740.00119 Control (Japan)/8–3045
The Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union(Stalin) to President Truman
I have received your message of August 1268 regarding the appointment of Army General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied armies for the acceptance, coordination and conduct of the general capitulation of the Japanese armed forces.
The Soviet Government agrees to your proposal.
It also agrees to the proposed by you procedure, which provides that General MacArthur will give the Imperial Staff Quarters orders about the unconditional surrender of the Japanese troops also to the Soviet Supreme Commander in the Far East. Lieutenant General Dere-vianko69 has been appointed as representative of the Soviet Military Supreme Command and has been given all necessary instructions.
- This translation appears to have been received from the Embassy of the Soviet Union in Washington. A smoother translation has subsequently been published in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R., Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. and the Presidents of the U.S.A. and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, vol. ii (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), Doc. No. 360, p. 260.↩
- August 11; see first paragraph of Extract of Minutes, p. 634.↩
- Lt. Gen. Kuzma Nikolayevich Derevyanko.↩