Churchill and Roosevelt relaxing at the White House before conferring on Allied war strategy.

WARREN F. KIMBALL

On Thursday, March 28, 1941, four fountain

pens arrived on Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill's desk. Each was appropriately inscribed with the name of one of the American signatories to the bases agreement that would finally conclude the famous destroyer-bases deal of September 1940. Although Churchill disapproved a suggestion that champagne be served after the signing (unfortunately we have no document explaining this out-of-character decision), the prime minister had agreed to a Foreign Office proposal to hand out pens à la Franklin D. Roosevelt. The request, which was made at the last minute, caused a commotion within the bureaucracy since fountain pens were a scarce commodity in wartime Britain. (The Ministry of Information official given the job of preparing the pens facetiously blamed the shortage on Lord Beaverbrook, the minister of aircraft production whose department had first priority on almost anything it wanted.)1 That would not be the last time that Churchill did things the American way.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library opened the complete Map Room papers to scholars in May 1972. Within that very large collection of

1974 by Warren F. Kimball

The author would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Research Council of Rutgers University for grant and fellowship assistance in the preparation of this article.

1 Churchill to John Martin, Mar. 28, 1941, Prime Minister's Operational File (PREMIER 3), File 461, Folder 4, pp. 21-22, Public Record Office (hereafter cited as PREM 3, 461/4/21-22).

key documents on the political and military direction of World War II is the American file of correspondence between President Roosevelt and Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty and later as prime minister.

First knowledge of the extent of their personal correspondence came in 1948, when Churchill published The Gathering Storm, the first of his six-volume history, The Second World War. His initial reference to "perhaps a thousand communications on each side" was refined in his second volume to 950 from Churchill and "about eight hundred" from Roosevelt.2 Although Churchill disclosed the existence of his extensive correspondence with Roosevelt, even especially privileged scholars given access to classified American documents did not know that 90 percent of those exchanges were in the Map Room papers, which arrived at the Roosevelt Library in 1951. One of those historians, William L. Langer, claimed in 1963 that If a document has been officially published, even if only a partial text, the author has so indicated. All published documentary collections and Churchill's memoirs, the multivolume Second World War (Boston, 1948-53), have been checked. Although a number of Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges are quoted in various memoirs and official histories, the author has not consistently treated these as publication of the documents since they are usually only partial texts; nor do these sources refer to any correspondence not in those files available to scholars. In fact, documents quoted in official British histories are often specially marked for preservation because they were so quoted.

2 Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm (Boston, 1948), p. 441, and The Second World War: Their Finest Hour (Boston, 1949), p. 23.

"until Churchill spoke of these messages, there was no reason to even suspect that they existed." Even though the first two volumes of Churchill's memoirs were published before Langer and Gleason's Challenge to Isolation, research on the latter was largely finished before the Churchill books became available. Moreover, knowing that Churchill and Roosevelt had exchanged a large number of messages did not reveal the existence of the Map Room collection. State Department files held only a few copies of Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence because the president was most selective in sending copies to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The scholarly community as a whole did not learn of the existence of the extensive file of Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges in the Map Room papers until much later. Herbert Feis, who was granted special permission to use State Department files, likewise had no knowledge of a complete collection of ChurchillRoosevelt messages, although like Langer and Gleason he did cite a number of messages in State Department files or in Roosevelt Library files other than the Map Room papers. Robert E. Sherwood in his study of Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins quoted from a number of exchanges between the president and Churchill but had access only to the very incomplete file of such messages available in the Hopkins papers. The first citation in the State Department's Foreign Relations series to a Churchill-Roosevelt message obtained from the Roosevelt Library is in the Yalta documents, published in 1955, although the reference gives no indication of any special collection of correspondence between the two men. Llewellyn Woodward in the one-volume condensation of his British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, published in 1962, cited Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence in the British files but likewise made no reference to any specific separate collection. In 1953 Herman Kahn, then director of the Roosevelt Library, mentioned the Map Room papers in an address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, but he made no specific reference to the ChurchillRoosevelt correspondence. Not until 1964 were scholars given access to the Map Room papers, and even then the Churchill-Roosevelt materials remained closed until the spring of 1972 when the State Department, as part of the socalled special exception, opened almost all

World War II diplomatic records.3

Since Roosevelt did not set up his Map Room communications center until after seeing a similar operation that Churchill brought to the Washington Conference of December 1941January 1942, it is not surprising that the major gaps in the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence in that collection are for the period prior to 1942. Fortunately those gaps can be largely filled by documents found in other files at the Roosevelt Library as, for example, the Hopkins papers and the President's Secretary's File. In addition, approximately twenty messages, not in any of the available American files, are in the newly opened British records for World War II, which were officially declassified on January 1, 1972, but not available in their entirety to scholars until August 1973. The key file, which is the Prime Minister's Operational File (PREMIER 3), contains an extensive but incomplete collection of the Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges.

In addition, the PREMIER 3 files provide a fascinating, if often incomplete, glimpse into the activities and thinking of Prime Minister Churchill. Although they must be supplemented by an examination of the Foreign Office records on any given question, there are a number of documents in the PREMIER 3 collection that are not duplicated elsewhere. Drafts of Churchill to Roosevelt correspondence provide an insight into the care he took not to offend the American president. Occasionally Churchill would vent his frustration at being the junior partner in the alliance. He did include a few strongly worded drafts in his memoirs without ever labeling them as such, but his

3 William L. Langer to Richard J. Whalen, May 29, 1963, in possession of the author; Langer to author, May 19, 1974; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolationism, 1937-1940 (New York, 1952), and The Undeclared War, 1940-41 (New York, 1953); Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton, 1957); Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York, 1950); Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, D. C., 1861-), The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945, p. 7; Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London, 1962); Herman Kahn, "World War II and Its Background: Research Materials at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Policies Concerning Their Use" (paper delivered at the 68th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, Dec. 29, 1953), and printed in American Archivist 17 (1954): 149-162.

4

anger rarely appeared in the final version of a message. Among the most intriguing documents in the PREMIER 3 materials are the transcripts of the political discussions held between Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the Russians in Moscow in December 1941 and similar talks between Churchill and Stalin in 1944. Although neither contains ChurchillRoosevelt materials, they bear directly on Anglo-American relations, particularly in respect to the critical question of boundary settlements in Eastern Europe.

Churchill's performance at the 1944 Moscow Conference was simply incredible. On the first day, at a meeting not attended by the American observer, Averell Harriman, he began by pre

4 For example, the message agreeing to Roosevelt's proposal to ship gold from Capetown to the United States appears in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941, 3: 1-2. Churchill simply assents with only a brief comment about the possible adverse worldwide publicity. In his memoirs Churchill prints a much longer message on the same subject in which he agrees, but only after a lengthy explanation of why such a transfer would be very unwise and embarrassing. The PREM 3 records show that it was an unsent draft. See Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 573-575, and Churchill to Roosevelt, Dec. 31, 1940, PREM 3, 469.

tending not to know who was presently leading the Polish government in London. He then proceeded to swap "Polish jokes" with Stalin for a few minutes. After facetiously agreeing that if you put one Pole alone in a room he would argue with himself, Churchill and Stalin exchanged crude references to the Poles before getting down to the real business at hand. By the close of the conference, the deal was clear: the Russians were to be paramount in Romania and Bulgaria, as noted in the famous percent memo, reprinted in Churchill's memoirs. But what is implicit in the talks, and never even hinted at in the memoirs, is that the Soviet Union would have its way in Poland in return for British hegemony in the Mediterranean and Greece. It is interesting that even the code name for this conference- TOLSTOY-remained classified and unmentioned all these years.5

Some of the omissions from the PREMIER 3 records are suggestive. For example, the records for Anglo-Japanese relations from Decem

5 The British record of the discussions at the TOLSTOY conference are in PREM 3, 434/2. See also PREM 3, 66/7 (Spheres of Influence in the Balkans).

ber 1941 through February 1942 are missing, but more interestingly those files for September and October 1941 are still closed. A number of printed records of various conference proceedings are listed as missing, although it is possible that they are on a shelf, neatly bound and awaiting discovery by a conscientious archivist. Whatever the explanation, the printed proceedings from the QUADRANT, SYMBOL, TRIDENT, and the Moscow Foreign Minister's conferences are noted in the index as missing." Even with these and other missing or closed files, the British records are absolutely invaluable, not only for a study of British foreign policy but also for the light shed on American policy and actions. For example, because the British thought like a world power, almost as much about Roosevelt's emotional and factually inaccurate condemnation of French policy in Indochina can be learned from the British records as from the American records. In short, no history of American foreign policy and diplomacy during World War II can be considered adequately researched without an intensive investigation of the prime minister's and Foreign Office records for that period. The indexes to the prime minister's papers- the PREMIER 3 and 4 collections-can be ordered from the Public Record Office, and the index to the Foreign Office papers has been published. Nevertheless, they are poor substitutes for the grueling but rewarding task of page flipping.8

Unless Churchill and Roosevelt consciously and successfully hid portions of their telegrams and letters from both bureaucrats and archivists, scholars now appear to have what is an almost complete collection of their correspondence. All available exchanges have been checked for any internal evidence of correspondence not in the collection, and to date only one probable item has been found: Churchill's initial response to Roosevelt's September 1939 invitation to correspond with him via diplo

6 These files are listed in the index to the PREM 3 records as 252/5 (Japan), 172/4 (Moscow Foreign Ministers), 366/5-7 (QUADRANT), 420/2, 4 (SYMBOL), and 443/3 (TRIDENT).

7 For interesting material concerning Roosevelt's views on Indochina, see Prime Minister's Confidential Files (PREM 4), File 27, Folder 7, pp. 476-477, PRO.

8 Great Britain, Foreign Office, Index to Correspondence of the Foreign Office, 1920- (Nendein, Liechtenstein, 1969-).

matic pouch. Even on such a highly classified subject as the development of the atomic bomb, a summary listing of all Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges on that subject in the PREMIER 3 records shows that all of these documents are available. 10 Only one subject seems to have been systematically, but not totally, excluded from the Map Room and PREMIER 3 collections - cryptographic and code matters. In two specially numbered messages and a separately sent paragraph in a third message, the two leaders discussed various communications between neutral and enemy governments that had been read using the broken Japanese code, an operation called MAGIC.11 Although these messages are declassified, all cryptographic materials are still closed to researchers, hence it is impossible to determine whether or not Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged other messages relating

Roosevelt to Churchill, letter, Sept. 11, 1939, to which Churchill claims Roosevelt "responded with alacrity." Churchill, Gathering Storm, pp. 440-441. Roosevelt's message is also in the Map Room Papers and in PREM 3, 467. The author has generally cited the Map Room version of a document. An asterisk after an entry indicates that a duplicate is in the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence portion of the PREM 3, 467-473. Because the documents are filed in chronological order, folder and page numbers have been omitted. If the document is found elsewhere in British records, a full citation is given.

The first Churchill-Roosevelt exchange in the records, a telegram, was not sent until Oct. 5, 1939. See Churchill to Roosevelt, Oct. 5, 1939, Great Britain - Churchill,* President's Secretary's File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. (Unless noted, all exchanges between Roosevelt and Churchill are telegrams.) Churchill's first letter to Roosevelt was sent May 7, 1940. It is quite possible that Churchill's initial response was by telephone.

10 Roosevelt's initial message on the subject, following year-long discussions by British and American scientists, was a letter to Churchill, Oct. 11, 1941, Map Room Papers, and PREM 3, 139/8A. Although Churchill indicated enthusiasm in his memoirs, he did not actually respond until December. There is no date on the letter, but it was probably written after Pearl Harbor. Churchill to Roosevelt, Dec. 1941, PREM 3, 139/8A/570. When the Roosevelt papers are not cited, British records are the only source for the actual document. See also Churchill, The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate (Boston, 1950), pp. 378-379, and Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946, in History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (University Park, 1962) 1:256-259.

11 Churchill to Roosevelt, no. 545, Jan. 16, 1944, Map Room Papers; Roosevelt to Churchill, unnumbered, Jan. 19, 1944, ibid.; Churchill to Roosevelt, HMOC 399, Jan. 22, 1944, File 163, ibid. None of the references to MAGIC were found in any of the available British records.