The Second Quebec Conference

On 12 September 1944 the second Anglo-American conference to be held in Quebec opened under the code name “Octagon”. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were meeting there for the second time in thirteen months, but in a military situation utterly different from that of August 1943. The Allies had liberated Paris and Brussels and their armies stood on the borders of the Reich; the Red Army had reached the Vistula and was entering the Balkans; and in the Pacific the Americans had taken the Marianas. The talks lasted until 16 September and turned on two great questions: Britain’s part in the final phase of the war against Japan, and what to do with Germany once it had been defeated.

Roosevelt and Churchill discussed military cooperation in the Pacific and the future of Germany. On Germany, however, the outcome went no further than paper, and the most notorious of those papers, the Morgenthau Plan initialled on 15 September, lost the backing of the President himself within a few weeks.

From “Quadrant” to “Octagon”

The first Quebec meeting, the Quadrant Conference of August 1943, had confirmed the date of the invasion of France and produced a secret agreement on joint work on the atomic bomb. Three months later Roosevelt and Churchill conferred with Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo Conference, and at the Tehran Conference they met Joseph Stalin for the first time. Since then Overlord had become a reality: after the liberation of Paris and of Brussels many Allied staff officers expected the war in Europe to be over before Christmas. The time had therefore come to decide how to shift forces to the war against Japan and how to organise a defeated Germany, before Stalin sat down at the same table again.

Churchill sailed to Halifax in the liner Queen Mary and went on to Quebec by train; the President also arrived there by train on 11 September. Both stayed at the Citadel, the summer residence of the Governor General of Canada. Their host was Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, but, as in 1943, he took no part in the main deliberations: the conference was an Anglo-American affair, and most of the work was done by the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the two countries at the Château Frontenac hotel. King entertained the guests, appeared with them in public and made sure that Canada was seen as an ally and not merely as the venue.

The delegations were led by the same men as a year earlier. The British Chiefs of Staff were represented by Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal and Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham; the American by Admiral William Leahy, General George Marshall, Admiral Ernest King and General Henry Arnold. Absent, however, was the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who was too ill to come. Roosevelt instead summoned the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, from Washington, while the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, joined from London. This line-up mattered a great deal for the most notorious of the Quebec documents.

A British fleet in the Pacific

At the first plenary session, on 13 September, Churchill proposed that the main body of the Royal Navy should take part in the principal operations against Japan in the Pacific under American command, and not only in the Indian Ocean. For London this was a political matter: the British did not want the Americans to recover Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore for them, and the Empire saw it as a measure of its post-war standing. Admiral King did not want British ships in “his” ocean and feared they would depend on American supplies. Roosevelt, however, settled the question at once; according to Churchill’s memoirs, the President accepted the offer as soon as it was made. The Chiefs of Staff stipulated that the British fleet must be self-sufficient, which forced the Admiralty to build its own fleet train of tankers and supply ships from scratch. Thus was born the British Pacific Fleet, whose command Admiral Bruce Fraser took up in November.

The conference also produced a decision that brought the Pacific war forward by two months. The carriers of Admiral William Halsey, raiding the Philippines in the first half of September, had met surprisingly weak resistance in the central part of the archipelago. On 13 September Halsey proposed dropping the intermediate objectives and striking straight at the island of Leyte. Admiral Chester Nimitz and the staff of General Douglas MacArthur backed the idea, and the American Chiefs of Staff, who happened to be in session in Quebec, approved it on 15 September: the Leyte landing was set for 20 October instead of December, and the planned landings on Mindanao and Yap were cancelled. The change came too late, however, to halt the fighting on Peleliu, which began that same day.

The decisions on South-East Asia were less concrete. The Combined Chiefs of Staff instructed Admiral Louis Mountbatten to conduct an offensive in northern Burma and to prepare a seaborne landing at Rangoon, code-named Dracula, for the spring of 1945. The British hoped in this way to recover Burma with their own forces, whereas the Americans cared above all about keeping open the supply route to China, which was then losing province after province to the Japanese Operation Ichi-Go.

Europe: Italy, Antwerp and the bombers

On European matters the Chiefs of Staff approved the plan of General Dwight Eisenhower, which directed the main effort northwards towards the Ruhr, and stressed the importance of opening the port of Antwerp quickly. The city had been taken on 4 September (the liberation of Antwerp), but the Germans still held the Scheldt estuary, so ships could not reach it. It was also agreed that the heavy bombers of the RAF and the US Army Air Forces, placed under Eisenhower in the spring for the duration of the invasion, would return to the direction of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, with Portal and Arnold acting on their behalf. The new directive came into force at the end of September.

Churchill pressed the case for Italy. He wanted the armies of Harold Alexander not to be weakened by further transfers of divisions to France and, once the Gothic Line had been broken, to advance north-east towards Trieste and Vienna, possibly supported by a landing in Istria. The Americans agreed not to withdraw troops from Italy until the autumn offensive had been decided, and the question of a landing was left to General Henry Maitland Wilson. Historians, especially Soviet ones, saw the plan as an attempt to forestall the Red Army in Central Europe; British sources confirm that Churchill also had its political consequences in mind, but the plan never went beyond the stage of discussion.

Occupation zones

On 12 September, the day the conference opened, representatives of the United States, Britain and the USSR on the European Advisory Commission in London signed a protocol dividing Germany within its 1937 borders into three occupation zones and Greater Berlin into three sectors. The eastern zone was assigned to the Soviet Union, but the spaces for the north-western and south-western zones were left blank. Roosevelt and Churchill had been arguing over them for months. The President wanted the north-west, with its North Sea ports, so as to have a direct route home and not depend on lines of communication through France, whose future he did not trust.

In Quebec Roosevelt gave way. The British received the north-western zone with the Ruhr, and the Americans the south-western zone with Bavaria, together with the right to control the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven and transit to them through the British zone. This arrangement, with a French zone carved out later, lasted until the end of the occupation.

The Morgenthau Plan

The greatest stir was caused by a document on Germany’s economic future. Morgenthau and his deputy, Harry Dexter White, had brought a memorandum that envisaged the partition of Germany, the cession of part of its territory to its neighbours, the internationalisation of the Ruhr and the dismantling of heavy industry. It met with opposition in the War Department and the State Department: the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, believed that impoverishing Germany would harm the whole of Europe and sow the seeds of another war. Hull, who usually restrained such ideas, was ill, however, and had not come.

Churchill at first reacted very badly to the proposal and is said to have remarked that England would then be “chained to a dead body”. He changed his mind after talks with Morgenthau and with his scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann), who argued that the destruction of German industry would open markets to the British. On 15 September Churchill and Roosevelt initialled a short memorandum drafted by the Prime Minister himself: it provided for the elimination of the armaments industries of the Ruhr and the Saar and for converting Germany into a country “primarily agricultural and pastoral” in character. There was no longer any mention of partition. Eden, who arrived during the conference, protested sharply, and in London the Cabinet never adopted the document.

Some historians link Churchill’s assent to the talks on American aid to Britain that were taking place at the same time. The Prime Minister himself wrote after the war that the President and Morgenthau, from whom the British wanted a great deal, had been so insistent that they agreed to consider the proposal. Others, also quoting Churchill, emphasise his hostility to Germany after five years of war. Both interpretations are found in the literature, and neither can now be settled beyond doubt.

Lend-Lease after Germany’s defeat

Britain was entering the last year of the war with its reserves exhausted, in debt to the Dominions and with its exports reduced to a fraction of their pre-war level. Since 1941 it had been kept going by American aid under Lend-Lease. In Quebec Churchill sought an assurance that the aid would not end on the day Germany surrendered but would continue in the period between victory in Europe and the defeat of Japan, referred to in British documents as “Stage II”. Roosevelt agreed in principle. In a note to Hull of 15 September he wrote of a proposal for credits to Britain totalling six and a half billion dollars. The details were to be worked out by a committee in which Morgenthau played the leading role on the American side; the negotiations, in which the British side was represented by the economist John Maynard Keynes, went on in Washington until late autumn and ended in a compromise that fell short of British expectations.

The close of the talks and Hyde Park

On 16 September, at the close of the conference, Roosevelt and Churchill met the press at the Citadel. The communiqué said not a word about Germany; it stressed that the greatest difficulty was how to bring to bear against Japan the vast forces that both countries intended to hurl at that enemy. That same day both leaders received honorary doctorates from McGill University.

From Quebec Churchill went with the President to Roosevelt’s family estate at Hyde Park on the Hudson. There, in private conversation, they returned to the question of the atomic bomb. The secret aide-mémoire recording that conversation, dated 18 September (many accounts say it was signed on 19 September), rejected the suggestion, urged by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, that the world be informed of the work on nuclear weapons and that international control over them be sought. It provided that the bomb, once ready, might “after mature consideration” be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that the bombardment would be repeated until they surrendered. It also announced full cooperation between the two countries on Tube Alloys after Japan’s defeat and ordered inquiries to make sure that Bohr was not passing on information, “particularly to the Russians”. The American copy was lost among the President’s papers, and after his death Washington long doubted that any such document existed.

Significance

The Morgenthau Plan did not last long. Stimson and Hull, outraged that the President had signed it behind their backs, protested at the White House, and on 21 September the journalist Drew Pearson revealed its existence. Critical articles followed in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The propaganda of Joseph Goebbels at once seized on the plan as proof that the Allies meant to starve the Germans and as an argument for fighting to the end. According to Stimson’s diary, Roosevelt admitted to him in a conversation on 3 October that he had no idea how he could have initialled the text. The plan was shelved; in a softened form, however, traces of it survived in the harsh directive to the American occupation forces of 1945, replaced by another in 1947.

The military decisions had much more lasting effects. The Americans landed on Leyte on 20 October, which led to the greatest naval battle of the war, in Leyte Gulf. The British Pacific Fleet went into action in 1945 off Okinawa and the coast of Japan. The division of occupation zones agreed between the British and Americans in Quebec was confirmed in February 1945 by the Yalta Conference, which added a French zone. The Hyde Park aide-mémoire foreshadowed the decisions of August 1945 and at the same time showed that neither leader intended to share the secret of the bomb with Stalin.

Octagon was the last bilateral conference between Roosevelt and Churchill before the great meeting of the three powers. The question of Poland and of embattled Warsaw was not among the main subjects of the talks, although both governments knew of the desperate appeals of the insurgents and of Soviet obstruction of the supply flights; on 18 September, two days after the talks ended, a large force of American bombers flew over the city dropping supplies. A month later Churchill flew to Moscow to divide influence in the Balkans with Stalin without Roosevelt. The war, which in Quebec had been expected to end in 1944, went on in Europe until May 1945 and in the Pacific until September 1945.