740.00119 EW/11–945
The Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs (De Gasperi) to the American Ambassador in Italy (Kirk)5
Mr. Ambassador: In reply to your courteous letter of November 5, I hasten to inform you that the Italian Government, in conformity with a desire repeatedly expressed on its part, will have no difficulty in providing for the publication of the previously mentioned Armistice documents tomorrow on the seventh instant6 that is to say, simultaneously with the publication that will take place in Washington and London.
Allow me to add that if the Italian Government had been consulted earlier on this matter, it would have certainly requested that, in addition [Page 1082] to those indicated in your letter, certain other documents should be published simultaneously which would have permitted Italian and international public opinion to form a more exact evaluation of the facts and a more faithful interpretation of the circumstances that accompanied and followed the Armistice.
I am referring principally to the “Memorandum in addition to the Armistice conditions” known as “The Quebec Document”,7 which is, in fact, closely connected in time and above all in spirit to the “short-term Armistice” of September 3, 1943, and it is necessary that it be made known as soon as possible to the Italian people and, I believe, to international public opinion. Also it would be an excellent thing to publish the letter sent under date of November 20, 1943,8 by Marshal Badoglio to President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, which truly sums up, in our judgment, very efficaciously the first phase in the relations between Italy and the Allies and illustrates the true conditions of time, environment and spirit under which the Italian people began that full and loyal collaboration with the United Nations which was to lead later to greater and more promising results.
Also in the Allied comments on the long-term Armistice, greater and more extensive explanations might have been introduced to demonstrate both the Allies’ willingness to apply it in a manner progressively more liberal and generous, and the fact that it now concerns an obsolete document which does not have, almost two and one-half years after it was signed, any historical or political justification.
I beg you, Mr. Ambassador, to bring to the attention of your Government our very keen desire to see published as soon as possible the two documents mentioned above, and especially the Quebec document which, I repeat, seems to us essential to the comprehension and evaluation of the events which have weighed so long and so harshly on the Italian people.
Accept [etc.]
- Copy transmitted to the Department in despatch 2624, November 9, 1945, from Rome; received November 21.↩
- The material was released to the press simultaneously in Washington, London, and Rome on November 6, 1945. It appeared in newspapers in Italy on November 7.↩
- The full title is “Aide-Mémoire to accompany conditions of Armistice, presented by General Eisenhower to the Italian C in C”. It was presented in Lisbon to Gen. Giuseppe Castellano by Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. The text of the “Quebec Document” is printed in Albert N. Garland and Howard McGaw Smyth, Sicily and the Surrender of Italy, in the official Army history, United States Army in World War II: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 556. The records of the First Quebec Conference between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, with their advisers, August 17–24, 1943, are scheduled for publication in a subsequent volume of Foreign Relations. ↩
- Foreign Relations, 1943, vol. ii, p. 393.↩