NEW YORK (AP) – Spencer Davis, wearing a shoulder patch reading “Associated Press war correspondent,” stood on the teak deck of the sleek gray battleship, one reporter among scores, and wrote the news bulletin announcing the end of the greatest conflict in human history:

“U.S.S. Missouri, Sunday, Sept. 2 (Ap) – Two Nervous Japanese Formally And Unconditionally Surrendered All Remnants Of Their Smashed Empire To The Allies Today, Restoring Peace To A War-battered World.”

A good summation. But one paragraph could not say it all, not all that had occurred since another Sunday morning 1,365 days earlier – the day the Pacific War began with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

Across half the hemisphere, from the edges of Australia to the shores of Alaska, from remote atolls to island archipelagos, battles raged at sea and in places very few people in the West, or in Japan, for that matter, had ever heard of: Bataan, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, New Guinea, Truk, Saipan, Leyte, Iwo Jima. New words and names entered the popular lexicon: banzai charge, Iron Bottom Bay, Marianas Turkey Shoot, kamikaze.

Graves of fallen soldiers, many of them only temporary, dotted the tropical outposts. A huge fleet of warships, built in months in American shipyards, met and destroyed Japan’s Imperial Navy, what had been at the outset the world’s No. 1 sea power.

On Sept. 2, 1945, almost a month had passed since atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki three days later, prompting Japan’s emperor Hirohito to give up, telling a nation hearing his voice on radio for the first time that it was time to “bear the unbearable.” Across America, Europe and the Pacific, troops girding for an invasion of Japan sighed, cheered and wept for joy.

The concern of Allied leaders had been that Tokyo would resist to the last Japanese, which at the time included a million-man army in China and home-front civilians being trained to fight with spears.

Now, on Sunday morning, Sept. 2, a U.S. Navy launch came alongside the battleship Missouri, anchored offshore in Tokyo Bay. The ship, named for President Truman’s home state, had been specifically chosen to host the surrender.

Eight Japanese, four in military uniform and four in formal diplomatic garb including top hats, disembarked from the launch, mounted stairs to the main deck and were piped aboard with the trappings of shipboard ritual. Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu needed assistance on the stairs, due to his wooden leg.

Waiting on the quarterdeck were Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who with Adm. Chester Nimitz had directed the United States’ four-year Pacific campaign, and senior officers from eight other Allied nations.

Photographers, reporters, lesser officers and ordinary sailors clung to every part of the superstructure to get a glimpse of the event.

Max Desfor, an AP photographer who had covered the battle of Okinawa and the Enola Gay’s return from the Hiroshima raid and later won a Pulitzer Prize in Korea, found his view blocked by taller spectators. To get pictures he raised the heavy Speed Graphic over his head and clicked the shutter. “It was what you would call a “Hail Mary’ today,” Desfor, 92, said in an interview Friday on the eve of the anniversary.

The surrender documents – large, open books – rested on a table, in the shadow of a forward turret housing three of the battleship’s nine 16-inch guns.

MacArthur was dressed informally, in khakis and open-collared shirt. But his manner was brisk and militarily correct.

After opening remarks expressing hope for lasting peace, he said, “I now invite the representatives of Japan to sign at the places indicated.”

Shigemitsu hobbled forward, accompanied by his aide, junior diplomat Toshikazu Kase.

“As he signed his name he paused for a moment looking inquiringly up at me,” Kase would recall five years later in a book, “Journey to the Missouri.” “I consulted my wrist watch: four minutes past nine. Deliberately he put the time down, 0904, after his name, Mamoru Shigemitsu, written in Japanese in a masterful hand …

“The instrument of formal surrender had just been signed by the principal Japanese delegate. At 9:04 A.M. September 2, 1945, the hostilities between Japan and the Allied powers officially came to an end.”

It remained, however, for Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, of Japan’s general headquarters, and for the Allied officials, to sign.

MacArthur, soon to become Japan’s military occupation governor, signed first. He handed two of the pens to Lt. Gen. Johnathan Wainwrght, still gaunt from four years as a Japanese prisoner, and Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, Britian’s former commander at Singapore.

Otherwise there was no gloating, no driving home the point. The obvious discomfort of the eight Japanese was quite enough.

Then came Nimitz, and one after another, Allied officers delegated by their governments stepped forward – Britain, Australia, Canada, China, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands – even the Soviets, who had declared war on Japan just days after Nagaasaki, hoping to gain some of the spoils of victory.

When it was done, MacArthur would have the last word: “These proceedings are closed.”

“The day was very gray and overcast but just as he said that, the sun broke out and lit up the whole scene,” said Desfor, of Silver Spring, Md.

The Japanese delegation filed down the ladder, as a bosn’s mate piped the honors appropriate to officials of a friendly government.

After service in the Korean War and later in the Middle East, the USS Missouri was permanently retired. Sixty years after hosting the surrender of Japan, the last of America’s battleships is a floating naval museum at Pearl Harbor, where the Pacific War began.