Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1942, General; the British Commonwealth; the Far East, Volume I

Declaration by United Nations, signed January 1, 1942 ¹

^1.Secretary of State Cordell Hull describes the inception and development of the Declaration by United Nations in his Memoirs (The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York, 1948), vol. ii, pp. 1114–1126). He recalls that almost immediately after Pearl Harbor he had begun to consider the form of unity the nations fighting against Germany and Japan should take, and on December 13 he asked Maxwell M. Hamilton, Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs, “to draw up a draft of a declaration to be made by the nations fighting the Axis, which would bind them together until victory and would commit them to the basic principles that we upheld.” (pp. 1114–1115) Hull records that Hamilton prepared two alternative drafts of a declaration by the Allies and that: “These differed only in that one brought in all the Allies, whereas the other consisted of two separate declarations, the first to be signed by all the Allies with the exception of Russia, who was not at war with Japan, and the latter to be signed by Russia. We quickly decided to discard the second draft, believing it would be far more effective to have Russia included with the rest of the Allies.” (p. 1115) Hull reports that a new draft was prepared at a meeting of a group of his associates in his office on December 14, and adds: “From December 15 to December 19 my associates and I spent considerable time perfecting drafts of the document that became the United Nations Declaration.” (p. 1116)