Introduction
Scope of Coverage
This volume presents documentation on the fourth and fifth conferences participated in by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill after the United States became a belligerent in World War II. These are the Third Washington Conference of May 1943 and the First Quebec Conference of the following August. These conferences are also known by their code names: Trident for the Washington Conference and Quadrant for the meeting at Quebec. The Third Washington Conference was a single unit comprising two weeks of discussions in the capital. The First Quebec Conference, however, was accompanied by meetings at Hyde Park, New York, both before and after the Quebec meetings, and Churchill was a guest for more than a week in early September 1943 in the White House at Washington, where his presence gave rise to an ancillary series of meetings on problems related to the war. At both conferences there was participation in some meetings by Canadian and Chinese officials; and a meeting of the Pacific War Council was held during the Trident Conference.
Advisers, both civilian and military, assisted Roosevelt and Churchill at Washington and Quebec, but the predominant concerns of the conferences were military. Accordingly, the documentation on military subjects bulks large. But Secretary of State Cordell Hull participated to some extent in the conversations at Washington, and both Hull and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were major participants in the political discussions at Quebec, in preparation for which the Department of State assembled elaborate background documentation. Additional and extensive background information on the subjects discussed at the Washington and Quebec Conferences has previously been published in the annual volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States and in the series United States Army in World War II, published by the Department of the Army.
Organization of the Volume
The volume is divided into two parts, one devoted to each of the conferences. The organization of each of the parts is similar—pre-conference papers, minutes of meetings, and conference documents and [Page XVI] papers—but the greater bulk of documentation for the Quebec Conference and the desirability of including material on the related Hyde Park and Washington conversations dictated organization of the material into a larger number of chapters and a different arrangement of the pre-conference papers.
The volume opens with a section of previously unpublished papers on atomic energy in the period from February 1943 to the opening of the Third Washington Conference. This section is followed by a group of documents, arranged chronologically, on arrangements for the conference.
The chapter on proceedings of the Trident Conference (as is the case also with Quadrant ) is organized chronologically by meetings. Every meeting attended by a senior American official is accounted for. All minutes and memoranda of conversation are included; where none was found, the editors have supplied an editorial note, embodying what information was available on that particular meeting. There were no general meetings of the American delegation at either of the conferences; what little information has been found on President Roosevelt’s consultations with his advisers is included in the chapters on proceedings.
The Trident chapter entitled “Conference Documents and Supplementary Papers” contains the documents presented and discussed at the conference, together with related papers pertinent to conference subjects which were prepared during the period of the conference.
The preparatory papers for the First Quebec Conference, being much more numerous than those for the Third Washington Conference, are organized somewhat differently. They begin with a chapter on agenda and arrangements, followed by a chapter containing substantive preparatory papers, divided among sixteen subjects. This chapter includes pre-conference papers later circulated or discussed at the conference as well as official background memoranda and recommendations prepared specifically for possible use at Quebec.
The papers on the proceedings at Quebec (identical in scope and arrangement with the documentation on the Trident proceedings) are preceded in the volume by a brief chapter containing all the documentation found on the preliminary conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill which took place at Hyde Park, and by a log of the President’s visit to Canada. The chapter on proceedings is followed by the conference documents and related papers, arranged by subject, concluding with the final documents of the Quadrant Conference.
At the end of the First Quebec Conference, there was an interval of a week before Prime Minister Churchill arrived in Washington to resume his consultations with the President. A separate chapter is devoted [Page XVII] to the arrangements for the Prime Minister’s visit to the United States and to the developments in the war against Italy, then reaching a climax. Documentation on this subject during this period is included in this volume because it is needed to bridge the gap between the Quebec discussions and the signature of the Italian armistice, which took place while Churchill was in Washington. There is then a chapter on the proceedings of the conversations at Washington, followed by a chapter which includes the documents discussed during those conversations and related papers bearing directly on the President’s meetings with Churchill.
When Churchill left Washington, he stopped again briefly to see Roosevelt at Hyde Park, and the final chapter of the present volume includes all the documentation which has been found on their conversations there.
Unpublished Sources
Since the conferences at Washington and Quebec documented in this volume dealt to a very large extent with questions outside the jurisdiction of the Department of State, the editors sought and obtained the assistance of several other Government departments and agencies in gathering much of the source material for this publication. Of particular importance were the Presidential papers in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, military papers in the files of the Department of Defense (principally in the files of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and documents on cooperation with the United Kingdom in the field of atomic energy research in the files of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. The Roosevelt Library provided photocopies of all Presidential papers (including the papers of Harry L. Hopkins) that could be found relating to either of the conferences. The Department of Defense provided all papers that could be found documenting the official position or advice of the War and Navy Departments on politico-military subjects discussed at the international level, as presented by the civilian leaders of those departments and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
The papers printed in this volume which are in the Central Files of the Department of State are indicated by means of a file number in the headnote, in the usual style of Foreign Relations. The provenance of papers obtained from other sources is also shown in headnotes, as indicated on the following list:
a. inside the department of state
- 1.
- Lot 57 D 688—An unindexed collection of papers relating to diplomatic aspects of the question of atomic energy.
- 2.
- Lot 60 D 224—An unindexed collection of papers produced by the postwar planning group in the Department, containing, for 1943, important planning papers in the fields of international organization and territorial studies.
b. outside the department of state
- 1.
- A.E.C. Files—The files of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
- 2.
- Department of the Army Files—Files for 1943 of the War Department, now under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Army.
- 3.
- Harriman Papers—The papers of W. Averell Harriman.
- 4.
- Hopkins Papers—The papers of Harry L. Hopkins, deposited in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park.
- 5.
- Hull Papers—The papers of Cordell Hull, deposited in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress.
- 6.
- J.C.S. Files—The files of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These files provided documentation of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff and of the American-British Combined Chiefs of Staff. The approval of the British Chiefs of Staff, along with that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was obtained for declassification of the Combined Chiefs of Staff documentation published in this volume.
- 7.
- Leahy Papers—The diary of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, deposited in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, has been used with the permission of his son, Rear Admiral William H. Leahy.
- 8.
- Roosevelt Papers—The papers of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, deposited in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park.
- 9.
- Stimson Papers—The diary of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, deposited in the Yale University Library, has been used with the permission of the Library and the Henry L. Stimson Literary Trust.
- 10.
- War Shipping Administration Files—The files of the War Shipping Administration, now in the National Archives.
Published Sources
a. official
In addition to Foreign Relations of the United States and the Department of State Bulletin, the official publications listed below were found to be of particular value in the preparation of this volume. Other official publications consulted by the editors are identified in editorial notes and footnotes.
American
Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), in the series United States Army in World War II: The War Department. Hereafter cited as “Cline”.
[Page XIX]Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943–1945 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), in the series United States Army in World War II: The War Department. Hereafter cited as “Coakley and Leighton”.
Harry L. Coles and Albert K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), in the series United States Army in World War II: Special Studies.
Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, editors, The Army Air Forces in World War II, prepared by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948–1958), volume II, Europe: Torch to Pointblank, August 1942 to December 1943, volume IV, The Pacific: Guadalcanal to Saipan, August 1942 to July 1944. Hereafter cited as “Craven and Cate”.
Albert N. Garland and Howard McGaw Smyth, assisted by Martin Blumenson, Sicily and the Surrender of Italy (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), in the series United States Army in World War II: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations. Hereafter cited as “Garland and Smyth”.
Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), in the series United States Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations. Hereafter cited as “Harrison”.
Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), volume I of A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Hereafter cited as “Hewlett and Anderson”.
George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), in the series United States Army in World War II: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations. Hereafter cited as “Howe”.
Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), in the series United States Army in World War II: The War Department. Hereafter cited as “Leighton and Coakley”.
Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941–1942 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), in the series United States Army in World War II: The War Department. Hereafter cited as “Matloff and Snell”.
Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943–1944 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959), in the series United States Army in World War II: The War Department. Hereafter cited as “Matloff”.
Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, volume X, The Atlantic Battle Won, May 1943–May 1945 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1956).
Louis Morton, Strategy and Command: The First Two Years (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), in the series United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific. Hereafter cited as “Morton”.
Harley A. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939–1945 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949; Department of State Publication 3580). Hereafter cited as “Notter”.
Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, Stilwell’s Mission to China (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), in the series United States Army in World War II: China–Burma–India Theater. Hereafter cited as “Romanus and Sunderland”.
[Page XX]Marcel Vigneras, Rearming the French (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), in the series United States Army in World War II: Special Studies. Hereafter cited as “Vigneras”.
British
C. B. A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office and Longmans, Green and Company, 1955), in the series History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Civil Series. Hereafter cited as “Behrens”.
John Ehrman, Grand Strategy, volume V, August 1943–September 1944 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956), in the series History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Military Series.
Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1964). Hereafter cited as “Gowing”.
S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, volume II, India’s Most Dangerous Hour (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1958), in the series History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Military Series.
S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945, volume II, The Period of Balance (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956), in the series History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Military Series.
Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, volume II, Endeavor (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), in the series History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Military Series.
Sir Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1962), in the series History of the Second World War. Hereafter cited as “Woodward”.
Soviet
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R., Commission for the Publication of Diplomatic Documents, Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. and the Presidents of the U.S.A. and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, volume I, Correspondence With Winston Churchill and Clement R. Attlee (July 1941–November 1945), volume II, Correspondence With Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (August 1941–December 1945) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957). Reprinted in the single volume Stalin’s Correspondence With Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman, 1941–1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958). Hereafter cited as Stalin’s Correspondence.
b. unofficial
Much authoritative information is to be found in unofficial publications written by those who participated in the conferences (or in matters closely related to the conferences) or by authors who have used the papers of conference participants. In view of the incompleteness of the official record, in many respects, for the conferences presented in this volume, the editors have cited such unofficial publications frequently for factual information not found in official files. The Department of State assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of fact or [Page XXI] interpretation in these unofficial publications. The principal publications of this type which have been consulted in the preparation of this volume are listed below. Other works also consulted on particular points are identified in editorial notes and footnotes at the appropriate places.
H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949). Hereafter cited as “Arnold”.
Alberto Berio, Missione segreta (Tangeri: Agosto 1943) (Milan: Enrico Dall’Oglio, 1947).
Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide: A History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1957). Hereafter cited as “Alanbrooke”.
Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, Happy Odyssey: The Memoirs of Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart (London: Cape Publishers, 1950).
Giuseppe Castellano, Come firmai l’armistizio di Cassibile (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1945).
Giuseppe Castellano, La guerra continua (Milan: Rizzoli, 1963).
Claire Lee Chennault, Way of a Fighter (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949).
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948–1953), 6 volumes.
- Volume IV, The Hinge of Fate. Hereafter cited as “Churchill, Hinge of Fate”.
- Volume V, Closing the Ring. Hereafter cited as “Churchill, Closing the Ring”.
Winston S. Churchill, The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, compiled by Charles Eade (London: Cassel and Company, 1951–1952), 3 volumes. Hereafter cited as “Churchill, War Speeches.”
Anthony Eden, The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon: The Reckoning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965). Hereafter cited as “Eden”.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1948).
Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., editor, Stephen E. Ambrose, associate editor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), volume II (pages 665–1397), volume III (pages 1401–2037). Hereafter cited as Eisenhower Papers.
Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1962).
William D. Hassett, Off the Record With F.D.R., 1942–1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958).
Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, volume II (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948). Hereafter cited as “Hull”.
Lord Ismay, The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay (London: William Heinemann, 1960).
Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1952). Hereafter cited as “King”.
William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1950). Hereafter cited as “Leahy”.
[Page XXII]James Leasor, The Clock With Four Bands, Based on the Experiences of General Sir Leslie Hollis (New York: Reynal and Company, 1959). Hereafter cited as “Leasor”.
Harold Macmillan, The Blast of War, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Hereafter cited as “Macmillan”.
Lord Moran, Churchill, Taken From the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (Boston, Houghton Miffilin Company, 1966).
Sir Frederick Morgan, Overture to Overlord (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1950).
Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1964).
Gerald Pawle, The War and Colonel Warden: Based on the Recollections of Commander C. R. Thompson, Personal Assistant to the Prime Minister, 1940–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). Hereafter cited as “Pawle”.
J. W. Pickersgill, The Mackenzie King Record, volume I, 1939–1944 (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press and the University of Chicago Press, 1960). Hereafter cited as “Pickersgill”.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943 volume, The Tide Turns, compiled by Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950). Hereafter cited as “Rosenman”.
Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, revised edition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950). Hereafter cited as “Sherwood”.
Joseph W. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948).
Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947). Hereafter cited as “Stimson and Bundy”.
Grace Tully, F.D.R., My Boss (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1949).
Giacomo Zanussi, Guerra e catastrofe d’Italia, giugno 1943–maggio 1945 (Rome: Libraria Corso, 1946).