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Commodore Matthew Perry may not have enjoyed the same level of prestige as his older brother Oliver Hazard Perry, who famously defeated the British fleet at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812—but that was about to change. In July 1853, the American naval commander was on the cusp of accomplishing something few other mariners had done. The smoke-blowing steam engine of the paddle frigate USS Mississippi, whose construction the commodore had personally supervised, propelled the vessel into Tokyo Harbor, to the dismay of Japanese onlookers lining its shores. As was customary during any visit to a foreign land, Perry’s flagship flew all of its colors, including a new hand-sewn, 31-star wool American flag, recently modified after California’s 1850 entry as the Union’s latest state.
Sent by the United States to “coerce the government of Japan into civilization,” as one 1940s publication put it, Perry’s fleet of four black iron-hulled, steam-powered ships delivered a personal letter from President Millard Fillmore to Emperor Tokugawa Ieyoshi. Influenced in no small part by fusillades from the cannons and rifles of the U.S. Navy, the emperor, the shogun and the entirety of the Japanese command saw little option other than to entertain this representative of the emerging Western power. Further fueled by fear of the European nations already carving nearby China into spheres of influence, Japan’s leaders consented to an official treaty with the U.S. when Perry returned for a second visit in early 1854, opening their ports to trade with a foreign power for the first time in centuries.
When Perry departed Japan later that year, he left a nation on the cusp of change. Japan transitioned from a period of isolation to one marked by assertiveness, embarking on an imperialist journey that culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—a voyage that saw the Asian empire’s ships retrace Perry’s route home. By the time World War II ended in September 1945, Perry, his crew and the Mississippi were long gone, the frigate having sunk during a naval battle of the American Civil War. But even in those closing days of the global conflict, the commodore’s legacy and the significance of his visit were far from forgotten. One man’s wish and another’s epic journey would ensure that.
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Known for his gruff, profane and combative attitude, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey—the “Patton of the Pacific,” as some called him—had successfully led his U.S. Navy task force from late 1941 to the 1942-1943 Guadalcanal campaign to the waters of the Japanese archipelago in 1945. With the Japanese surrender at hand, the world’s attention centered on the admiral’s flagship, the USS Missouri, chosen as the venue for the formal ceremony in part because Missouri was President Harry S. Truman’s home state.
Halsey’s Missouri entered Tokyo Bay on August 29, 1945, just over 92 years after Perry’s Mississippi docked at that same port. While Perry’s visit had jump-started the birth of an empire, Halsey’s would witness the end of that chapter in Japan’s history. As the admiral stood on his flagship’s bridge, the moment and its significance were not lost on him. Converging from all points of the Pacific theater of war, the warships of the U.S. Navy steamed by the scores into sprawling Tokyo Bay. As the host of the upcoming ceremonies, Halsey had thought of everything, including a most appropriate symbol for the historic occasion.
A wire from Halsey had arrived at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, on August 23. The urgent request sought delivery of the flag from Perry’s 1853 Tokyo expedition to the Missouri as soon as possible. While the details of the surrender ceremony and its location largely remained a secret, those in the know in Washington—and crew members aboard Halsey’s ship, who were tasked with repairing the damage from a recent kamikaze attack—were already full steam ahead with preparations. Within hours of receiving Halsey’s wire, the museum’s curator had packaged up the brittle, hole-ridden flag in a wooden box and had it delivered to the Officer Messenger Mail Center in Washington, D.C., which sent top secret documents worldwide via courier during the war.
John K. Bremyer, a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, had traveled a long road to attain his desk job at the messenger center. But this journey was nothing compared with what his superiors would expect him to do over the next several days. As Bremyer recalled in a 2005 oral history interview with the Fredericksburg, Texas-based National Museum of the Pacific War, he was deep in his studies at the University of Kansas law school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, more than 3,500 miles away from his suburban hometown of McPherson, Kansas. Bremyer sought an officer’s commission, but after numerous physicals at various branches’ recruitment centers, he was repeatedly rejected due his colorblindness.
Undeterred, Bremyer sat for one more physical at a Navy recruitment center in early 1942. Though given the same prognosis, he pleaded with the doctor to send in his papers regardless. The older man looked at his patient and said, “OK, but I’m going to mark it with this rubber stamp that says ‘not recommended.’” A hopeful Bremyer thanked the doctor and left. That May, he received a waiver for his colorblindness, and by mid-June, the newly minted lieutenant was serving on a destroyer in the Pacific. (“I was never in any combat except [for] one boat that shot at us,” Bremyer later said.)
In the summer of 1945, with the fight against the Axis powers in Europe over and the war in the Pacific nearing its conclusion, the Navy began transferring battle-weary junior officers to safer jobs stateside. Bremyer landed an office position in the nation’s capital, where he anticipated sitting out the remainder of the conflict.
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Then, on August 23, eight days after Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced his nation’s surrender, Bremyer’s superior at the Messenger Mail Center handed him an order to deliver Perry’s old wool flag to Tokyo. (He eventually framed the order for display at his law office in Kansas.) When his commanding officer explained the symbolism of the flag and the mission, Bremyer was taken aback. “I had not known when I left home that morning that before I returned, I would make a 20,000-mile trip,” he later said.
Whether Bremyer comprehended the job’s significance didn’t matter. His orders were clear: Leave now, because Halsey was waiting. Bremyer needed to get to Japan, find Halsey and his flagship, and hand-deliver the boxed-up historic banner to the senior naval commander. As was the case with top secret documents, the relic in the young Kansan’s possession was not to leave his sight at any point in the journey.
Bremyer had been wrapping up his workday and looking forward to an evening date with his sweetheart, Jayne Dickey. But the written order directed him to leave immediately, as he might otherwise miss the forthcoming surrender ceremony, which, rumor had it, was days away. Bremyer tried desperately to contact Jayne, to no avail. “She thought that I had left her,” he later recalled of his future wife.
Not even granted time to drop by his apartment for spare clothing or essentials, the lieutenant went straight from work to catch the next plane bound for San Francisco. According to the Washington Post, the young man switched planes in Winslow, Arizona, that night, barely managing to grab some cold pancakes and a sandwich before hastily boarding the aircraft that would bring him to the West Coast. Already exhausted from a sleepless night when he landed in San Francisco at dawn, Bremyer hopped straight aboard the next connecting flight. Provided only a meager glass of tomato juice to hold off his hunger, he departed for Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the first stop of his island-hopping campaign.
With any inclination to sleep stymied by the chill of the poorly insulated plane, Bremyer clung to the courier satchel on his lap. Inside it, neatly folded in its box, lay a flag that had once flown in Tokyo Bay as a symbol of U.S. might and was now emerging from retirement for a repeat performance—that is, if a certain lieutenant managed to locate the Third Fleet and Halsey’s flagship, at that moment somewhere in Sagami Bay and making its way toward Tokyo.
At precisely one minute before noon on August 15, “Kimigayo,” the Japanese national anthem, began to play on radios across the country. A speaker announced the emperor, who addressed his people in a prerecorded speech: “To our good and loyal subjects,” he began. Hardly any of the stunned listeners bowing reverently as their leader announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied powers had ever heard Hirohito’s voice. The man in whose name their government had expected them to sacrifice for the ultimate victory was telling them the war was over. The conquering Americans would arrive on their shores within days—a prospect unbearable for many.
Plans for a formal surrender ceremony began to take shape almost immediately. A day after Hirohito’s broadcast, American General Douglas MacArthur and the Allied High Command requested that a Japanese delegation proceed to the Philippines to discuss the official surrender and occupation logistics with U.S. representatives. Concerns by the Japanese regarding social unrest delayed the planned surrender, so American units only landed in Japan on August 28, the date originally set for the ceremony. The general arrived 48 hours later.
But the young Kansan racing halfway around the world had no way of knowing that plans had changed.
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Bremyer arrived on yet another island, this time Guam, some 60 hours after he’d departed Washington. His instructions were plain: Proceed “immediately.” Per the Post, he was unsure whether he was supposed to hand over the flag to someone on the island. After making numerous inquiries, the lieutenant learned that Halsey was still waiting for the flag, the delivery of which had been assigned top priority. Further phone calls indicated the admiral’s flagship, the Missouri, was some 1,500 miles from Guam, currently steaming toward Tokyo. An officer assured Bremyer that early the next day, he could get the lieutenant on a plane that would take him to the recently conquered island of Iwo Jima, about halfway to his destination. As time was short, Bremyer hastily agreed.
The formal surrender ceremony was carefully choreographed to be impressive and dramatic. While Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed it should be held as close to Tokyo as possible, to emphasize Japan’s submission in the face of American military might, fear of uprisings dictated its ultimate venue aboard a ship in the harbor. Bremyer would need to get to the American fleet, still in Sagami Bay en route to Tokyo, and seek out the Missouri—one gray-hulled warship among thousands.
The lieutenant arrived on Iwo Jima on August 28. Gazing out across the island’s battle-scarred landscape, he likely would have reflected on the enormous human sacrifice wrought by the Pacific War. Five months after the U.S. Marines conquered the closest island to mainland Japan, at the cost of roughly 7,000 American lives and 18,000 Japanese ones, freshly dug graves wreathed Iwo Jima’s reclaimed airfield.
As Halsey’s ship was on the move, the Navy was originally going to put Bremyer on a destroyer directly to Japan. But officials feared the trip would take too long, so Bremyer sought help for the last leg of his journey from the Black Cat Squadron, a unit that used amphibious patrol bomber aircraft to pick up pilots who’d been shot down.
As his patrol bomber approached Sagami Bay on the afternoon of August 29, Bremyer stared in awe at the vast fleet below him, its countless ships speckling the water’s surface in every direction like stars in the night sky. Rough seas would not make for an easy landing. But then again, not a single part of his journey had been easy. As the seaplane touched down, waves battered its floats, tossing about the young passenger in the back. The pilot had radioed the Missouri about his approach and watched as the battleship’s boat taxied up alongside him.
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Bremyer’s relief at having neared the completion of his mission dissipated as he noticed the ship’s boat struggling in the swells. Moments later, a powerful wave threw it up against the seaplane, ripping a chunk from its tail and damaging its fuselage. Unwilling to remain a sitting duck any longer than he had to, the lieutenant boarded the pitching boat while clenching his satchel and the precious cargo within.
Within minutes, a wet, tired and hungry Bremyer stepped onto the deck of America’s mightiest battleship and handed the flag to one of Halsey’s aides. Since leaving his office in Washington five days earlier with little more than a moment’s notice, the lieutenant had traversed more than 9,000 miles. “I carried [the flag] in a sack and slept and ate and went to the head with it and everything all the way out there and all the way back,” he told the Wichita Eagle in 1995. “I never let it out of my custody during the whole trip.”
Bremyer’s wife, Jayne, would later marvel that his tale seemingly revolved around his search for a meal. “Every short stop or change … was punctuated, as he told his story, by his quest for something to eat,” she wrote in a 1950 essay for the Kansas City Times. Upon his arrival in Japan, the young man was more than happy to accept Halsey’s invitation to a steak dinner. As he later recalled, “The admiral said to me, ‘You’re going to stay for the ceremony, aren’t you?’ I hadn’t known that I could, but I didn’t wait for a second invitation.”
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In the end, the Perry flag was deemed too fragile to fly on the ship’s mast. Instead, Halsey had it placed in a framed glass case and suspended from a bulkhead overlooking the table used by the treaty signatories. It was mounted backward, the stars in the upper right corner instead of the left, as is customary for a flag hanging on a mast. The purpose is to make it appear as if the American colors are flying forward into battle, not retreating—a fitting sentiment for the day’s event.
Granted permission to remain aboard for the September 2 surrender ceremony, Bremyer sat two decks above the main action. He watched as the 11-man Japanese delegation clambered up a swaying rope-and-wood-slat ladder to the deck of the Missouri. Everywhere one looked, sailors and soldiers filled every available space, all in perfect silence. Movie cameras whirred, and camera shutters fired with machine-gun rapidity around those assembled on the main deck. As MacArthur approached a cluster of waiting microphones, representatives from the Allied nations lined up behind him.
Bremyer listened attentively, as did millions of people sitting by their radios around the world. Finally, MacArthur broke the silence. “We stand in Tokyo today reminiscent of our countryman, Commodore Perry, 92 years ago,” the general said. “His purpose was to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade and commerce of the world.” The general then issued a stinging rebuke: “Alas, the knowledge thereby gained … was forged into an instrument of oppression.” As MacArthur continued speaking, Bremyer mused proudly on his accomplishments. “I was flattered and impressed,” he later told the Wichita Eagle. “These were the big boys. And here I was, a boy from Kansas.”
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One of the official Navy photographers hanging off a makeshift platform to the right of the general raised his camera and pressed the shutter button. The resulting image captured both MacArthur and the Perry flag, encased in glass above and to the left of the general. A symbol of Perry had returned to Japan to keep the commodore’s promise of opening the country to American influence, courtesy of a young man from Kansas who would one day have a wild story to tell his grandchildren.
Bremyer left Japan on September 4, two days after the ceremony, with the flag in tow. He took a more circuitous route home, stopping in Saipan, Guam and San Francisco en route to Washington, where he reunited with his sweetheart, Jayne.
Five years later, in September 1950, Bremyer was practicing law in his hometown of McPherson, and the U.S. was once again fighting in the Pacific, this time in the Korean War. Jayne found an account of Bremyer’s perilous journey to Japan tucked in the bottom of a desk drawer, and she decided to share it with a local newspaper to honor those “good Joes, from privates to big brass, [who] fought and died to make that victory of 1945 possible.” The Kansas City Times article marked the first of a handful of occasions over the following decades that Bremyer’s story appeared in local and national papers, usually courtesy of a short mention around the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. Bremyer died on April 17, 2008, followed by the love of his life, Jayne, on December 22, 2012.
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Today, Perry’s 31-star flag hangs on a wall at the Naval Academy Museum in Maryland. Though large, it is tucked away to the side of a small transition wall just past the more famous “Don’t Give Up the Ship” flag flown by Perry’s older brother at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. While the latter has a dedicated exhibit, the flag with which Bremyer raced to Japan seems lost among other displays. Its only accompanying text is a small, four-sentence card that identifies the artifact as a “31-star flag, probably made by a sailor, [that] was the first American flag hoisted over Japanese soil.” The description briefly mentions the flag’s role in Japan’s surrender.
No major Hollywood movie productions tell the story of Bremyer’s adventure. Apart from the lieutenant’s self-published memoir, which examines the event in some detail, no books are solely dedicated to the story. None of that seemed to bother Bremyer. In his 2005 oral history interview, he simply said, “I was proud of our country. I was proud of the association.” The war was never about just one mission, no matter how unbelievable, but many.
Editor's Note, August 30, 2024: This article has been updated to remove a reference to the Battle of Midway, which Admiral William Halsey did not participate in.
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