The Quebec Conference and the Quebec Agreement

On 19 August 1943, in the Citadel, the old fortress towering over the city of Quebec, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a short, four-page document entitled “Articles of Agreement Governing Collaboration Between the Authorities of the U.S.A. and the U.K. in the Matter of Tube Alloys”. Behind that code name lay the programme to build the atomic bomb. The Quebec Agreement merged British nuclear work with the American Manhattan Project and for almost three years laid down the rules of the two powers’ atomic alliance. Its existence remained secret for a decade after the war.

The signing of the agreement was only one strand of the first Quebec Conference, code-named Quadrant, which lasted from 17 to 24 August 1943. At it the British and American leaders, together with their chiefs of staff, confirmed the invasion of France in May 1944, settled further strategy in Italy, created a new command in South-East Asia and mapped out the lines of advance in the Pacific. The host was the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Three months after Trident

At the Trident Conference in Washington in May 1943 the Allies had set 1 May 1944 as the date for the cross-Channel invasion, but the Americans had come away feeling that the British still regarded this commitment as conditional. Over the summer the situation changed faster than anyone had foreseen. On 10 July the Allies landed in Sicily, and on 25 July King Victor Emmanuel III removed Mussolini from power. The new government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio assured Berlin of its loyalty to the alliance while at the same time seeking a way to the Allies. The Germans, distrusting the Italians, were sending division after division over the Brenner.

Churchill saw in this an opportunity that must not be wasted: knocking Italy out of the war, taking Rome and perhaps further operations in the Balkans and the Aegean. The American chiefs of staff, led by General George Marshall, feared precisely that: that successes in the Mediterranean would draw Allied forces into further sideshows and once again postpone the decisive blow in France. Before leaving for Canada the American planners prepared a position under which Operation Overlord was to receive absolute priority over all other operations in Europe.

Over everything hung the Soviet question. Joseph Stalin had for months been demanding a second front, and his relations with the Western Allies had cooled after the invasion was postponed yet again. Stalin was invited to Quebec but declined, pleading the need to direct the Red Army’s summer operations.

The journey and the venue

Churchill sailed from Britain on 5 August aboard the liner Queen Mary with a large delegation, which included the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, and Brigadier Orde Wingate, leader of the first Chindit expedition in Burma. The Prime Minister had brought him along so that the Americans could hear at first hand his concept of fighting behind Japanese lines. After arriving in Canada, Churchill visited Roosevelt at his estate at Hyde Park, where the two talked in private, among other things about the command of the invasion and atomic matters.

The chiefs of staff met from 14 August in the Château Frontenac hotel, and on 17 August Roosevelt arrived in Quebec. The leaders stayed in the Citadel, the summer residence of the Governor General of Canada, where two plenary sessions were held (on 19 and 23 August). Mackenzie King entertained his guests with great care but did not take part in the strategic deliberations. Churchill proposed that the Canadian should attend all the talks, but Roosevelt objected, fearing that at future conferences all the other allies would demand a similar place. Canada’s role was thus largely reduced to that of host, which was received with mixed feelings in Canada itself.

Overlord and Italy

The main dispute concerned the place of Operation Overlord in Allied strategy. The Americans demanded “overriding priority” for it, which would have closed off any diversion of forces and landing craft to the Mediterranean. The British, although Churchill gave assurances that he firmly supported an invasion in 1944, did not want to tie their hands. Brooke believed that the success of the invasion depended on how many Germans could first be tied down in Italy, and the Prime Minister argued that a landing in France made sense only if German forces in the west did not exceed a certain level. The chiefs of staff’s discussions were at times so stormy that some sessions were held without note-takers.

It ended in a compromise. The Combined Chiefs of Staff’s final report of 24 August recorded that Overlord would be the primary American–British ground and air effort against the Axis in Europe, with a target date of 1 May 1944. The Americans, however, had to accept a weaker formula than “overriding priority”: where resources were short, they were to be distributed with the “main object” of ensuring the invasion’s success. It was confirmed that seven experienced divisions (four American and three British) would be transferred from the Mediterranean to Britain from November. The invasion plan prepared by General Frederick Morgan’s COSSAC staff was adopted as the basis for further work. In case of a sudden German collapse, a plan for an emergency return to the Continent (Rankin) was prepared, while Churchill kept returning to the idea of a landing in northern Norway.

During the conference a decision was also taken that affected Brooke personally. Churchill had earlier promised him command of the invasion, but at Quebec he conceded that since American forces would predominate, the commander had to be an American. Brooke noted in his diary that the Prime Minister had broken the news to him as if it were a matter of minor importance. The commander’s name was to be settled later.

As for Italy, a three-stage plan was adopted: eliminating Italy from the war, seizing airfields in the Rome area and, if possible, further north, and then maintaining unremitting pressure on the German forces on the peninsula. Churchill gave assurances that he had no wish to advance beyond the Ancona–Pisa line. The capture of Sardinia and Corsica was also agreed, as was the preparation of a landing in southern France to support Overlord. Operations in the Balkans were limited to supplying the partisans, bombing and commando raids. News of the end of the fighting in Sicily arrived on 17 August, the day of Roosevelt’s arrival, and over the following days the plans for landings in Calabria and in the Gulf of Salerno (Operation Avalanche) were approved.

In parallel, secret talks with the Italians were going on. On 15 August Badoglio’s emissary, General Giuseppe Castellano, called on the British ambassador in Madrid with a proposal that Italy should go over to the Allied side. The leaders in Quebec instructed General Dwight Eisenhower to send two staff officers to Lisbon, who on 19 August presented Castellano with the armistice terms. The Allies maintained their demand for unconditional surrender but indicated that the extent to which the terms were softened would depend on how much the Italians did against the Germans. Moscow was kept informed of the progress of these talks.

South-East Asia and the Pacific

The British came to Quebec with an idea meant to answer American charges of passivity in Burma: the creation of a separate South East Asia Command (SEAC), detached from the remit of the command in India. After a long search for a candidate, Churchill proposed the 43-year-old Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, until then Chief of Combined Operations, and the Americans agreed. His deputy was General Joseph Stilwell, who at the same time remained chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek and commander of American forces in China, Burma and India. Mountbatten’s appointment was announced on 25 August, the day after the conference ended.

Wingate presented to the chiefs of staff his concept of “long-range penetration” operations: columns operating deep in the Japanese rear and supplied entirely from the air. He made a great impression, especially on Marshall and on General Henry Arnold, who promised to provide the Chindits with an air force of their own. It was decided to expand the Chindits considerably and to use them in an offensive in northern Burma at the beginning of 1944. Its aim was to open a land route to China; at the same time it was decided to increase the airlift over the Himalayas. The Chinese foreign minister, T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), took part in some of the talks on China.

According to some accounts, it was at Quebec that Mountbatten demonstrated to the chiefs of staff pykrete, ice reinforced with sawdust, from which it was proposed to build gigantic aircraft carriers under Project Habakkuk. A pistol shot fired at a block of pykrete is said to have ricocheted and nearly hit one of those present. The project was handed over to Canada for study but was eventually abandoned.

In the Pacific the American plan for two lines of advance was approved. Admiral Chester Nimitz’s forces were to advance across the Central Pacific, beginning with the Gilbert Islands and the Marshall Islands, while General Douglas MacArthur’s troops were to move along the coast of New Guinea. The most important change was the decision not to capture the main Japanese base at Rabaul but to cut it off and neutralise it from the air. This was the first official statement of the strategy of bypassing strongholds which the Americans had just begun to apply in the Solomon Islands: on 15 August they had landed on Vella Lavella, bypassing strongly held Kolombangara. The American planners also set down the aim of defeating Japan within twelve months of Germany’s defeat.

An atomic crisis in the alliance

The Quebec Agreement closed a crisis of several months in the two powers’ atomic relations. Britain had begun serious work on the bomb earlier than the United States: in 1941 its scientists on the MAUD Committee showed that a nuclear weapon was feasible, and their report convinced the Americans that the matter had to be pursued on a large scale. In the autumn of 1941 Roosevelt proposed a joint programme to Churchill, but the British, wary of American discretion and convinced of their own lead, gave an evasive reply. The roles were soon reversed. After the United States entered the war, the Manhattan Project received resources the British could only dream of, and in December 1942 Enrico Fermi’s team started up the first nuclear reactor in Chicago.

Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant, who directed American research, concluded that British help was no longer needed, and General Leslie Groves, head of the project from September 1942, imposed strict compartmentalisation of knowledge on it. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, took the view that since the United States was doing “ninety per cent of the work”, there was no reason to share more than necessary. The Americans also suspected that people from the ICI concern involved in the British programme wanted to use American know-how to build a post-war nuclear industry. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 the exchange of information was restricted to what the British could use during the war, which hit, among others, the Anglo-Canadian laboratory in Montreal working on a heavy water reactor. The British then stopped sending their scientists to America.

In London the cost of an independent programme was calculated: a uranium enrichment plant, a reactor in Canada, heavy water production, tens of thousands of skilled workers and huge quantities of steel and electricity. The result was unequivocal. Britain could not build the bomb on its own during the war, and certainly not before the end of the fighting in Europe. Churchill decided to restore cooperation at the highest level. In May 1943 in Washington his adviser Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, spoke with Bush in the presence of Harry Hopkins, and Roosevelt orally promised to restore full exchange. The promise, however, did not translate into decisions by officials. In July Churchill received Bush and Stimson in London and told them that the President had given him his word of honour. The British argued at the same time that they were not after commercial advantage but wanted to have nuclear weapons of their own after the war. On 20 July Roosevelt instructed Bush to “renew, in an inclusive manner, the full exchange” with the British. The text of the agreement was drafted by Sir John Anderson, the minister responsible for Tube Alloys in the government, and Churchill reworded it to make it sound more solemn. At the beginning of August Anderson agreed the final version in Washington.

The agreement of 19 August

The document signed in the Citadel on 19 August stated that it was vital to the common safety in the present war “to bring the Tube Alloys project to fruition at the earliest moment”, and that this was best achieved by pooling the resources of both countries. The parties undertook:

• never to use this weapon against each other;
• not to use it against third parties without each other’s consent;
• not to communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties without mutual consent;
• to recognise that, in view of the heavy burden of production falling on the United States, the President might limit Britain’s post-war industrial and commercial use of atomic energy.

A Combined Policy Committee, based in Washington, was set up to oversee the joint enterprise. The United States was represented on it by Stimson, Bush and Conant, Britain by Field Marshal John Dill and the minister John Llewellin. Although Canada was not a party to the agreement, it was given a seat on the committee for its Minister of Munitions and Supply, Clarence Decatur Howe. This was recognition of its contribution: Canadian uranium from the mine on Great Bear Lake, heavy water production and the Montreal laboratory were an important part of the joint effort. Mackenzie King, however, did not take part in the negotiations, and the text itself was agreed solely between London and Washington.

For the British the agreement was a compromise, and on many points a concession. The clause on post-war industrial use made it clear who was the stronger partner in the atomic alliance. Churchill nevertheless believed that he had obtained as much as was possible: access to American know-how, without which Britain would not have been able to build its own bomb after the war, and a veto over its use. Stimson, for his part, was most troubled precisely by the requirement of British consent to the weapon’s use, of which Congress knew nothing. The text had gaps which Groves later exploited to maintain compartmentalisation, and the rules for exchanging information were still being worked out until December 1943.

The document was top secret, and not even the United States Congress saw it. The secret, however, proved leaky. According to historians, as early as 4 September 1943 the Soviet military intelligence agent Ursula Kuczynski (“Sonya”) passed information about the agreement to Moscow, most probably obtained from the physicist Klaus Fuchs.

Political questions and the close of the talks

From 20 August the foreign ministers, Cordell Hull and Anthony Eden, were also in Quebec. Most of their time was taken up by the question of the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers. The British wanted to recognise it broadly; the Americans, distrustful of Charles de Gaulle, as narrowly as possible. No common formula could be agreed, and on 26 August each of the allies announced its own: Washington recognised the committee only as a body administering those overseas territories that acknowledged its authority, London added recognition of it as the body directing the French war effort, and Moscow went furthest, calling it the representative of the state interests of the French Republic. The ministers also discussed the future of Germany and relations with the USSR. With Stalin in mind, a meeting of the foreign ministers of the three powers was proposed, which took place in Moscow in October. A declaration condemning German crimes in occupied Poland was also prepared and issued by the British and American governments at the end of August.

Stalin received the news from Quebec coolly. In a message of 22 August he complained that in the matter of the negotiations with Italy he was merely informed of decisions already taken instead of sharing in them, and he demanded the creation of a tripartite military-political commission. During the conference Admiral Pound suffered another stroke and soon had to resign.

The conference ended on 24 August with a joint press conference by Churchill, Roosevelt and Mackenzie King on the terrace of the Citadel. The communiqué was deliberately vague: it spoke of full agreement on military matters and of the intention to hold further talks with the Soviet Union and China. The atomic agreement was not mentioned by a single word. The next day Roosevelt spoke in Ottawa, while Churchill, after a few days’ rest by a lake, went on to Washington for further talks.

Significance

The Quebec Conference gave Western strategy the shape it kept until the end of the war in Europe. The invasion of France ceased to be one option among several and became the main objective, to which operations in the Mediterranean were subordinated. In December Eisenhower was named commander of Overlord, and its date was eventually put back to early June 1944. On 3 September the Allies landed in Calabria, and on 8 September Italy’s surrender was announced; the Germans responded by occupying most of the peninsula, where the fighting bogged down for many months. In November and December 1943 the Quebec plans were discussed with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo and with Stalin at the Tehran Conference. In 1944 Mountbatten’s SEAC carried out the second, much larger Chindit expedition, during which Wingate was killed in an air crash, and the American advance across the Central Pacific began in November at the atolls of Tarawa and Makin.

The Quebec Agreement proved even more lasting in its effects. Thanks to it, several dozen British scientists worked at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Berkeley, and its mutual consent clause was formally applied on 4 July 1945, when Britain agreed to the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. After the war the Americans lost interest in the atomic alliance: the McMahon Act of 1946 ended the exchange of technical information, and in January 1948 the agreement was replaced by a much more modest modus vivendi. Britain built its own bomb independently and carried out its first test in 1952. The content of the Quebec Agreement was revealed only by Churchill in the House of Commons in April 1954. It remained the first international agreement on nuclear weapons and the seed of the two countries’ “special relationship” in this field, which continues to this day.