On August 14, 1945, Thomas E. Jones, who was a 16-year-old courier in Washington, D.C., was entrusted with a cable. It announced Japan’s surrender to the United States and he was supposed to take it to the White House.

The dutiful young man promptly stopped for pancakes at a local restaurant, where he hung out with friends over breakfast. When he finally did decided to get going, he got pulled over by a traffic cop who stopped him for making an illegal U-turn.

Anyway, Quincy Perkins decided to make a 16-minute short film about that fateful day from the boy’s perspective. It’s called The Messenger and was scheduled to premiere this weekend at the Philadelphia Film Festival. It looks like its showing was cancelled, but I couldn’t see why.

So, yeah, a boy’s pancake breakfast delayed the end of World War II.