Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that on August 14, a group of Japanese fanatics, young military officers, had sought to stop the surrender by killing the commanding general of Emperor Hirohito's personal guards, Lt. General Mori, and surrounding the palace. After the killing, they wrote out forged orders to his subordinates, some of whom recognized the false signature. Some of the conspirators committed suicide within the headquarters of the guard. Others tried to commandeer the radio broadcasting station, to prevent the surrender tape of the Emperor from being transmitted, but the move was prevented by employees.

The rebelling officers were able to insert a line into the Imperial communique announcing the surrender: "The Japanese Army and naval forces, upon receipt of the Imperial command to safeguard our national policy and defend our land, have launched, with everyone in the fighting services as a unit, a vigorous operation against the enemy Allied forces." Another officer issued a proclamation in the name of War Minister Anami ordering the continued fighting. As he had been a proponent of surrender, the War Minister, subsequently committing suicide, then angrily dismissed this subordinate.

Several suicide pilots also dove into Tokyo Bay at the announcement of the surrender, while others, as previously reported, had dropped leaflets urging continued resistance. Some 35 civilians committed suicide in front of the Imperial Palace after the announcement of surrender.

Otherwise, the capital was fairly quiet from the time of surrender until the beginning of occupation.

The same sources who had provided these stories had reported to correspondent Russell Brines that surrender discussions had begun in late February, but the militarists overwhelmingly had voted to continue to fight. The Japanese had hinted in June to Russia that they would surrender Manchuria and North China to reform the Soviet neutrality pact denounced by Russia in late March. The Soviets did not reply. The Japanese considered sending an envoy to Moscow in July, until it was reported that Stalin had attended the Potsdam Conference.

The Emperor had in March summoned former Premiers to solicit their opinions. While most favored peace, they were unwilling so to advise the Emperor out of fear of assassination by elements of the Army. The Emperor was finally able to overcome the continued bellicosity of the militarists on August 8 after Russia had entered the war in the wake of the Hiroshima bomb.

Initially, the Army had demanded that Foreign Minister Togo send to the Allies the demand that no occupation troops be allowed to enter Japan. Knowing that to be futile, Togo refused, receiving the support of other Cabinet members. Eventually, he sent the acceptance of the Potsdam terms on the basis that the Emperor be allowed to retain the throne.

General MacArthur was set to lead a three-mile long parade of occupation troops into Tokyo, beginning Saturday, with occupation to be complete by Tuesday. The parade would be in sight of the Imperial Palace. An honor guard of the Seventh Regiment, that of General Custer, would escort General MacArthur from the Tokyo railroad station to the American Embassy.

Censorship of Domei, under the supervision of Brig. General Elliott Thorpe, would immediately begin at the inception of the occupation.

Meanwhile, 9,000 prisoners had been liberated from the prison camps in Japan thus far.

From San Diego, as indicated yesterday, it was reported that Rear Admiral John S. McCain had died the day before of a heart attack at age 61, having just returned to the United States on Wednesday from the signing ceremony the previous Sunday onboard the U.S.S. Missouri. As commander of Task Force 38 since October, his planes, in the last three months of the war, had knocked out 6,000 enemy planes and two million tons of shipping, including a hundred warships. His ships, used in support of the Okinawa invasion between late March and June, were regularly targeted by kamikaze raids, subjecting the Admiral to constant strain.

About the surrender ceremony, he had stated, "Japan's warlords are not half licked yet. I didn't like the look in their eyes." He had also stated, "Give me enough fast carriers and let me run them and you can have the atom bomb," meaning that he put more stock in the Navy carrier task force than in the new terror weapon.

Admiral McCain had received the Distinguished Service Medal for having contributed greatly to the occupation of the Guadalcanal-Tulagi area in August through October, 1942.

All twenty-one passengers and crew aboard an Eastern Air Lines flight, which had encountered bad weather, were killed when the plane crashed en route from Miami to New York, near the Pee Dee River over a swamp in the vicinity of Florence, S.C., at 2:00 a.m. this date. Nine of the passengers were military personnel and there were three crew members aboard.

Senator Walter George of Georgia, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, predicted that there would be a five billion dollar cut in Federal taxes to become effective January 1. Corporations would receive two billion of the cuts. Individual cuts might come as a flat percentage of income across the board.

The House Steering Committee endorsed the Senate resolution passed unanimously the previous day to open a ten-member board inquiry into the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Republicans offered an amendment whereby, instead of six of the members being Democrats, it would be equally bipartisan and expanded to twelve members.

Observers of Capitol Hill politics found the 21-point message of President Truman delivered the previous day to Congress to echo the policies of FDR and not suggest any conservative or leftward turn of the Administration. Only six were new suggestions of the President, including the proposal for higher unemployment compensation, increase of the minimum wage from 40 cents an hour, and to continue the draft of men between 18 and 25.

Striking workers across the nation numbered 100,000 for the first time since several months before the end of the war. The figures had ranged between 30,000 and 50,000 in August, rising sharply to 75,000 toward the end of the month. The automotive industry accounted for 42,000 of the idle workers, triggered by a walkout at Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co., which in turn impacted Ford, causing 30,000 workers to be without work. The original dispute concerned three employees having been discharged by the wheel company, resulting in 4,200 workers striking.

You need those wheels to roll. It can be mighty bumpy otherwise.

In Akron, 15,000 more workers had struck at B. F. Goodrich.

You need that good rubber, too. Otherwise, sparks.

Siwash, the duck which had served as the mascot of the First and Second Battalions of the Tenth Marines, having joined the service in a New Zealand pub in March, 1943 after a corporal had won her in a raffle for a shilling, was cooked and eaten over a nice dinner with some Chianti and fava beans while toasting the Chinese victory over the Japanese.

No, no, our eyes are going.

Actually, Siwash had 43 more points for discharge than her master's 90, and so was discharged by being eaten instead of her master.

No, no, no.

Siwash had 12 ducklings during a furlough in Wilmington, Ill., racking up 72 of her 133 points.

She also liked beer, having acquired the taste in her dissolute days as a pubfly, or, as we once heard someone in a video store say with regard to a movie, "'Barf-ly'—what's that about?"

Siwash was honorably discharged, but promptly got drunk, got into a fight with a sailor duck, Seawabee, and died the next day of wounds to her pride. Her treatment was complicated by the apparent derision she continued to hurl at the medics attempting to tend her wounds, out in the barranca in the moonlight.

No, you will have to read it. Our eyes are too blurry at this point.

Incidentally, the latest raw score on the Iconic Pandemic which has increasingly broken out in the United States in 2011-2012, and possibly is spreading abroad, having found its source, we feel certain, within the pages of the Wicked-pedia, is 43,422 superfluous uses during the last month in major online publications and broadcast media. We shall keep you apprised of this developing iconic story, awesome in its portent for the world's increasingly mindless and uncool reportage.

Those who want to join our movement, the Iconicclasts, need not pay dues; just write your friendly reporter or commentator every time you see it or hear it and ask what was so iconic about the particular movie, book, actor, actress, singer, song, what have you, to which or whom they normlessly applied the term, and sit back and await a friendly and wholly irrelevant reply.

On the editorial page, "New Man, New Phase" finds the President's 21-point message to Congress the previous day to have established him as the new man in the White House, with his own policy agenda from that point forward. Such proposals as unemployment compensation, the increase of the minimum wage to some level higher than 40 cents, 65 cents an hour having been bandied about as an appropriate level, reorganization of the Federal Government, the full employment bill, and the renewal of the earlier failed proposal of FDR to make the Fair Employment Practices Commission permanent, had cast President Truman as a solid New Dealer of moderate politics, somewhere between Grover Cleveland and Henry Wallace in terms of individual responsibility to the Government as much as Government responsibility to the individual.

"The Last Straw" finds McFadden Publications marketing a three-point plan to prepare a returning veteran's wife, sweetheart, or mother for reunion with her husband, sweetheart, or son. It was enough to make any returning veteran, even if having spent two hard winters only in the Charleston Navy Yard, into a "case".

"Far and Near" comments on a report that 7,000 Australian brides of servicemen in the U.S., after having been together for brief periods following marriage, remained stuck in Australia, able to gain passage to the United States only at the rate of 500 per month. The divorce rate among these couples was predicted to be high.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has a debate between Representative John Sparkman of Alabama, eventually the vice-presidential candidate with Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and Malcolm Tarver of Georgia and Emanuel Celler of New York, with Mr. Sparkman sitting as chairman, debating two points of order raised by Mr. Celler, one against the proposed appropriation for the Office of Economic Stabilization and the other for the Scientific Research and Development Office, both sustained because Clarence Cannon of Missouri conceded them, Mr. Tarver having raised a point of order in objection to the chair's use of the term "sustained".

Drew Pearson suggests that the weight of the world had fallen onto the shoulders of Secretary of State James Byrnes, to prevent another war, especially now with the atomic bomb on the scene.

A piece from Business Week comments that the abrupt end to Lend-Lease following the end of the Pacific war should have come as no surprise to anyone, including the British, as it had been planned that way for several months. While Britain faced a problem, it suggested that the condition was not the result of the abrupt end of Lend-Lease but rather Britain's trade deficit, with imports exceeding exports by a factor of 2.5, or 4.8 billion dollars, reducible to one billion following reconversion in Britain and cutbacks on war imports, only a fourth of which had come from the United States.

A letter writer vehemently disagrees with Senator Clyde R. Hoey's recommendation to end the draft, says that most servicemen, including his engineer brother-in-law who had served for two years in the Pacific, were opposed to ending the draft, as they wanted to be able to come home.

Marquis Childs comments on the month-long delay since the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, while Congress was on summer leave, during which time nothing had been accomplished to limit future use of the bomb and to devote atomic power to peaceful purposes.

Scientists had made it clear that the capability existed to construct a bomb so large as to destroy the atmosphere, wiping out every living being on the planet in one fatal blast.

Two days after the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Pravda had carried the story that an atomic bomb had been used. In June, the Soviets had invited scientists from around the world to participate in its 220th anniversary celebration of the Russian Academy of Sciences. American physicists who had attended the event said that it would only be a matter of two to five years until the Russians had the atomic secret.

An atomic expert, according to the New York Times, had been discovered in Yugoslavia by the Soviets and flown to Moscow.

"And the rest, as Hamlet said, is silence."

In fact, it would be four years before the first successful test in the Soviet Union.

The next move, said Mr. Childs, would have to come from the United States.

"It is death and destruction, or life and world unity. But the odds lengthen each day against what Bert L. Taylor in the old Chicago Tribune always referred to as the so-called human race."