The Folly of ‘Unconditional Surrender’
Was the call for the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Germany, Italy, and Japan the most ruinous Allied policy of the Second World War?
From January 14th to 24th, 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in the sunny resort of Anfa, a collection of luxurious villas around a hotel some three miles south of Casablanca. On the last day, reporters gathered in the courtyard of Roosevelt’s villa to hear the two leaders sum up the historic conclave. A beaming FDR declared that the 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 – ‘the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan’.
Winston Churchill chimed in with a hearty endorsement of their ‘unconquerable will’ to pursue total victory over the ‘criminal forces’ that had plunged the world into war. It may well have been his finest hour as a political performer. He later admitted, however, that he had been ‘dumbfounded’ by Roosevelt’s announcement – and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct of the war.
Roosevelt discussed unconditional surrender with Churchill some five days before he made his announcement at Anfa. Churchill, or someone on his staff, sent a cable to the British Cabinet, asking if they approved. The Cabinet answered in the affirmative, and urged that Italy be included – a proposal Churchill emphatically rejected. Neither he nor the Cabinet foresaw that Roosevelt would make the policy a public war cry. It is significant that the final communiqué on Casablanca, which both leaders approved in advance, made no mention of the idea.
FDR later claimed unconditional surrender ‘just popped into my head’. An amazing number of historians have accepted this explanation. It is belied by a typed copy of the President’s remarks, which he had in his lap during the press conference, which now resides in the files of the Roosevelt library. There was nothing accidental about the announcement. In the words of one aide, unconditional surrender had been ‘deeply deliberated’.
Among Churchill’s British colleagues, dislike of unconditional surrender was widespread. Chief of British Intelligence General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies considered the policy disastrous because it wrecked certain operations he had in progress with his counterpart, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, Germany’s secret service. The silver-haired admiral doubled as one of the clandestine leaders of the German Resistance to Hitler. 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.
The feeling of dismay was shared by a number of VIP Americans who attended the Casablanca conference. General Dwight Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender could do nothing but prolong the war and cost American and British lives. General Ira Eaker, head of the 8th Air Force, later recalled: ‘Everybody I knew at the time when they heard this [unconditional surrender] said: “How stupid can you be?”’ Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall told Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the British liaison officer in Washington DC, that he, too, considered unconditional surrender a blunder.
In Berlin, Roosevelt’s announcement sent Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, into euphoria. He called it ‘world historical tomfoolery of the first order’. To one of his colleagues, Goebbels 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 Canaris turned to one his deputies and said: ‘I believe that the other side have now disarmed us of the last weapon with which we could have ended [the war].’ The Abwehr chief saw unconditional surrender as the death knell of his hopes that the German Resistance could persuade the Wehrmacht’s generals to join them in overthrowing Hitler. The admiral’s intuition was confirmed by a message from Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, commander of the Berlin garrison, who had declared himself ready to do everything in his power to depose the Führer. Now Witzleben said: ‘No honourable man can lead the German people into such a situation.’
Compounding the folly of unconditional surrender was its timing. Roosevelt announced it on the very day that the Russians trapped the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, virtually guaranteeing the demise of the Third Reich. It would have been the ideal moment for the German Resistance and their allies among the generals to stage a coup.
Later, Roosevelt defended unconditional surrender as a way of keeping Stalin in the war. At Casablanca the Western allies had postponed a second front in France until 1944, something they feared would infuriate the Russian dictator. But Stalin denounced unconditional surrender the moment he heard it, saying it would make the Germans fight to the last man.
The roots of his desire for unconditional surrender were embedded deep in Roosevelt’s psyche. He had first heard it from Theodore Roosevelt during the First World War, when the later used it in the 1918 mid-term elections to bludgeon President Wilson for his pursuit of a negotiated peace with Germany. A more immediate influence was the forgotten war within the Second World War that raged in American domestic politics. In the 1942 mid-term elections, Roosevelt’s New Dealers had taken a fearful beating. When the Allies invaded North Africa, the field commanders had negotiated an armistice with Admiral Jean Darlan, Vichy France’s spokesman on the scene. American liberals had denounced Roosevelt for dealing with a fascist. Unconditional surrender was FDR’s attempt to rally the liberals, the only political troops he had left.
On the eve of the invasion of Italy, Eisenhower and Churchill attempted to negotiate peace with the deposed Mussolini’s replacement, Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Roosevelt insisted on unconditional surrender, throwing the situation into chaos. While Badoglio resisted and protested, the Germans poured troops into Italy, turning a potentially bloodless victory into a war of attrition that killed or wounded 201,180 American and British soldiers.
As D-Day approached, General Marshall, backed by the US joint chiefs of staff, urged Roosevelt to modify unconditional surrender. He vehemently refused. On the eve of the invasion, Eisenhower tried again, with the same result. When the German army did not collapse after the Allies broke out of the Normandy beachhead, Ike pressured Roosevelt to do something to reduce the German soldier’s will to resist. Roosevelt suggested Churchill make a statement. With considerable savagery, the prime minister said he did not want to ‘confess our errors’ and preferred to ‘remain set in unconditional surrender, which is where you put me’.
After the breakout from Normandy, US casualties amounted to 418,791 dead and wounded. The British and Canadians lost another 107,000. If we include Russian and German losses, including German civilian casualties from the Allied bombing, the total number of post D-Day dead and wounded approaches two million. If we add to this toll the number of Jews who were murdered in the last year of the war, the figure can easily be doubled. Unquestionably, unconditional surrender was an ultimatum written in blood.
In mid-1944, on a visit to Hawaii, Roosevelt was asked if unconditional surrender applied to Japan. He said it most certainly did, and launched into a history lesson to justify the policy. He claimed General Ulysses S. Grant had insisted on unconditional surrender when he met the defeated Southern general, Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox Court House in the closing days of the American Civil War.
Alas, FDR did not know what he was talking about. Grant never mentioned unconditional surrender at this famous meeting. On the contrary, he offered the beaten Southerners generous terms and sent rations to their starving enlisted ranks. The President’s version was a sad illustration of the dangers of a gentleman’s C, FDR’s usual grade at Harvard.
Within a month of Truman assuming the presidency in April 1945, Germany surrendered. Japan was reeling toward similar collapse under daily pounding from American B-29s. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Admiral William Leahy, the White House military chief of staff, urged the new president to abandon unconditional surrender and negotiate a quick peace. Ex-president Herbert Hoover offered the same advice. Truman said he was inclined to this course.
But Roosevelt loyalists in the new President’s entourage told Truman that polls showed unconditional surrender had the support of 90 per cent of the American people. They predicted he would destroy his presidency – and the Democratic Party – if he altered this keystone of FDR’s legacy. So the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Afterwards, in an agonised dance of evasive phrasing and invisible negotiation, the Japanese were permitted to keep their Emperor, while the Americans proclaimed they had surrendered unconditionally. The most ruinous policy of the Second World War was finally discarded in the name of sanity and peace.
