The Trident Conference

On 12 May 1943 the Third Washington Conference, code-named Trident, opened at the White House in Washington. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, together with their chiefs of staff, deliberated for two weeks, until 25 May. The meeting came at an exceptional moment: a few days earlier Tunis and Bizerte had fallen, and the remnants of the Axis forces in Africa were laying down their arms. For the first time since the beginning of the war, the Western Allies faced the question not of how to survive, but of where and when to strike. The talks were concerned above all with future strategy – Italy, the invasion of France, the bombing offensive, the war against Japan and aid to China. During the conference, on 19 May, Churchill addressed a joint session of the United States Congress for the second time.

After Casablanca

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies had decided that once North Africa was cleared they would strike at Sicily, but they had not settled what was to follow. The demand for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers announced there defined the aim of the war, not the road to it. Over the following months the disagreement between the allies did not narrow at all. The British, led by Churchill and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, wanted to exploit the momentum of victory in Africa and knock Italy out of the war, hoping that fighting in the south would disperse German forces and prepare the ground for a later landing in France. The Americans, above all the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, feared that the Mediterranean would become a “suction pump”, drawing in the men, ships and landing craft needed for the decisive blow across the English Channel. The naval commander-in-chief, Admiral Ernest King, for his part pressed for more forces to be committed to the Pacific.

Over everything hung the Soviet question. In March Stalin had demanded a second front and warned against any further delay of the invasion of France, and in the spring of 1943 the Red Army was still tying down the overwhelming majority of German divisions. The Anglo-American leaders knew that another postponement would provoke anger and suspicion in Moscow, but they also knew that in 1943 they had neither enough landing craft nor enough troops in Britain to mount an invasion with a prospect of success.

The voyage on the Queen Mary

This time Churchill decided not to fly but to sail. On 5 May he and a large delegation went aboard the liner Queen Mary, which served in wartime as a fast troopship. On the westbound voyage the ship was also carrying several thousand German prisoners of war. During the crossing the British chiefs of staff refined their position, and Churchill dictated notes on strategy for the rest of the year. On 11 May the delegation disembarked in New York and travelled by train to Washington, where Roosevelt welcomed the Prime Minister. Churchill stayed, as usual, at the White House.

Participants and procedure

Churchill was accompanied by the three British chiefs of staff: Brooke, the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Dudley Pound, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, as well as Lieutenant General Hastings Ismay, chief of staff to the Prime Minister in his capacity as Minister of Defence. For the first time, commanders from the Far East took part in such a conference. From India came the Commander-in-Chief there, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, Admiral James Somerville, commander of the Eastern Fleet, and Air Marshal Richard Peirse. From China flew two Americans who had been at odds for months over how the war there should be conducted: General Joseph Stilwell, chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek and commander of US forces in China, Burma and India, and General Claire Chennault, commander of the Fourteenth Air Force. Chiang Kai-shek’s interests were represented by his foreign minister, Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong). On the American side sat Marshall, King, the commander of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold, and Admiral William Leahy, the President’s chief of staff, who presided over the American Joint Chiefs of Staff. At Roosevelt’s side, as always, was Harry Hopkins.

The two delegations worked in two circles. Churchill and Roosevelt met roughly every other day at the White House, while the chiefs of staff sat almost daily as the Combined Chiefs of Staff in the board room of the Federal Reserve building. Their meetings saw fierce disputes; several times the discussions were moved to closed sessions, without secretaries or advisers, so that the generals could speak frankly to one another. Halfway through the conference Roosevelt took his guest for the weekend to his mountain retreat, Shangri-La in Maryland (later Camp David), where the two leaders talked in a more relaxed atmosphere and the President went fishing.

The dispute over Italy and France

Europe was the hardest question. The British argued that after Sicily had been taken the Allies must go further and knock Italy out of the war. The fall of Mussolini would force the Germans to replace the Italian divisions in the Balkans and in Italy itself with their own troops, drawing them away from the Eastern Front and from France. It might also persuade neutral Turkey to move closer to the Allies. Brooke maintained that a cross-Channel invasion had no chance until German forces had been dispersed and, according to the American minutes, said that major operations on the Continent might become possible only in 1945 or 1946. The Americans heard this with disbelief. Marshall replied that further Mediterranean operations would delay the decisive blow and prolong the war, which was unacceptable not least because of the Pacific.

A compromise was worked out after several days. In return for agreeing to further operations in the Mediterranean, the Americans obtained what they had been fighting for for more than a year: a binding commitment to a cross-Channel invasion of a specified scale on a specified date. The Combined Chiefs of Staff decided that the operation – then called Roundhammer, and soon Overlord – would begin on a target date of 1 May 1944, and that 29 divisions would be ready in Britain by the beginning of May. From 1 November 1943 seven divisions – four American and three British – were to be transferred from the Mediterranean to Britain.

In exchange, General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, was instructed to plan such operations following Operation Husky (the landing in Sicily) as would best serve to eliminate Italy from the war and tie down the greatest possible number of German forces. How this was to be done was not specified, and the final decision was reserved to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Eisenhower was to plan on the basis of the 27 divisions that would remain in the Mediterranean after the transfer. For an operation in Italy, therefore, he could not count on any additional troops.

Bombers, Ploiești and the Azores

The air war caused less controversy. Already at Casablanca the Allies had decided to conduct a joint bombing offensive against Germany, and in the spring of 1943 the commander of the Eighth Air Force, General Ira Eaker, had drawn up a detailed plan for it. At the Trident Conference the chiefs of staff approved it as the basis of the Combined Bomber Offensive. The plan envisaged four phases, running until April 1944. The Americans were to bomb selected industrial targets by day, while Bomber Command destroyed German industrial cities by night, as the Ruhr was experiencing at that very time. Priority, however, was given to destroying the German fighter force and the factories that equipped it; without command of the air neither the bombers nor the future invasion could hope to succeed. The executive directive, named Pointblank, was issued on 10 June 1943. In keeping with the long-standing dispute over day and night bombing, the two air forces retained their own methods.

The chiefs of staff also agreed that the Americans should prepare a raid from bases in North Africa on the refineries around Ploiești in Romania, the most important source of oil for Germany. The British were tasked with drawing up a plan to obtain bases in the Portuguese Azores, which would allow aircraft to cover convoys in the very middle of the Atlantic. It was agreed that Portugal should first be persuaded by diplomatic means, by invoking the ancient Anglo-Portuguese alliance. The war against the U-boats remained the first charge on all the resources of both allies, but in the spring of 1943 the Atlantic air gap was beginning to close, and during the conference reports of record German submarine losses were reaching Washington.

The Pacific

Trident was the first conference at which Japan received almost as much attention as Germany. The American chiefs of staff, King above all, presented a programme of operations for 1943–1944. It included driving the Japanese out of the Aleutians – on 11 May, the day before the conference opened, the Americans had already landed on Attu – taking the rest of the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Japanese positions on New Guinea, and a thrust across the Central Pacific against the Marshall Islands and the Carolines. The plan thus envisaged two parallel lines of advance: General Douglas MacArthur’s through New Guinea and Admiral Chester Nimitz’s across the atolls of the Central Pacific. The British accepted this programme without much resistance. It was also decided that the plan for the final defeat of Japan would henceforth be drawn up jointly by the staffs of both countries, not by the Americans alone.

The Pacific war was absorbing more and more American strength, and voices were being raised in the United States suggesting that once Germany had been defeated the British would leave the Americans to deal with Japan on their own. Churchill was well aware of this. At one of the sessions he gave an assurance that Britain would enter the war in the Pacific with all its strength as soon as the situation in Europe allowed. He repeated the same publicly a few days later, before Congress.

Burma and aid to China

Agreement on Burma and China was much harder to reach. At Casablanca the plan for Operation Anakim had been adopted – the reconquest of the whole of Burma, including a landing at Rangoon, which would make it possible to reopen the Burma Road to China. By the spring of 1943 this plan already seemed unrealistic. The unsuccessful British offensive in Arakan had ended in retreat, the first Chindit expedition behind Japanese lines under Orde Wingate had brought more publicity than territorial gains, and Wavell argued that the jungle, the monsoon and the lack of landing ships ruled out a major campaign in the coming season.

A separate dispute was going on among the Americans. Stilwell wanted to train and arm a large Chinese army which, together with the British, would retake northern Burma and open an overland link with China. Chennault claimed that his air force, given enough fuel and bombs, would inflict heavy losses on the Japanese in China and sink many of their ships. Chiang Kai-shek, through Song Ziwen, backed Chennault, and Roosevelt came round to this view. The only supply route to China at the time was the airlift from Assam over the Himalayas, which the airmen called “the Hump”. The conference decided to raise its capacity to 10,000 tons a month by the early autumn of 1943. Of the 7,000 tons planned for July, the first 4,700 were to go to Chennault, the next 2,000 to Stilwell’s troops, and the last 300 tons again to the airmen.

The land campaign was scaled back. The British undertook to conduct “vigorous and aggressive” operations from Assam into Burma via Ledo and Imphal, in parallel with a Chinese advance from Yunnan, and to prepare landings at Akyab and on Ramree Island. These operations were to tie down Japanese forces, protect the airlift and serve as a first step towards opening the road to China. Stilwell returned from Washington embittered: he felt that instead of a strategy he had been given promises, and that his plan for rebuilding the Chinese army had lost out to faith in air power.

Churchill before Congress

On 19 May 1943, halfway through the conference, Churchill addressed a joint session of both houses of the United States Congress at the Capitol for the second time. He had first stood before Congress on 26 December 1941, during the Arcadia Conference, less than three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now he began by recalling that seventeen months and more than five hundred days had passed in which the two nations had fought “side by side” on land, at sea and in the air. He took the second invitation as a sign that their partnership had “not done so badly”. Some 1,100 people filled the chamber, twice as many as expected, among them the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Wavell and Somerville, the British ambassador Lord Halifax and the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII. The 55-minute speech was carried by all the major American radio networks.

The loudest applause greeted his declaration on Japan. Churchill was answering suspicions that once Hitler had been defeated the British would leave the Americans to their own devices in the Pacific. He promised that Britain would wage that war side by side with the United States “while there is breath in our bodies and while blood flows through our veins”. He spoke of the need to reduce Japan’s cities and munitions centres to ashes, “for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world”.

The Prime Minister also reviewed the war as a whole. He spoke of the record successes against the U-boats in recent weeks, though he cautioned that he still regarded them as the greatest danger. He described the devastation the bombers were wreaking in the Ruhr and recalled the recent raid by the British air force on the great dams supplying its industry – a “gallant operation” that had cost eight of the nineteen Lancaster bombers employed. He thanked the Americans for the hundreds of Sherman tanks that, in the summer of 1942, after the fall of Tobruk, had been taken from their own divisions and sent to Egypt, and called them the best tanks in the desert. He also gave the Russians their due: he pointed out that 190 German divisions and 28 divisions of Germany’s allies stood on the Eastern Front, whereas in Tunisia the Allies had destroyed the equivalent of about fifteen divisions at a cost of some 50,000 killed, wounded and missing.

The speech ended with a warning. Churchill said that the greatest danger that would accompany the Allies to the very end was the “undue prolongation of the war”. It was precisely on the democracies growing tired, bored or divided that Germany and Japan pinned their chief hopes, and that hope had to be destroyed by refusing to be diverted from the main aim – the general victory of the United Nations. The German news agency DNB dismissed the speech with the remark that the announcement of a war waged to the very end, whatever the cost, was typical of Churchill.

The close of the conference

The chiefs of staff adopted the final report for the President and the Prime Minister on 25 May. At its head stood the principle for which the Americans had been fighting for more than a year: the concentration of maximum forces in a “selected area” as early as possible in order to carry out a decisive invasion of the Axis fortress. Alongside the strategic decisions, one further, less visible arrangement was made in Washington. Churchill, backed by his scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, complained that the Americans had restricted the exchange of information on work on the atomic bomb. Roosevelt promised to restore co-operation, which found expression in the agreement concluded at Quebec in August 1943.

Churchill was not entirely satisfied with the outcome. He felt that the question of Italy had been only half settled, since the decision on landing on the Italian mainland had been left for later. That is why, immediately after the conference, on 26 May, he flew to Algiers to persuade Eisenhower in person of the need for a swift blow against Italy once Sicily had been taken. At his request Roosevelt agreed that Marshall should accompany him. The talks in Algiers began at the end of May.

Significance

The Trident Conference was a turning point in the Anglo-American dispute over strategy. For the first time both sides agreed on a specific date and scale for a cross-Channel invasion, and the British accepted that operations in the Mediterranean were to serve it, not replace it. The balance of power within the alliance was beginning to shift: it was the Americans, who were fielding ever more troops, ships and aircraft, who increasingly determined the course of the war. At the same time none of the old disputes had really been laid to rest. The British still wanted to seize every opportunity in the south, and the Americans still suspected that every such opportunity pushed the invasion of France further away.

Events moved quickly. On 10 July the Allies landed in Sicily, and on 25 July Mussolini was overthrown. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943 Operation Overlord was confirmed and given top priority, and in the autumn the Allies landed on the Italian mainland, where they became bogged down in a long and costly campaign. On 1 August American bombers from Libya attacked Ploiești, suffering heavy losses. In October Portugal granted the British bases in the Azores. The invasion of Normandy finally began on 6 June 1944, postponed by a month for lack of landing craft.

The sharpest reaction to the outcome of the conference came from Joseph Stalin. When he learned at the beginning of June that the second front in France had been put off until 1944, he replied to Churchill and Roosevelt with letters full of reproach, and relations between the allies cooled markedly for several months. In Asia the airlift over the Hump reached its planned capacity only at the end of 1943, and the dispute between Stilwell, Chennault and Chiang Kai-shek dragged on for another year. Churchill’s promise that Britain would fight Japan to the end was fulfilled in 1945, when the British fleet operated alongside the American fleet in the Pacific and the Fourteenth Army reconquered Burma.