Office of the Historian

740.0011 European War 1939/22227a: Telegram

The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Standley)

Washington, June 11, 1942—5 p.m.

291. Please transmit to the Foreign Office the following message from me to the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Molotov:

“I extend through you to the Government and people of the Soviet Union on behalf of the Government and people of the United States, congratulations upon the success with which you have resisted the brutal aggression of Nazi Germany and have thus frustrated the plans for world conquest so overconfidently laid by our common enemy. For one year the peoples of the Soviet Union have been engaging the armies not only of Nazi Germany but also of those other European countries the governments of which have accepted Nazi dictation. In this struggle the armed forces of the Soviet Union, with the heroic support of the entire population, have so acquitted themselves as to win the admiration, of the liberty-loving peoples of the world and to earn a place in history beside those Russian Armies which over a century and a quarter ago did so much to ruin the plans of another aspirant to world conquest.

“During the past year the American people, although themselves threatened by aggression from several directions, have gladly shared their arms and supplier with the Soviet Union. It is planned that during the coming year these arms and supplies will pour forth from our factories and countryside in an ever widening stream until filial victory has been achieved.

“We are confident that before the end of another year the instigators of this war will have been given to understand how seriously they have underestimated the determination and the ability for effective action of the peace-loving nations and will have learned that in an aroused world aggressors can no longer escape the consequences of acts resulting in human suffering and destruction.”

This message should be dated June 22, the first anniversary of the launching of the German attack upon the Soviet Union. It may be handed to the Foreign Office, however, on June 21.88

Hull
  1. The Minister Counselor, Walter Thurston, reported in telegram No. 554 of June 24, from Kuibyshev, that this congratulatory message had been published in Pravda on the day before, together with messages received also from Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Senator Tom Gonnally of Texas, Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet Adm. Ernest J. King, and Harry L. Hopkins (740.0011EW 1939/22425).↩