Office of the Historian

740.00119 Control (Germany)/5–1045

Memorandum of Conversation, by the Acting Secretary of State

[Extract]
[Washington,] May 10, 1945.
Participants: The President;
General J. C. Holmes;36
Mr. William Phillips;
Acting Secretary, Mr. Grew.

. . . . . . .

2. The Situation in Venezia Giulia and Trieste.

I said to the President that the most disturbing problem before us today is the situation in Venezia Giulia and especially in Trieste which the Yugoslavs had largely occupied, had raised their own flags and had changed the names of the streets from Italian to Yugoslav. I told the President of my deep concern regarding this situation which was growing more serious hourly, that Tito was not only proceeding to dominate the entire region which he admitted he intended to keep under the Peace Treaty, that Russia was undoubtedly behind Tito’s move with a view to utilizing Trieste as a Russian port in the future, that the Socialists and Communists argued that the United States and Great Britain are no longer able to oppose the Soviet Union in Europe and that Bonomi’s position as President of the Council was endangered.

The President replied that he had been giving the most serious consideration to this matter and had finally come to the conclusion that the only solution was to “throw them out”. He realized that this was a reversal of his former position but that developments were such that it left no alternative.

I expressed relief and satisfaction and said that I would have prepared immediately a memorandum for the President to use in his communication to the Joint Chiefs. (This memorandum will lay down the so-called Alexander Line which includes Trieste and Pola as the eastern boundary to be occupied by the Allied forces.)

We are also drafting a telegram from the President to Churchill on this subject.

In this connection I handed the President the telegram from Mr. Kennan37 in Moscow in which he had pointed out the procedure used by Soviet Russia in Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary and the indications that the same procedure would be adopted, so far as [Page 1155] the Soviets are permitted to do so, in the case of Austria and Czechoslovakia and I said I thought it would be helpful to the President to read the telegram with care. The President said that he was fully alive to this situation and would read the telegram carefully.

. . . . . . .

Joseph C. Grew
  1. Assistant Secretary of State.↩
  2. George F. Kennan, Chargé in the Soviet Union; telegram 1424, April 30, 1945, vol. iii, p. 105.↩