760C.61/4–643
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
The Polish Ambassador called to see me this morning at his request. The Ambassador referred to the urgent letter he had sent me last night transmitting a letter to the President.91 He said that he had received two urgent cables from his Government impressing upon him the great urgency with which the Polish Government, viewed the problem presented for the President’s consideration in this letter, and [Page 369] asking him to do everything possible to get a reply from the President without delay.
I explained to the Ambassador that the President had been away from Washington and had only returned this morning and that it had been impossible consequently before now to transmit this letter from the Ambassador to the President. I reminded the Ambassador of what the Secretary of State had said to him with regard to these matters in his recent conversations with him and added that the Ambassador need hardly be told once more that the President had these matters very much in mind but that, as the President had said on several occasions both to General Sikorski and to the Ambassador, the President must himself determine when and how his interest in the Polish situation could be helpfully indicated to the Soviet Government.
The Ambassador said that General Sikorski was only able to maintain morale among the Polish forces in the Middle East and in the Polish organization in occupied Poland if he were able to give them assurances that both the United States and the British Governments had made representations in Moscow against the treatment accorded Polish citizens within the Soviet Union.
I said it seemed to me that the question was one of whether the Polish Government desired representations to be made merely for the sake of having them made, or whether it desired representations to be made with the hope that they might achieve some useful purpose. If the latter were the case, I said I felt that General Sikorski and the Ambassador would both agree that the President should be permitted to determine for himself how he could be most helpful in this question. I added that as soon as the President had had an opportunity of studying the documents transmitted to him by the Polish Government, I would be glad to inform the Ambassador of the reply which the President might feel able to make.