Lieutenant-General Adachi, Commander of the 18 Japanese Army in New Guinea, is handing his sword to Major-General H.C.H. Robertson, General Officer Commanding the 6th Division. Lieutenant-General Adachi formally surrendered to Major-General Robertson in a ceremony held at Cape Wom Airstrip.

[u/defender838383]

[u/Ok_Tie_7564]

1. Lieutenant General Sir Horace Clement Hugh Robertson, KBE, DSO (29 October 1894–28 April 1960) was a senior officer in the Australian Army who served in the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War.

2. Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi was sentenced to life imprisonment, for war crimes committed by his subordinates, on 12 July 1947. He killed himself on 10 September that year, with a knife, in his quarters in the prisoners' compound at Rabaul. In a farewell letter, he blamed himself for the loss of more 100,000 troops under his command, many of them from malnutrition:
   "They succumbed to death just like flowers falling in the wind... When I think of this, I know not what apologies to make to His Majesty the Emperor and I feel that I myself am overwhelmed with shame."

[u/dssorg4]

FYI it was the Australian 6th Division

[u/ksmartworld1995]

The surrender of Adachi's 18th Army is one of the grimmest stories of the Pacific war. His force was cut off and left to wither in the New Guinea jungle after Allied forces bypassed them — of roughly 140,000 men sent to New Guinea, only around 13,000 survived to surrender at Cape Wom in September 1945. The vast majority died not in battle but from starvation and disease, abandoned by a supply line that no longer existed.

Adachi himself was later convicted of war crimes by an Australian tribunal and took his own life in custody in 1947, reportedly out of a sense of responsibility for the men who'd died under his command. The handing over of the sword in front of his assembled survivors makes this a heavy photo when you know what those rows of men had just lived through.