The demand for unconditional surrender

On Sunday 24 January 1943, on the lawn in front of the Villa Dar es Saada at Anfa near Casablanca, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill received several dozen war correspondents. The journalists, flown in from Algiers and kept in the dark, learned only on arrival that an Allied conference had been going on there for ten days. Roosevelt, seated beside Churchill, spoke casually, almost chattily, but one sentence from that press conference passed into history: world peace could be achieved only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power, and that meant “the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan”.

The press conference at Anfa

The French took the stage first. Roosevelt and Churchill had persuaded Generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle to shake hands in front of the press photographers. The handshake was so stiff and brief that, according to those present, it had to be repeated for the cameras. The photograph went round the world as proof of the unity of the French fighting alongside the Allies, although in reality the two generals had agreed only to a short communiqué about their common aim – the liberation of France.

Then Roosevelt presented the results of the conference. For obvious reasons he said nothing specific about military plans. Instead he defined the aim of the war. Unconditional surrender, he explained, “does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.” He also invoked a figure from the American Civil War: General Ulysses Grant, who in February 1862, besieging Fort Donelson, had replied to the Confederate commander that he would accept “no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender”. Ever since, Americans had read U.S. Grant’s initials as “Unconditional Surrender”. Churchill, speaking after the President, endorsed his words, spoke of the unshakeable determination of both nations and promised that the war would be waged until victory.

The formula sounded like an improvisation, and Roosevelt himself kept up that impression – he later said that the thought of Grant had simply “popped into his mind” during the press conference. In reality it had been carefully prepared. The State Department’s advisory committee on post-war foreign policy had recommended it as early as the spring of 1942, and on 7 January 1943, still at the White House, the President told the American Chiefs of Staff that he would raise the matter with Churchill. General George Marshall believed that an uncompromising demand would strengthen Allied morale and dispel Stalin’s suspicions. According to surviving documents, the formula also appeared in the notes the President had prepared for himself for the press conference.

Did Churchill know?

Churchill’s part in the matter later became a subject of dispute, to which he himself contributed. In 1949 he told the House of Commons that he had first heard of unconditional surrender from Roosevelt’s lips at the press conference and had backed it out of loyalty to his ally. The documents say otherwise. As early as 20 January Churchill had cabled the War Cabinet in London asking whether the final statement should include a declaration that the war would be pursued until the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, leaving Italy out – the omission was meant to encourage the Italians to break with Germany. The Cabinet, on whose behalf the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden replied, raised no objection to the formula itself, but judged that Italy should not be left out, as this would cause unease in Turkey, the Balkans and elsewhere. Confronted later with these documents, Churchill admitted that his memory had failed him and published the exchange of telegrams in his memoirs.

It nonetheless remains true that unconditional surrender did not appear in any agreed official communiqué of the conference, and the British did not expect Roosevelt to state it so emphatically on 24 January. Some witnesses, among them American journalists, remembered the Prime Minister’s surprise; Churchill, however, joined the President without hesitation. The American diplomat Charles Bohlen later wrote that responsibility for the doctrine rested almost entirely with the President.

Why such a formula

Several motives lay behind the demand for unconditional surrender. The first was the memory of 1918. Germany had then signed the Armistice of Compiègne on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”, and its army had returned home undefeated on its own soil. From this grew the “stab-in-the-back” legend, which nationalists and Nazis exploited throughout the interwar years. This time no one in Germany was to have any doubt that the war had been lost, or any grounds to claim that the Allies had broken their promises.

The second motive was the Soviet Union. Stalin, who had not come to Casablanca and was not going to get a second front in 1943, might suspect that the Western Allies would conclude a separate peace with Germany at his expense. The formula of unconditional surrender was an assurance that this would not happen. At the same time it guarded the alliance against a similar suspicion from the other side: it was meant to make it harder for Stalin to seek an understanding with Hitler.

The third motive was the Darlan affair. The deal the Americans had struck with Admiral Darlan in November 1942 to halt the fighting in North Africa had caused a storm in the British and American press and accusations that the Allies were ready to come to terms with collaborators. The Anfa declaration closed the door to similar deals with the leaders of the Axis states and their accomplices.

The echo in Berlin and Moscow

News of the conference was released a few days later, when Roosevelt and Churchill were already safely away. It reached Germany just as the Sixth Army was in its death throes at Stalingrad. The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels immediately turned it into an argument: since the enemy left the Germans no choice but enslavement, all that remained was to fight to the end. From then on this theme recurred constantly in German propaganda, alongside the call for “total war” and later the leaks about the American Morgenthau Plan of 1944. It is hard to judge, however, how much it really changed: a regime that had already proclaimed before Casablanca that the very existence of the German nation was at stake had no intention of surrendering anyway.

No one asked Stalin for his opinion, and Moscow’s first reactions were guarded – he was more interested in the date of the second front than in the formula. In his May Day order of 1 May 1943, however, Stalin adopted unconditional surrender as the common aim of the coalition. At the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943, according to Bohlen’s account, he did suggest that a demand without defined terms might only rally the Germans around Hitler, but he did not distance himself from the principle.

Italy, Japan, Germany

In practice the principle was applied with varying consistency. Italy, after Mussolini’s overthrow in July 1943, signed the Armistice of Cassibile on 3 September and the detailed terms of surrender on 29 September. Their severity was soon softened when, in October, the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which had declared war on Germany, was recognised as a co-belligerent. In the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July 1945 the Allies demanded the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces while setting out the terms of occupation; the Japanese accepted them in August in the hope of preserving the Emperor, which is what eventually happened. Only Germany, in May 1945, surrendered entirely unconditionally – the instruments signed at Reims and in Berlin handed all authority over the country to the victors.

The historians’ debate

Ever since the war ended there has been debate over whether the demand for unconditional surrender prolonged the war. Critics – among them the American military writer Hanson Baldwin and some former members of the German opposition – argued that it robbed the generals and conspirators of an argument for overthrowing Hitler, since even after a successful coup they could not count on better treatment for Germany, and that it handed Goebbels a ready-made slogan. Opponents of this view point out that the German conspirators acted regardless, as the 20 July 1944 plot shows, that the war went on above all because of Hitler’s will and the apparatus of terror, and that abandoning the principle risked breaking up the coalition and repeating the mistakes of 1918. Many present-day historians believe that the formula’s real effect on the length of the war was slight.

Significance

The press conference of 24 January 1943 closed the proceedings at Anfa, but its most lasting result was not the operational plans but a single sentence. For the first time the leaders of Britain and the United States publicly stated how the war was to end: not through negotiations, not with an armistice on terms, but with the complete surrender of the Axis states and the placing of their fate in the hands of the victors. The Allies never abandoned this principle, though they applied it flexibly in the details. What followed in 1945 flowed from it: the occupation of Germany by the four powers, the dissolution of the Wehrmacht, the trials of the Nazi leaders and the post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan, in which neither the old military elites nor the ideologies that had led to war survived.

For contemporaries the Anfa declaration also had an immediate significance. Just as the Sixth Army’s catastrophe at Stalingrad was coming to an end and Axis forces in North Africa were retreating all along the line, the Western Allies announced that they had no interest in any compromise. For the peoples of occupied Europe – the Poles among them – it was a sign that Germany would not be able to keep its conquests in exchange for peace. The handshake between de Gaulle and Giraud, photographed the same day, proved in turn to be the start of a road which within a year made de Gaulle the undisputed leader of Fighting France.