Office of the Historian

Roosevelt Papers: Telegram

President Roosevelt to Prime Minister Churchill 1

[Excerpts]
top secret
priority
[Washington,] 4 October 1944.

Number 626, 4 October 1944, Top Secret and Personal from the President for the Prime Minister.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I am asking our military people in Moscow to make available to you our Joint Chiefs’ statement to Stalin.2

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Roosevelt
  1. Sent to the United States Naval Attaché, London, via Navy channels. For the full text of the message, see ante, pp. 7–8.↩
  2. Not printed. The statement referred to was a message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Deane dated September 28, 1944, setting forth the Joint Chiefs’ strategic concept of Soviet participation in the war against Japan. The missions for Soviet forces envisaged in this concept were: (1) securing the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Vladivostok Peninsula; (2) setting up American and Soviet strategic air forces for operations against Japan from the Maritime Provinces and the Kamchatka Peninsula; (3) interdiction of lines of communications between Japan proper and the Asiatic mainland; (4) destruction of Japanese ground and air forces in Manchuria; and (5) securing the Pacific supply route, in which Soviet participation would include (a) making Petropavlovsk available for United States use as a naval base and areas on the Kamchatka Peninsula as air bases; (b) neutralization by air of southern Sakhalin and Hokkaido; (c) improvement of port facilities and inland transportation at and from Nikolaevsk, Magadan, Petropavlovsk, and Sovietskaya Gagan; (d) military occupation of southern Sakhalin; and (e) Soviet naval cooperation with the United States Navy as the situation dictated. See Deane, pp. 241–242. A substantially similar restatement of these views appeared in J. C. S. 1176/6, dated January 18, 1945, enclosure A, section 6b. See post, pp. 392–393.↩