Unconditional Surrender

The Impact of the Casablanca Policy Upon World War II

Anne Armstrong

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839746345
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

Did the concept of Unconditional Surrender announced by President Roosevelt at the conclusion of the Casablanca conference in 1943 actually prolong the Second World War?No question about Allied policy and conduct of the war has produced more debate, more expression of emotional and political bias—and less dispassionate judgment based upon the facts. This has been so partly because we have not had access to all the facts. In spite of the remarkable coverage of the war given us at the time by our newspapers and our radio reporters and subsequently by historians, we have lacked detailed, authoritative documentation of the impact of Unconditional Surrender upon the people who experienced it at first hand—the Axis powers, their governments and their citizens.Here is a comprehensive and penetrating examination of this controversial policy from its inception as an idea to its utilization as a major Allied propaganda weapon and its imposition upon our enemies as the penalty for aggression and war.In particular, here is the story of what it was like to be part of the other side of the war, to experience developments as members of the German military establishment. Drawing upon hitherto unpublished diaries and letters and upon interviews with leading German generals and members of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, Anne Armstrong presents a vivid picture of the effect of wartime demands for unconditional surrender on those elements in the enemy camp which Allied policy could and should have influenced most decisively—those German leaders with the ability and inclination to terminate the war.

CHAPTER 1—The Background of Unconditional Surrender

THE CASABLANCA ANNOUNCEMENT

War, wrote Clausewitz, is nothing more than the continuation of policy with a mixture of other means. In other words, war is the implementation of policy by force, it is the violence to which a state resorts when diplomatic means have failed to achieve a political objective, If this is true, the aim of the war will be to compel the enemy to accede to the original political demand, the aim of strategy will be to reduce his strength to the point at which he is forced to accede. A successful war will be one in which the original political objective is achieved at a military cost which is roughly proportionate to the value of the objective. From this point of view let us inquire how successfully the military victory of the Allies in the Second World War served the ends of Allied diplomacy and how efficiently the policy of Unconditional Surrender contributed to the victory of both strategy and diplomacy.

According to Clausewitz, policy is “woven into the very fabric of war,” and strategy, if it is sound, is the handmaiden of diplomacy.{2} The accounts of the major Allied conferences of the Second World War seem to indicate that President Roosevelt and many of his advisers thought otherwise. The major decisions, at least during the first years of the war, were military. The major conferences were devoted to strategic planning and were often attended by the Commanders-in-Chief and their military staffs to the exclusion of ranking diplomatic advisers. Policy trailed in the wake of strategy, and strategy seemed to be aimed solely at the destruction of the enemy. The policy of Unconditional Surrender is both a reflection and a symptom of the nature of the thinking of the Anglo-American policy makers on the conduct of war and the role of policy in wartime. The Casablanca Conference in January, 1943, was a case in point, illustrative of the priority given to military planning. Policy, to the extent that it figured at all in the meetings of the conference, was a by-product and an afterthought. The decision to call for nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy—a decision which was basically in the realm of policy and was to have far-reaching political implications—was made by the President and the Prime Minister after consultation with their military chiefs and advisers as an appendage to military discussions. Neither the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, nor the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had attended the Casablanca Conference and neither was consulted in the decision of Unconditional Surrender. This was not an accident. It reflected a basic attitude, and perhaps a basic situation in the relations among the Allies. Let us first examine the Casablanca decision and then probe into its background and implications.

Although at the President’s suggestion the Casablanca Conference has won the title of “the Unconditional Surrender meeting,”{3} the decision to make this historic demand was incidental to the initial aims of the conference. Basically the Casablanca Conference was a military meeting. The decision to demand Unconditional Surrender was discussed by the chiefs briefly between urgent discussions of the planned Second Front, the all-out air offensive against the German homeland, and the status of the sea war. The atmosphere at the conference was one of urgency and gravity, and perhaps to a large extent the Unconditional Surrender demand reflects this mood of urgency and gravity. Perhaps, as Churchill later explained, this was a gesture of defiance evoked by a grim situation in which victory seemed distant.{4}

The Casablanca Conference convened on January 14, 1943. From the Allied viewpoint, the military situation at the opening of 1943 was promising, but still uncertain. Hopes for eventual victory were stronger, but Germany, Japan, and even Italy were still formidable opponents and the price of victory would be high. The Allied planners still operated in the mood of the early months of the war, which had witnessed an unbroken series of Axis triumphs.

By January, 1943, the German advance in North Africa had been halted. At the beginning of November, 1942, the English counterattack in Tunisia had broken through the German defenses at El Alamein. A few days later the Allied amphibious landing in North Africa had further endangered the German Afrika Korps. On November 13 Tobruk had fallen to the British Eighth Army. On the Eastern Front the German advance had been stopped at Stalingrad. By November 22 the entire German Sixth Army had been encircled and cut off. By January the fate of 250,000 Germans had been sealed. The tide of the war had begun to turn.

However, many grave threats still haunted the Allied chiefs, many serious obstacles still stood between them and eventual victory. The German Wehrmacht remained a formidable weapon and it still straddled a vast space in Western Russia stretching from Leningrad in the north to Stalingrad in the south. It held Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, and the Crimea and occupied Europe from the Atlantic through the Balkans, from Norway to the Mediterranean. Rommel’s Afrika Korps, although badly injured by the English breakthrough and suffering from severe shortage of supply, was still a dangerous opponent. Throughout 1942 German submarines had taken a heavy toll of Allied shipping in the North Atlantic; sinkings had outstripped replacements by a million tons.{5} The German homeland was intact and German production, although hampered by inherent limitations of raw materials, was reaching new levels of expansion. All in all, although the tide had perceptibly turned, the end of the war was certainly not in sight. The questions of how victory could be achieved and what its cost would be were still unanswered. It was in this context that the English and American military leaders met at Casablanca. Perhaps in this context it is easy to understand that they were preoccupied with the immediate problem of military victory, that they were urgently concerned with strategic means, not with political ends.

The Allied political situation in January, 1943, was far from clear. The weaknesses of coalition warfare were already apparent and the basic suspicions lurking between the Eastern and Western Allies contributed to the uneasiness of the atmosphere at Casablanca. Stalin had criticized his allies openly and severely for their delays in opening a second front to relieve pressure on the Red Army; the Anglo-Americans were haunted by the fear that the Soviet Union would desert the alliance and make peace with Hitler. Even the English and the Americans, although firmly determined to fight to ultimate victory, were by no means clearly in agreement on the methods of achieving that victory or on the terms of the peace that would follow. Not only was there a natural rivalry for leadership in the coalition between the British and the American chiefs, but also there was a genuine divergence of viewpoint on basic strategy which strained the temper of the planners if not the alliance itself.{6} These political factors also had their influence at Casablanca and probably played a role in the call for Unconditional Surrender.

Let us examine briefly the milieu that produced the Casablanca Formula. The major problems which faced the British and Americans at Casablanca were as follows: the relative importance of the war in the Pacific as opposed to the war in Europe; the control and ending of the U-boat menace; the dispute between the rival Free French generals, de Gaulle and Giraud; the question of future operations in the Mediterranean; the method and scope of the proposed bombing offensive against Germany; and perhaps most decisive and most controversial, the decision of where and when to launch a second front invasion.{7} The British and American chiefs were divided on their answers to almost all of these questions. The major work of the meetings at Casablanca involved ironing out disagreements. The atmosphere often became strained, the rift in viewpoint seemed basic. On one point, however, the Anglo-Americans clearly agreed: that the war must be pursued to the point of final victory. Perhaps in an atmosphere of division the one point of total accord needed to be stated unequivocally. Perhaps to some extent this explains “Unconditional Surrender.”

Underlying many of the differences in approach to strategic plans was a basic American mistrust of British diplomacy and especially of imperialism. For example, the American military men seemed to fear that, since the major British interests lay in the Middle East and in Europe, the English would exploit American strength for the defeat of Germany and would then leave the work of defeating Japan largely to the United States, and, further, that British interest in continuing military operations in the Mediterranean resulted more from concern for the lifeline of the Empire and for post-war political advantage than from a desire to relieve pressure on the Red Army and to defeat the German Wehrmacht as quickly and economically as possible.{8} The British, on the other hand, seemed suspicious of American enthusiasm and lack of experience. RAF Marshal Sir John Slessor put it succinctly: he said that the American attitude was simple, “in fact rather too much so.” He felt that the American chiefs wanted action in Europe even though in the British view their troops were not yet battleworthy. The Americans criticized the British for their caution in wishing to postpone the projected invasion of the European Continent until the battle for shipping had been won, until a sufficient build-up of men and matériel in the British Isles had been accomplished, and until German resistance had been softened by strategic bombing of industrial centers. Slessor explained that the English had been “once bitten (or rather twice, having had nearly a million men killed last time) and were twice shy about that particular dog.”{9} The Americans, relatively new to land warfare on the European Continent, seemed fresh, eager and naive to the more skeptical and seasoned British.

The discussions on all phases of the disagreement were sometimes heated and acrimonious. The British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lord Alanbrooke, recorded the Casablanca wrangling in his diary and noted: “There is no doubt that we are too closely related to the Americans to make co-operation easy.” In a later entry he wrote of the Americans that they “are difficult, though charming people to work with.”{10} Agreement could be obtained only by concessions and compromise. For example, the British agreed formally to the target date of fall, 1943, or spring, 1944, for the cross-channel invasion even though they doubted the feasibility of the earlier date. In return the Americans accepted the British plan for the invasion of Sicily as a means of clearing the Mediterranean for Allied shipping and perhaps of forcing Italy out of the war.{11} There was a long controversy over the nature and scale of the bombing offensive to be launched against German war production centers, but there too a compromise was effected.

In the perspective of these bitter debates, the question of whether or not to demand the Unconditional Surrender of the enemy seemed a minor issue. Neither Alanbrooke nor Slessor mentions any discussion of the issue in his book. General Wedemeyer states that the American Joint Chiefs took up the proposal at a morning meeting at Casablanca and notes that both he and General Deane opposed the plan, but the chiefs took no official stand on the matter.{12} Apparently the final decision to issue the demand was made unofficially by the President and the Prime Minister.

Elliott Roosevelt, who had accompanied his father to the conference, reports that the President suggested the phrase informally at lunch on the next to last day of the conference. Although this account is not confirmed in other sources, he writes that both Harry Hopkins and the Prime Minister reacted favorably to the phrase, that Churchill looked thoughtful, grinned, and then said “Perfect! And I can just see how Goebbels and the rest of ‘em’ll squeal!” The President thought that the formula would be “just the thing for the Russians...Uncle Joe might have made it up himself.” Later that day when cocktails were passed around Elliott Roosevelt says that Churchill proposed a toast: “Unconditional Surrender.”{13}

On the following day, January 24, at the press conference which marked the conclusion of the official meetings President Roosevelt read the communiqué which announced the Anglo-American decisions. The phrase “Unconditional Surrender” was not ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War II
• DEDICATION
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHRONOLOGY of Major Political Events of the Second World War
• CHAPTER 1-The Background of Unconditional Surrender
• CHAPTER 2-The Implementation of the Policy of Unconditional Surrender in the Second World War
• MILITARY CHRONOLOGY of the Second World War: 1939-1945
• CHAPTER 3-The Effects of the Policy of Unconditional Surrender on the Military Conduct of the War
• CHAPTER 4-The Effect of the Policy of Unconditional Surrender on the German Anti-Nazi Resistance Movement: 1943-1944
• CHRONOLOGY of Postwar Events in Germany
• CHAPTER 5-Conclusions
• APPENDIX A-Additional Notes on the German Anti-Nazi Resistance
• APPENDIX ?-Excerpts from a Note About the July 20, 1944, Plot by Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Nürnberg, 1946
• Selected Bibliography
• Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
• About the Author