GEOFF ELLWAND:
Making a mess of history
April 27, 2006 | More from Geoff Ellwand
Geoff Ellwand is a veteran CBC Radio reporter who normally covers Toronto. In a varied career he has followed some big stories, most notably the Bernardo-Homolka case, and some inconsequential ones, such as the death of an elephant. Recently, Ellwand returned to Tokyo – a city where he worked as a reporter 17 years ago.
A Canadian curiosity can be found in the heart of the Edo-Tokyo Museum.
The Museum is a spectacular building standing on five-storey-high concrete legs surrounded by the city it celebrates.
 The copy of the terms of the Japanese surrender displayed in Edo-Tokyo Museum contains a memorable gaffe by Canadian Col. Lawrence Moore Cosgrave — he signed below the intended line, instead of above it. The mistake was corrected on a U.S. copy of the document.
It is in the display devoted to the horrors of the Second World War that I came across a curious piece of Canadiana. It appears on the Japanese copy of the "Terms of Surrender" signed with great ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 2, 1945.
Two copies of the document were signed by the Japanese representatives and by the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. One copy was for the United States, and one for Japan. The Allied powers, including Canada, also signed. The then-Dominion's involvement in the Pacific war had been limited. Its most tragic contribution was to the hopeless defence of Hong Kong in 1941, in which nearly two thousand Canadians were either killed or captured.
The man who signed the historic documents for Canada was 55-year-old Col. Lawrence Moore Cosgrave. At the time he was serving as a Canadian liaison officer in Australia and presumably was the closest available Canadian of sufficient rank to appear at the signing. But the simple act of writing his name was not uneventful.
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.
While it was nine o'clock Sunday morning on Tokyo Bay, because of the time difference, it was eight o'clock Saturday night in Ottawa. There, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was following developments. He had organized a dinner party at a country club to mark the historic signing, and was apparently fed information by aides as events unfolded. "Next came word of the signatures by the U.S. and later the U.S.S.R., the Chinese and Canada." King wrote in his diary that night, "I made the announcement of each of these in turn. All stood when Canada 's signature was announced. The entire company rose." It appears no one in Canada was aware Cosgrove was, literally, making a mess of things.
Who was Cosgrove? He was an educated man. He graduated from R.M.C. and McGill. He was a brave man. During the First World War he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order not once but twice, for "conspicuous gallantry in action." France gave him the Croix de Guerre. Incidentally, he also served under Col John McCrae, the author of the famous war poem, "In Flanders Fields." Cosgrave was an accomplished man. He finished the war a Lieutenant Colonel and wrote a book, Afterthoughts of Armageddon published in 1919. He then served in a variety of consular posts throughout Asia and in the 1950s in Europe. In 1945 he was, fatefully, Canada's military attaché in Canberra. Despite his other accomplishments history cruelly remembers him only as the man whose brief walk on the world stage was marred by a misplaced signature.
The only other Canadian on the deck of the USS Missouri that day was a 30-year-old naval officer. He was Surgeon-Lieut. George Gayman who was Cosgrave's standby in the event of some problem. He wrote in his journal that after the signing, "T stayed on deck and talked to various people. A mighty air armada passed over out heads, the Marine Band played California, Here I Come and Sidewalks of New York, and everyone was happy, except Japan."
And perhaps, Col Cosgrave as well.
The Japanese version of the "Terms of Surrender" can be viewed every day but Monday at the impressive Edo-Tokyo Museum, (www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp). The nearest stop on the Tokyo Metro is the Ryogokuy station on the Oedo Line.
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