| Present | ||
|---|---|---|
| United States | United Kingdom | |
| Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau | Lord Cherwell |
| Present | ||
|---|---|---|
| United States | United Kingdom | |
| President Roosevelt | Prime Minister Churchill | |
| Mrs. Churchill | ||
| Foreign Secretary Eden | ||
| Mr. Law | ||
| Sir Alexander Cadogan |
| Present | ||
|---|---|---|
| United States | United Kingdom | Canada |
| President Roosevelt | Prime Minister Churchill | Prime Minister Mackenzie King |
Mackenzie King apparently came to the Citadel for the purpose of asking Roosevelt and Churchill to accept honorary degrees from McGill University. The rest of the conversation is described as follows in Mackenzie King’s notes:
… Churchill … then spoke to the President about our participation in the war in the Pacific; of our desire to be in the Northern part and have our forces to serve in North Pacific; also our wish to have our Chiefs of Staff have a talk with his. The President replied: Mackenzie and I had a talk together on that, last night. That is all understood.
The President then said something about the Kuriles needing a good deal of patrolling, also Northern China, probably requiring Japs to be driven out later. When he stressed that he would have his divisions leave Seattle, and that Canadian forces could leave Vancouver, Churchill referred again to naval forces coming through the Panama Canal into the Pacific.… I did not want to leave matters to just the North and indicated that we were prepared to operate in the central area as well. Churchill also indicated that we were prepared to go as far South as Burma.
Churchill said it would not do to have our Canadians fighting in the Tropics…
Washington, September 15, 1944
Top secret
MR-out-412
Personal and secret to Miss Grace Tully from Harry Hopkins.
I sent to the President memorandum entitled French Lend Lease Agreement and dated September 11 from the State Department. FEA and State Department are anxious to know whether the President has initialed it.
Could you help me get an answer on this tomorrow?
HARRY HOPKINS
| Present | ||
|---|---|---|
| United States | United Kingdom | |
| President Roosevelt | Prime Minister Churchill |
Roosevelt and Churchill had reached agreement on the allocation of zones of occupation in Germany as between United States and British forces. The agreement assigned the south western zone of occupation in Germany to United States forces and the northwestern zone to British forces; changed the boundary between the two zones by transferring the province of Hessen-Nassau and Oberhessen from the northwestern to the southwestern zone and by transferring an area west of the Rhine comprising Saarland, the Palatinate, and Rheinhessen from the southwestern to the northwestern zone; and provided that United States forces would have access “through the western and northwestern seaports” and rites of passage through the British zone of occupation.
The Pittsburgh Press (September 15, 1944)
Big invasion armada pours troops into Palau and Morotai
By Frank Tremaine, United Press staff writer
Drive toward the Philippines by U.S. forces was underway today from two directions, as U.S. troops landed on Morotai Island, northernmost of the Halmahera group south of the Philippines, and went ashore on the Palau Islands, to the east.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii –
A big American invasion armada poured fighting men ashore on the Jap island base of Palau, 560 miles east of the Philippines, today as Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s troops stormed up into the Halmahera Islands from the south in a twin offensive to clear the road back to Bataan and Corregidor.
Exploding their greatest combined offensive of the Pacific war, Gen. MacArthur and Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, breached the coastal defenses of the two island bastions under cover of shattering bombardments from sea and sky.
Gen. MacArthur led his troops ashore early Friday on Morotai Island, northernmost of the Halmaheras and only 250 miles south of the Philippines, at almost the same moment Adm. Nimitz’s Marines and Army assault units were battling across the beaches of Palau.
Gen. MacArthur issued a statement from the Morotai beachhead a few hours after the landing saying that “we now dominate the Moluccas” and “our position here is now secure and the immediate operation has achieved its purpose.” He added that “defeat now stares Japan in the face” and the campaign is entering its decisive phase.
A Navy communiqué said a number of beachheads were established on Palau, a narrow chain of 26 islands, many of them mountainous, lying between the Carolines and the Philippines. Babelthuap is the principal islet in the group.
Because of time difference, Adm. Nimitz’s announcement said the Palau landing occurred Thursday morning, Honolulu Time, which would be Friday morning Halmahera Time.
The twin invasion blow threatened to break the chain of sprawling island bases established by the Japs around the Philippines and the western and southern approaches to the Chinese mainland, and first reports from Palau said the enemy was fighting back furiously from long-prepared defenses.
U.S. battleships, cruisers and supporting warships of the Pacific Fleet stood offshore bombarding the Jap shore installations while carrier-based aircraft dive-bombed and strafed the enemy in close support of the advancing ground troops.
“Enemy defenses are being heavily bombed and shelled at close range,” the communiqué said.
Gen. MacArthur’s men on Morotai also went in under a powerful warship and aircraft screen, but their landing met only feeble Jap opposition, and casualties in the initial assault were described officially as “very light.”
The bulk of the Jap garrison in the Halmaheras were revealed to have been concentrated in the southern part of the island group in the belief that Gen. MacArthur would strike there. Instead, they were bypassed, cut off from their only direct sources of supply, and left to surrender or die.
On Palau, however, one of the toughest battles of the Pacific campaign was believed in progress, possibly exceeding in savagery the epic fight for Saipan or the Marine landing on Tarawa.
The troops who swarmed ashore had to overcome obstacles of barbed wire on the beaches, backed up by entrenched machine-gun positions. Farther inland were larger guns, probably ranging up to six inches, and the deadly mortars which caused heavy casualties on the Mariana Island beachheads.
A brief Navy communiqué said reinforcements were being put ashore from a host of transports guarded by the guns and planes of Adm. William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet, and that the landings were “continuing against stiff ground opposition.”
The reference to “ground” opposition indicated that the bulk of Palau’s aerial defenses had been smashed by Adm. Halsey’s task force in a series of softening up bombardments that began on Sept. 5 and continued almost without interruption until the zero hour.
The exact point of the landing was not disclosed, but Radio Tokyo said the attack centered on Peleliu Island, southernmost of the chain of atolls comprising the Palau group. Tokyo said the landing was made at 6:00 a.m. (Palau Time) and that the Jap garrison drove the Americans back into the sea after a two-hour battle.
“About 2,500” American dead were left on the beach, the broadcast said.
The language of the Pearl Harbor communiqué left little doubt the Japs would make a desperate attempt to hold Palau, probably their most important bastion in the Central Pacific, outranking even Truk, 1,150 miles to the west.
There was no mentioned of Jap opposition in the air, although there was a possibility that enemy might risk units of their grand fleet in an attempt to run carrier aircraft to the aid of their island garrisons.
Any such move, however, almost certainly would bring on a major battle of surface ships for which Adm. Halsey is undoubtedly well prepared. The size of the supporting battle fleet covering the Palau landing was not divulged, but it was known to include some of the Navy’s heaviest units.
The landing followed more than a week of widespread naval and air assaults by Adm. Halsey’s battlewagons and carriers against Jap positions on Palau and in the Central Philippines that cost the enemy 501 planes and scores of merchant vessels.
Truk bypassed
U.S. occupation of the Palaus would close a watery trap around 75,000 to 100,000 Jap troops now bypassed in the Western Carolines, including the once-formidable naval base at Truk.
In addition, it would remove the last island barrier astride the Central Pacific route to the Philippines and enable Adm. Nimitz to throw the full weight of his land, sea and air forces against the Jap-occupied islands.
VAdm. Theodore S. Wilkinson of Rosslyn, Virginia (commander of
the U.S. Third Amphibious Force), was directing the landing operations, while Marine Maj. Gen. Julian C. Smith of Alexandria, Virginia, who commanded the 2nd Marine Division at Tarawa, led the expeditionary troops.
Win air base*
The 300-mile overwater thrust from Dutch New Guinea to Morotai cleared away the last important barrier on Gen. MacArthur’s road back to the Philippines and gave his gathering air forces fighter bases within one hour’s flight of the southern up of the latter islands.
Gen, MacArthur watched the preliminary bombardment of Morotai from the bridge of a U.S. cruiser and went ashore in the wake of his troops to inspect the Pitoe Airdrome, one of the first prizes taken on the island’s southern coast.
“We shall shortly have an air and light naval base here within 300 miles of the Philippines,” he told his officers.
Pitoe Field is about 40 miles from the northern tip of Morotai.
“They are waiting there for me,” he added. “It has been a long time.”
Japs face trap
A triumphant communiqué announcing the invasion of Morotai declared that the Halmahera-Philippines line has now been penetrated, imperiling all of the remaining Jap conquests in the South Seas and threatening to isolate the enemy’s 16th and 19th Armies, some 200,000 strong, in the East Indies.
Envelopment of these armies, the communiqué said, “would sever the vital supply lines to the Japanese mainland of oil and other war essentials.”
Gen, MacArthur told his troops at the Pitoe Airdrome:
You have done well. You now dominate the last stronghold which bars the way to the Philippines. The enemy, as usual, was not in the right place at the right time.
Morotai Island, 12 miles off the northern tip of Halmahera, is 40 miles long, with a narrow coastal strip rising steeply to 4,000-foot, densely-wooded mountains, and had a native population of about 10,000 before the Japs seized it from the Dutch.
The initial landing was made at the southwestern end of the island, within a few hundred yards of Pitoe Airfield.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (UP) –
The Navy established a new record for speed in announcing Pacific operations, disclosing the invasion of Palau approximately nine hours after U.S. troops hit the beaches.
Stronghold of Aachen surrounded in drive into Siegfried defenses
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
…
There’ll be a change, he tells Montanans with better prosecution of the war
Billings, Montana (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey carried his presidential campaign into Montana today, pledging a first-class election fight which will not interfere with the war effort, but which will result in a change of administrations and more effective prosecution of the war after next January.
Mr. Dewey gave that pledge in an impromptu address to the crowd getting him at the Billings station last night upon his arrival for conferences today with agricultural, labor, veteran and political leaders.
First-class fight
Reminding his audience he was en route to the West Coast to make four major campaign speeches next week, Governor Dewey declared:
We will have a first-class fight from now until election. It will not be a campaign in the slightest degree to interfere with the war effort. This campaign will prove to all the world that we in America love our freedom so much that we can fight a total war harder because we are exercising the rights of free men as we do it.
By holding this campaign at a time when our enemies are collapsing and as we are making gigantic strides toward Berlin and Tokyo, we are demonstrating… that free men can wage a war, and the reason we are fighting so well is because we have something they haven’t.
We have a system that permits us to keep our shoulders to the wheel and to get every man and woman devoted to the cause, not deviating one moment.
As a result, I am confident we will change administrations and fight the war more effectively because we did so.
Mr. Dewey said he was confident that:
The American people will be convinced there is no indispensable man out of our 130 million, that there is a better way of life than either the creeping collectivism of the New Deal or the reaction they claim is the only alternative to their weaknesses and their spendthrift policy.
New Deal unemployed
He said:
There is a straight, out and out, American road in which government can do its part, which can encourage free men in business and labor and agriculture to do their part, by which we need never return to those seven straight years of the New Deal when the country ended up with 10 million unemployed.
Governor Dewey repeated his contention that this issue in the coming election is one of New Deal defeatism versus a progressive national economy.
He said:
The question before the American people is whether we shall continue downward, sliding slowly on the greased New Deal skids, toward total government control of business, of labor, of agriculture, of what we can buy and sell and what we can eat and wear, or whether… we shall start back once more on the American road toward a free economy, a free people, with full employment and with a great and growing country once more on the forward road. I am sure we will take the latter approach.
At the small town of Hardin during a brief operational stop for his special train, en route from Sheridan, Wyoming, he stepped to the rear platform and told a small audience that returning war veterans are “entitled to something better than the New Deal dole.”
He appealed for their help toward a Republican victory, which he pledged would assure “security and opportunity for all.”
It was one of the few rear platform appearances he has made, except at officially scheduled stops, since his special train left New York City Sept. 7.
Urges fight against regimentation
Columbus, Ohio (UP) –
Republican vice-presidential nominee Governor John W. Bricker last night charged that the New Deal has adopted “the basic doctrines” of Nazism against which U.S. men are fighting and asserted that the issue of the 1944 election is whether these doctrines or “the fundamentals of Americanism” shall prevail.
Speaking at the Ohio State Republican Convention in Memorial Hall here, he asserted that the administration for “12 long years” has applied a pattern which would “control, direct and manage the economic lives of all our people.”
He said:
The issue today is not between the historic Democratic and Republican parties. It is between New Deal collectivism and the fundamentals of Americanism to which Democrats and Republicans each hold allegiance.
The question confronting every American citizen in this campaign may be simply stated: Shall government direct the lives of our people or shall it create conditions which will enable them, individually and hopefully, to find their own way? Shall we continue to march toward absolutism, or shall we preserve the free atmosphere which our people have breathed since our country was founded?
Mr. Bricker cited the switch to support of the Republican Party by “many Democratic newspapers and some of the country’s great independent dailies like the Baltimore Sun and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.”
States rights threatened
Mr. Bricker also charged the administration with attempting to destroy state and local governments by making them financially dependent upon a centralized government.
Mr. Bricker said Republican presidential nominee Governor Thomas E. Dewey “has already demonstrated his intention to consult with and to work with the governors of the states.” Not once in the last 10 years, he said, has President Roosevelt “invited the governors to exchange views with him.”
Washington, Idaho show recent trend
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
…
New York (UP) –
Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) charged last night that statements by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, GOP candidate for the Presidency, that the “Hoover depression continued into the Roosevelt administration and it took a war to get us out” were a “blatant distortion of the facts.”
Senator Wagner said in an address before the International Ladies Garments Workers Union that Dewey “being a young man, has somehow forgotten to remember the Hoover depression,” and “what a change took place” when President Roosevelt took over.
He described Mr. Roosevelt as a great President before the war and a great Commander-in-Chief during the war and said that it was a “sham and delusion to try – as the Republicans are trying – to separate Mr. Roosevelt’s domestic record from his war record.”
He urged that all “work vigorously” to “get out every possible vote for President Roosevelt… as the least we can do to fulfill our obligations to our fighting men.”
Principal products are shells and Japanese is taught in all the schools
Washington (UP) –
U.S. troops now fighting in the Palau Islands will encounter thick tropical forests of ironwood and ebony trees and a few crocodiles as they battle inland from coralline coasts.
The islands, which extend some 77 miles in a north-northeasterly direction, lie some 560 miles east of Mindanao in the southern Philippines and 1,980 miles south of Tokyo.
Most of the islands, with the exception of Angaur at the southern tip, lie on and are surrounded by coral reefs.
Some, including Babelthuap, Arakabesan and Malakal, appear to be of volcanic origin with hills rising to a height of 641 feet.
Some are of coral
Others, consisting mostly of coral, are either flat or composed of long narrow hills with steep slopes on the seaward sides.
The natives speak a Malayan dialect and are the majority of the inhabitants. Out of a population of 10,632 in 1934, however, 4,842 were Japanese. Japanese is taught in the schools.
The principal products are shells, copra and pearls.
Has four peninsulas
Halmahera is an extremely irregular island consisting of four peninsulas enclosing four great bays opening toward the east.
The four peninsulas are traversed lengthwise by mountain chains 3,000 to 4,000 feet high, covered with forests rich in a great variety of trees.
The mountain chains from which spurs extend to the coast are frequently interrupted by plains.
The northern part of the mountain chain of the northern peninsula is volcanic. Along the western coast are volcanic mountains, at least one of which is active.
Fired first shell into Normandy in D-Day; saw action at Cherbourg
…
Says ‘defeat stares Japan in the face’
Adv Allied HQ, Southwest Pacific (UP) –
In a statement issued on the Morotai Beachhead today, Gen. Douglas MacArthur declared that the Allied campaign is entering upon its decisive stage and “defeat now stares Japan in the face.”
Gen. MacArthur said:
Our position here is now secure and the immediate operation has achieved its purpose.
We now dominate the Moluccas. I rejoice that it has been done with so little loss. Our campaign is now entering upon its decisive stage.
Jap officers inferior
Gen. MacArthur declared:
The Japanese ground troops still fight with the greatest tenacity. The military quality of the rank and file remains of the highest.
Their officer corps, however, deteriorates as you go up the scale. It is fundamentally based upon caste and the feudal system and does not represent strict professional merit.
Therein lies Japan’s weakness. Her sons are strong of limb and stout of heart but weak in leadership.
Sees Jap ‘revulsion’
Gripped inexorably by military hierarchy, that hierarchy is now failing the nation. It has had neither the imagination nor foresighted ability to organize Japanese resources for total war. Defeat now stares Japan in the face.
Its barbaric codes and creeds dominated the Japanese character and culture for centuries and have produced a type of national savagery at strange variance with many basic impulses of the Japanese people.
Its successful domination has been based largely upon the people’s belief in its own infallibility. When public opinion realizes that its generals and admirals have failed in the field of actual combat and campaign, the revulsion in Japanese thought will be terrific.
‘Military failed Japs’
Therein lies the basis for the ultimate hope that the Japanese citizen will cease his almost idolatrous worship of the military and readjust his thoughts along more rational lines.
No sophistry can disguise the fact from him that the military has failed him in this, his greatest hour of need.
That failure may mark the beginning of a new and ultimately happier era for him. His hour of decision is close at hand.
Kweilin Airfield object of advance
…
