Roosevelt Papers: Telegram
Prime Minister Churchill to President Roosevelt1
No. 536. Prime Minister to President Roosevelt. Personal and most secret.
Bedell Smith and Devers came through here morning of 5th. Bedell told me that he and Montgomery are convinced that it is better to put in a much heavier and broader Overlord than to expand Anvil above our pre-Teheran conception and that he is putting this to Eisenhower and your Chiefs of Staff.…
It also seems to me from what I heard very probable that the Y Moon (see my immediately following)2 will be at the earliest practicable date. I do not see why we should resist this if the Commanders feel they have a better chance then. At Teheran, however, C. O. S. recommendation was Y1 or one day earlier which you and I agreed to express more agreeably as “During May”.3 In conversation with U. J. we never mentioned such a date as May 5th or May 8th but always spoke to him around 20th.4 Neither did we at any time dwell upon the exact phase of the operation which should fall on any particular [Page 866] day. If now the Y date is accepted as final I do not feel that we shall in any way have broken faith with him. The operation will anyhow begin in May with feints and softening bombardments and I do not think IT. J. is the kind of man to be unreasonable over 48 hours.5
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- Sent by the United States Military Attaché, London, via Army channels.↩
- Telegram 537 reads: “… Y date is June 2d.”↩
- See ante, p. 564.↩
- See ante, p. 547.↩
- Further references of 1944 by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin to the Tehran agreement on the invasion of Europe will be found in Stalin’s Correspondence, vol. ii, pp. 138, 145.↩