Editorial Note
No official accounts of the conversation at this dinner meeting have been found. Arnold, pp. 524–526, gives the following information which apparently pertains to the dinner meeting on September 12:
“That night, at a dinner with the Governor General, the question of aid to Poland came up. Several messages [had] arrived from the [Page 312] Russians and from Harriman relating to Polish patriots in Warsaw.2 General Marshall and I talked this over at length. For some time it had been apparent that if some help was not given to the Polish patriots in Warsaw they would be exterminated. . . .
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“It gave the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Mr. Churchill, and the President something serious to think about. Could we help the Poles in Warsaw, even though we wanted to? That rather large problem was never completely solved. . . .3
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“During that dinner the Prime Minister came out with new ideas about winning the war. At that particular moment he thought it a matter of vital British interest that we (including the R.A.F.) get more planes, ships, and soldiers into the final battle of Japan as soon as we could. I told him the question of putting planes in there wasn’t quite that simple. There were not enough land masses in the Pacific Ocean to use the heavy bombers we would have available from Europe when that phase of the war was over. As a matter of fact, if we could use 1500 out of the 3500 we had in the E.T.O., we would be very, very lucky. Certainly, we would much rather have the B–29’s, with their longer range and their heavier bomb load than we would the B–17, the B–24, the Lancaster, or the Halifax. . . .”