Roosevelt Papers: Telegram
President Roosevelt to Generalissimo Chiang1
operational priority
From the President to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, personal and secret.
Many thanks for your message.2 I am leaving for North Africa in two or three days and I hope to get to Cairo on the twenty-first. Churchill will meet me there. We hope to meet Marshal Stalin in Persia about the 26th or 27th. However I would prefer that you and Churchill and I meet before that. Therefore can you try to reach Cairo by the 22nd of November? We will arrange good accommodations and guard for you and your party in or near Cairo. Please let me know as soon as you can.3
- Sent to the American Military Mission to China, Chungking, via Army channels, as War Department telegram 3788 to the Mission. The Roosevelt Papers also contain a draft of this message, in Roosevelt’s handwriting, in which an additional sentence appears just before the last sentence. The additional sentence—“How many people are you bringing with you?”—is crossed out.↩
- Probably the message delivered by Somervell, ante, p. 56. The reference may also have been intended as acknowledgment of Chiang’s telegram of November 2.↩
- The text of this message was repeated by Roosevelt to Churchill in telegram 413, November 8, 1943.↩