Unconditional Surrender: The Policy That Prolonged World War II
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UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE POLICY THAT PROLONGED WORLD WAR II
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UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE POLICY THAT PROLONGED WORLD WAR II
From January 14 to January 24, 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met and argued amiably - and compromised even more amiably - in the sunny resort of Anfa, a collection of luxurious villas surrounding a three-story hotel some three miles south of Casablanca. Nearby, their staffs argued much less amiably and, in some cases, declined to compromise. Finally, reporters gathered in the courtyard of Roosevelt’s villa to hear the two leaders sum up the historic Moroccan conclave.
FDR sat with his lifeless legs jauntily crossed, wearing a light gray suit and dark tie. Churchill was replete with homburg, cigar, and a dark blue suit and vest that seemed more suitable for the House of Commons than for a backdrop of waving palm trees and tropical sunshine. Beaming, FDR declared that the two allies had reached “complete agreement” on the future conduct of the war.
He and the prime minister, Roosevelt continued, had also hammered out a policy that would guarantee both victory and a peaceful world for generations to come. “Some of you Britishers know the old story - we had a general named U.S. Grant,” Roosevelt said. “His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my and the Prime Minister’s early days, he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender Grant.’ The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.”
Winston Churchill manfully chimed in with a hearty endorsement of their “unconquerable will” to pursue victory until they obtained “the unconditional surrender of the criminal forces that have plunged the world into storm and ruin.” It may well have been Churchill’s finest hour as a political performer. Inwardly, he was dumbfounded by the announcement - and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.
Among the prime minister’s British colleagues, dismay and alarm ran even deeper. The chief of British intelligence, General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous not only to certain secret operations already in progress, but because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats.” Air Marshal Sir John Slessor maintained to the end of his life that, were it not for the policy, air power alone could have ended the war. Lord Hankey, one of Churchill’s diplomatic advisors, was so perturbed he went back to England and researched 15 British wars back to 1600. In only one, the Boer War, had the idea of unconditional surrender even been considered - and it was hastily dropped when the Boers announced they would fight until doomsday.
The feeling of dismay was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, thought unconditional surrender was idiotic - it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge 20 bayonets, you might as well charge 20 bayonets.” General Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. It would, he said, “weld all the Germans together.” He had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and knew firsthand the deep divisions between Adolf Hitler and the German General Staff. Deliberately excluded from the conference by the president was another vehement opponent, the U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. Determined as usual to invent his own foreign policy, Roosevelt had brought no high level American diplomats with him to Casablanca.
In Berlin, the news of unconditional surrender sent Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, into euphoria. He called Roosevelt’s announcement “world historical tomfoolery of the first order.” To one of his colleagues, he admitted: “I should never have been able to think up so rousing a slogan. If our western enemies tell us, we won’t deal with you, our only aim is to destroy you, how can any German, whether he likes it or not, do anything but fight on with all his strength?”
Elsewhere in the German capital, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the silver-haired chief of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, turned to one of his deputies and said with a sigh: “The students of history will not need to trouble their heads with this war, as they did with the last one, over who was guilty of starting it. The case is however different when we consider the guilt for prolonging the war. I believe that the other side has now disarmed us of the last weapon with which we could have ended it.”
Of all these reactions to Roosevelt’s Casablanca declaration, Canaris’ was by far the most important. With his unillusioned grasp of men and politics, the Abwehr chief saw that unless the president could be persuaded to alter the policy of unconditional surrender, the plot that the admiral and other Germans had been painstakingly concocting to depose Hitler and negotiate peace was doomed to failure.
Traitors in Hitler’s Empire
Since the beginning of the war, Menzies and Canaris, two seeming opponents to the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940, the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered too late that it was excruciatingly authentic. While Admiral Canaris went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.
Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassell, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance, General Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler seized Prague in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement, and Count Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, who had been dismissed from his post by the Nazis for refusing to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.
The key figure was Beck, who was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. Menzies’ awareness of the existence of this conspiracy was almost certainly the reason for his interference in a plot to kidnap Admiral Canaris only a few weeks before the Casablanca Conference. When an Allied invasion fleet began landing 200,000 men on the African coast on November 8, 1942, the Abwehr director rushed to Algeciras on the Spanish coast to galvanize the horde of agents working out of the German consulate in Tangier. The British intelligence chief in nearby Gibraltar decided to seize him - until a message arrived from Menzies: “Leave our man alone.”
Not long after, Menzies received a message from Canaris asking if they could meet secretly somewhere in Portugal or Spain. Visions of an ultimate intelligence triumph thrilled Menzies: He and Canaris could negotiate a peace that would save millions of lives. But when the Secret Intelligence Service chief asked his superiors in the British Foreign Office for permission to meet the admiral, he was curtly refused - the ostensible reason being a fear of offending the Russians. The explanation would have made Canaris smile: The Russians had been trying to conclude a separate peace with Hitler virtually from the moment he attacked them.
In 1940, Vansittart wrote a fellow diplomat: “Eighty percent of the German race are the political and moral scum of the earth.” Needless to say, he was a passionate supporter of unconditional surrender. In his spirit and that of Casablanca, the Foreign Office issued a blanket order to its representatives to henceforth ignore peace proposals from any and all Germans.
Admiral Canaris was not particularly surprised by this démarche. He had an intimate knowledge of the hatred World War I had engendered between the two countries. He had run German intelligence in Spain in the early years of that war and was so successful, according to one story, the infuriated British tried to assassinate him. From the start of the conspiracy against Hitler, Canaris had placed his chief hope in a negotiation with the Americans - one of several reasons why Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender policy dismayed him.
Even more dismaying was the timing. Unconditional surrender was announced on the day the Russians split in half the German army trapped in the Stalingrad pocket, making its destruction inevitable. For two years the conspirators had been waiting for a defeat of this magnitude, which would force the general staff to admit the war was lost - and thus agree to support a coup d’état. At the very moment when this precarious hope seemed to be coming true, Roosevelt delivered it a terrible blow.
For a professional soldier, unconditional surrender is a term that reeks of contempt and dishonor. Since the beginning of conflicts between civilized states, most wars have been concluded by negotiation in which the victors tacitly admit that the losers have the right to make some claims to decent treatment for having fought courageously.
Before Casablanca, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, commander of the Berlin garrison, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” General Heinz Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason when he was approached by Colonel Hans Oster, Canaris’ second in command. Colonel General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the German army, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy.
“A Deal With the Devil”
Why had Roosevelt chosen this moment to announce the policy? Where had it come from? In his seemingly ingenuous way, FDR later claimed that the phrase had just “popped into my mind” at the press conference. The president sometimes liked to picture himself as a rather frivolous character, a “juggler” who did not let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. But the meaning and intent of the unconditional surrender policy was anything but frivolous, and its origin was not in the least accidental.
The term had first appeared in the documents of the American government in the spring of 1942, when the State Department set up a committee to discuss postwar aims. Its chairman was Norman H. Davis, former advisor to Woodrow Wilson and a frequent collaborator with FDR on foreign policy matters. There is little doubt that FDR told Davis he wanted the policy the committee recommended, unconditional surrender, and determined to pursue it very early in the war. The president foreshadowed the policy in his annual message to Congress on January 6, 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, when he declared: “There has never been - there can never be - successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and faith.”
At a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on January 7, 1943, Roosevelt told General George Marshall he intended to propose unconditional surrender to Churchill as a way of reassuring Josef Stalin that the British and Americans would not make a premature peace - even though they were still a long way from launching the second front that Moscow repeatedly and impatiently demanded.
A more immediate reason for the announcement was the uproar created by the U.S. Army-State Department deal with the Nazi collaborator, Admiral Jean Darlan, to end French resistance to the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. Liberal columnists, such as Drew Pearson and Walter Lippmann decried it as a “deal with the devil,” a reaction that took Roosevelt by surprise. Within the administration, liberal friends, such as Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., told Roosevelt the moral integrity of the United States had been impugned, and Morgenthau demanded Eisenhower’s head. The impact of this outcry on Roosevelt was profound.
Those two factors - anxiety over reassuring Stalin and the desire to expunge the stain of Darlan - explain to a large extent Roosevelt’s timing of the unconditional surrender policy but not the underlying long-range intention. That requires a look backward to Roosevelt’s experience in World War I, when he watched brutal clashes over peacemaking with Germany destroy the presidency and health of Woodrow Wilson, a leader he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy and whom he deeply admired. His prior experience left Roosevelt with an intense animus - hatred would be a more operative word - for Germany.
As for the “unconditional surrender” slogan itself, FDR never revealed its real source because it came from a president whose influence he did his utmost to conceal - Theodore Roosevelt. At the close of World War I, Teddy had differed violently with Wilson when he offered the reeling Germans an armistice and peace on the basis of his idealistic Fourteen Points. The Republican Roosevelt had insisted that nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the German army would guarantee the peace - an idea that the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. Pershing, also endorsed.
Hitler’s repudiation of the war-guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles and his reckless aggressions had convinced Roosevelt that Cousin Teddy and Pershing were correct, and FDR was determined to apply this lesson of history to the war he was running. Playwright Robert Sherwood, who worked closely with Roosevelt and his chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, as a speechwriter and confidant, concluded that unconditional surrender was “very deeply deliberated . . . a true statement of Roosevelt’s policy.”
Apparently, Roosevelt discussed unconditional surrender with Churchill some five days before he announced it at Casablanca. While he did not object to the idea, the British prime minister seems to have had grave reservations about making it a public slogan to which they would be tied for the rest of the war. It was Roosevelt’s announcement that left Churchill “dumbfounded,” one Casablanca participant later told Cordell Hull.
As a student of the past on a level Roosevelt never approached, Churchill knew the danger of applying lessons from history to statecraft. The lessons were too often irrelevant to the realities of a new time and a very different situation. Seldom has this counsel been more true than in the case of Nazi Germany and the German opposition to Hitler. Roosevelt’s commitment to unconditional surrender led him to disregard the existence of these courageous men and women, who risked their lives and reputations to redeem their country from one of the most evil regimes in world history.
FDR Turns a Deaf Ear
In the succeeding year, Canaris and the men around him tried desperately to communicate with Roosevelt. They used all sorts of emissaries, beginning with Louis Lochner, a former AP correspondent in Berlin, who rushed to the White House the moment he was repatriated from Germany in June of 1942. Lochner was curtly informed that the president had “no interest whatsoever” in his information. In Istanbul, Helmuth von
Moltke talked to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkan expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. He persuaded William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to come to the Turkish capital to hear an offer to fly a German general staff member to London to arrange a peaceful surrender of the western front if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”
Next, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, Switzerland, where Allen Dulles had become the OSS station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, an Abwehr agent disguised as a German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. A similar initiative in Stockholm, launched by the German Foreign Office, also came to naught.
As desperation mounted, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, a meeting was arranged between Canaris, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939 - surrendering all of Hitler’s conquests. A deputy of Canaris who was present at the meeting said it was the most exciting experience of his secret service career.