Editorial Note
No formal record of the conversation at this meeting has been found. Hopkins’ account of the discussion (set forth below) appears as a long footnote added to his memorandum of January 6, 1942 (post, p. 170). Hopkins gives the date of this meeting as December 27, but this appears to have been an error. There was a luncheon meeting with the same participants on December 27 (see ante, p. 112), but the conversation described by Hopkins in the note under reference could not have taken place as early as December 27 because the Russian amendments and the British War Cabinet recommendation (referred to therein) were not received until December 29 (see post, pp. 374 and 371). Since Churchill did not return from Ottawa until the late evening of December 31, the editors have conjectured that the conversation described in the Hopkins note took place at the luncheon meeting on January 1, 1942. This seems to accord with the chronological sequence as reflected in Churchill, The Grand Alliance, pp. 682, 685. Litvinov, in a conversation on January 10, 1942, referred to what was apparently this same discussion as having taken place “at the time of signing” the Declaration by United Nations; see Foreign Relations, 1942, vol. i, p. 31. The signing ceremony took place at about 10 p.m. on January 1, 1942; see post, p. 156.