Office of the Historian

740.00119 PW/12–2844

Memorandum by Mr. Eugene H. Dooman, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State (Dunn)33

[Washington,] January 16, 1945.

Reference is made to the Under Secretary’s memorandum of telephone conversation on January 13, 1945 with Major General George Strong concerning the proposed Japanese surrender terms.

Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Ballantine and I called on General Strong, who called in other members of the Joint Post-War Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs. Mr. Ballantine said that a group in the Department had given intensive study to the proposed Japanese surrender terms and had been impressed by a basic difference between the recommendations put forth by the Department to the War and Navy Departments and certain assumptions reflected in the proposed surrender terms. Mr. Ballantine further pointed out that we were anxious to support the Army and Navy in securing compliance by the Japanese with all the terms that were considered to be necessary to achieve American military ends, but that we believed that the form in which the demands for compliance with surrender terms would be put forward could be modified in such a way as to consort with the political position as the Department saw it. General Strong and his colleagues said that they were not concerned particularly with the form in which the surrender terms were laid down so long as the substance of the terms was obtained.

It was agreed that Mr. Ballantine and I, along with other persons in this Department, would meet with General Strong and with the other members of his committee at the War Department on Friday, January 19, 1945 to reexamine the draft surrender terms.

The present draft is open to two objections from our point of view: First, it is open to the implication that the surrender will be of a contractual character, and, second, it contemplates the continuation of the Japanese Government after the surrender. It will be primarily our purpose to have the document recast in such manner as to meet the Department’s position on these two points.

E[ugene] H. D[ooman]
  1. Addressed to the Under Secretary of State (Grew) and to Mr. Dunn and initialed by the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs (Ballantine).↩