9]
The Japanese garrison surrendered the Andaman Islands to the Anglo-Indian sloop Narbada.[14]
The freedom of the English city of Aldershot was conferred on the Canadian Army, the first time any British community had presented its freedom to a complete visiting army.[12]
Died:Béla Bartók, 64, Hungarian composer and pianist; A. Peter Dewey, 28, American soldier and the first U.S. fatality in French Indochina (killed by Viet Minh troops in a case of mistaken identity)
^Smith, Burge Carmon (2010). The 1945 Detroit Tigers: Nine Old Men and One Young Left Arm Win It All. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. p. 152. ISBN978-0-7864-6022-9.
