Prime Minister Churchill’s statement on the war situation
February 11, 1943
The dominating aim which we set before ourselves at the Conference at Casablanca was to engage the enemy’s forces on land, sea, and in the air on the largest possible scale and at the earliest possible moment. The importance of coming to ever closer grips with the enemy and intensifying the struggle outweighs a number of other considerations which ordinarily would be decisive in themselves. We have to make the enemy burn and bleed in every way that is physically and reasonably possible, in the same way as he is being made to burn and bleed along the vast Russian front from the White Sea to the Black Sea. But this is not so simple as it sounds. Great Britain and the United States were formerly peaceful countries, ill-armed and unprepared. They are now warrior nations, walking in the fear of the Lord, very heavily armed, and with an increasingly clear view of their salvation. We are actually possessed of very powerful and growing forces, with great masses of munitions coming along. The problem is to bring these forces into action. The United States has vast oceans to cross in order to close with her enemies. We also have seas or oceans to cross in the first instance, and then for both of us there is the daring and complicated enterprise of landing on defended coasts and also the building-up of all the supplies and communications necessary for vigorous campaigning when once a landing has been made.
It is because of this that the U-boat warfare takes the first place in our thoughts. There is no need to exaggerate the danger of the U-boats or to worry our merchant seamen by harping upon it unduly, because the British and American governments have known for some time past that there were these U-boats about and have given the task of overcoming them the first priority in all their plans. This was reaffirmed most explicitly by the Combined Staffs at Casablanca. The losses we suffer at sea are very heavy, and they hamper us and delay our operations. They prevent us from coming info action with our full strength, and thus they prolong the war, with its certain waste and loss and all its unknowable hazards.
Progress is being made in the war against the U-boats. We are holding our own, and more than holding our own. Before the United States came into the war, we made our calculations on the basis of British building and guaranteed Lend-Lease, which assured us of a steady and moderate improvement in our position by the end of 1943 on a very high scale of losses. There never was a moment in which we did not see our way through, provided that what the United States promised us was made good.
Since then various things have happened. The United States have entered the war, and their shipbuilding has been stepped up to the present prodigious levels, amounting for the year 1943 to over 13,000,000 gross tons, or, as they would express it in American nomenclature, 18,000,000 or 19,000,000 dead weight tons. When the United States entered the war she brought with her a Mercantile Marine, American and American-controlled, of perhaps 10,000,000 gross tons, as compared with our then-existing tonnage, British and British-controlled, of about – I am purposely not being precise – twice as much. On the other hand, the two powers had more routes to guard, more jobs to do, and they therefore of course presented more numerous targets to the U-boats. Very serious depredations were committed by the U-boats off the east coast of America until the convoy system was put into proper order by the exertions of Adm. King. Heavy losses in the Far East were also incurred at the outset of the war against Japan when the Japanese pounced upon large quantities of British and United States shipping there. The great operation of landing in North Africa and maintaining the armies ashore naturally exposed the Anglo-American fleets to further losses, though there is a compensation for that which I will refer to later; and the Arctic convoys to Russia have also imposed a heavy toll, the main part of both these operational losses having fallen upon the British.
In all these circumstances it was inevitable that the joint American and British losses in the past 15 months should exceed the limits for which we British ourselves, in the days when we were alone, had budgeted. However, when the vast expansion in the United States shipbuilding is added to the credit side, the position is very definitely improved. It is in my opinion desirable to leave the enemy guessing at our real figures, to let him be the victim of his own lies, and to deprive him of every means of checking the exaggerations of his U-boat captains or of associating particular losses with particular forms and occasions of attack. I therefore do not propose to give any exact figures. This, however, I may say, that in the last six months, which included some of those heavy operations which I have mentioned, the Anglo-American and the important Canadian new building, all taken together, exceeded all the losses of the United Nations by over 1,250,000 gross tons. That is to say, our joint fleet is 1,250,000 tons bigger today than it was six months ago. That is not much, but it is something, and something very important.
But that statement by no means does justice to the achievement of the two countries, because the great American flow of shipbuilding is leaping up month by month, and the losses in the last two months are the lowest sustained for over a year. The number of U-boats is increasing, but so are their losses, and so also are the means of attacking them and protecting the convoys. It is, however, a horrible thing to plan ahead in cold blood on the basis of losing hundreds of thousands of tons a month, even if you can show a favourable balance at the end of a year. The waste of precious cargoes, the destruction of so many noble ships, the loss of heroic crews, all combine to constitute a repulsive and sombre panorama. We cannot possibly rest content with losses on this scale, even though they are outweighed by new building, even if they are not for that reason mortal in their character. Nothing is more clearly proved than that well-escorted convoys, especially when protected by long-distance aircraft, beat the U-boats. I do not say that they are a complete protection, but they are an enormous mitigation of losses. We have had hardly any losses at sea in our heavily-escorted troop convoys. Out of about 3,000,000 soldiers who have been moved under the protection of the British Navy about the world, to and fro across the seas and oceans, about 1,348 have been killed or drowned, including missing. It is about 2,200 to one against your being drowned if you travel in British troop convoys in this present war.
Even if the U-boats increase in number, there is no doubt that a superior proportionate increase in the naval and air escort will be a remedy. A ship not sunk is better than a new ship built. Therefore, in order to reduce the waste in the merchant shipping convoys, we have decided, by successive steps during the last six months, to throw the emphasis rather more on the production of escort vessels, even though it means some impingement on new building. Very great numbers of escort vessels are being constructed in Great Britain and the United States, equipped with every new device of anti-U-boat warfare in all its latest refinements. We pool our resources with the United States, and we have been promised, and the promise is being executed in due course, our fair allocation of American-built escort vessels.
There is another point. Everyone sees how much better it is to have fast ships than slow. This is also true of racehorses, as the Noble Lady was well aware in her unregenerate days. However, speed is a costly luxury. The most careful calculations are made and are repeatedly revised as between having fewer fast ships or more slow ones. The choice, however, is not entirely a free one. The moment you come into the sphere of fast ships, engine competition enters a new phase. It starts with the escort vessels but in other directions and also in the materials for the higher speed engines there come other complicated factors. I should strongly advise the House to have confidence in the extremely capable people who, with full knowledge of all the facts, are working day in day out on all these aspects and who would be delighted to fit an additional line of fast ships, even at some loss in aggregate tonnage, provided they could be sure that the engines would not clash with other even more urgent needs. In all these matters I should like the House to realise that we do have to aim at an optimum rather than at a maximum, which is not quite the same thing.
On the offensive side the rate of killing U-boats has steadily improved. From January to October 1942, inclusive, a period of 10 months, the rate of sinkings, certain and probable, was the best we have seen so far in this war, but from November to the present day, a period of three months, that rate has improved more than half as much again.
At the same time, the destructive power of the U-boat has undergone a steady diminution since the beginning of the war. In the first year, each operational U-boat that was at work accounted for an average of 19 ships; in the second year, for an average of 12, and in the third year for an average of 7½. These figures, I think, are, in themselves, a tribute to the Admiralty and to all others concerned.
It is quite true that at the present time, as I said in answer to an inquiry by my Hon. Friend the Member for Seaham the other day, we are making inroads upon the reserves of food and raw materials which we prudently built up in the earlier years of the war. We are doing this for the sake of the military operations in Africa and Asia and in the Far Pacific. We are doing it for the sake of the Russian convoys, and for the sake of giving aid and supplies to India and to Persia and other Middle Eastern countries. We are doing this on the faith of President Roosevelt’s promise to me of large allocations of shipping coming to us, as the floods of American new building come upon the seas. Risks have to be run, but I can assure the House that these needs are not left to chance and to sudden and belated panic spurts.
Provided that the present intense efforts are kept up here and in the United States, and that anti-U-boat warfare continues to hold first place in our thoughts and energies, I take the responsibility of assuring the House – and I have not misled them so far – that we shall be definitely better off, so far as shipping is concerned, at the end of 1943 than we are now, and while it is imprudent to try to peer so far ahead, all the tendencies show that unless something entirely new and unexpected happens in this well-explored field, we shall be still better off at the end of 1944, assuming that the war continues until then. It may be disappointing to Hitler to learn that we are upon a rising tide of tonnage and not upon an ebb or shrinkage, but it is the governing fact of the situation. Therefore, let everyone engaged in this sphere of operations bend to his or her task and try to get the losses down and try to get the launchings up; and let them do this, not under the spur of fear or gloom, or patriotic jitters, but in the sure and exhilarating consciousness of a gigantic task which is forging steadily forward to successful accomplishment. The more the sinkings are reduced, the more vehement our Anglo-American war effort can be. The margin, improving and widening, means the power to strike heavier blows against the enemy. The greater the weight we can take off Russia, the quicker the war will come to an end. All depends upon the margin of new building forging ahead over the losses, which, although improving, are still, as I have said, a lamentable and grievous fact to meditate upon. Meanwhile, let the enemy if he will, nurse his Vain hopes of averting his doom by U-boat warfare. He cannot avert it, but he may delay it, and it is for us to shorten that delay by every conceivable effort we can make.
It was only after full, cold, sober and mature consideration of all these facts, on which our lives and liberties certainly depend, that the President, with my full concurrence as agent of the War Cabinet, decided that the note of the Casablanca Conference should be the unconditional surrender of all our foes. But our inflexible insistence upon unconditional surrender does not mean that we shall stain our victorious arms by wrong and cruel treatment of whole populations. But justice must be done upon the wicked and the guilty, and, within her proper bounds, justice must be stern and implacable. No vestige of the Nazi or Fascist power, no vestige of the Japanese war-plotting machine, will be left by us when the work is done, as done it certainly will be.
That disposes, I think, of two important features of the Casablanca Conference, the recognition that the defeat of the U-boat and the improvement of the margin of shipbuilding resources is the prelude to all effective aggressive operations, and, secondly, after considering all those facts, the statement which the President wished to be made on the subject of unconditional surrender. But the Casablanca Conference was, in my not inconsiderable experience of these functions, in various ways unparalleled. There never has been, in all the inter-Allied Conferences I have known, anything like the prolonged professional examination of the whole scene of the world war in its military, its armament production and its economic aspects. This examination was conducted through the whole day, and far into the night, by the military, naval and air experts, sitting by themselves, without political influence thrust upon them, although general guidance was given by the President and by myself. But they were sitting by themselves talking all these matters out as experts and professionals. Some of these conferences in the last war, I remember, lasted a day or two days, but this was 11 days. If I speak of decisions taken, I can assure the House that they are based upon professional opinion and advice in their integrity. There never has been anything like that.
When you have half a dozen theatres of war open in various parts of the globe there are bound to be divergences of view when the problem is studied from different angles. There were many divergences of view before we came together, and it was for that reason, that I had been pressing for so many months for the meeting of as many of the great Allies as possible. These divergences are of emphasis and priority rather than of principle. They can only be removed by the prolonged association of consenting and instructed minds. Human judgment is fallible. We may have taken decisions which will prove to be less good than we hoped, but at any rate anything is better than not having a plan. You must be able to answer every question in these matters of war and have a good, clear, plain answer to the question: what is your plan, what is your policy? But it does not follow that we always give the answer. It would be foolish.
We have now a complete plan of action, which comprises the apportionment of forces as well as their direction, and the weight of the particular movements which have been decided upon; and this plan we are going to carry out according to our ability during the next nine months, before the end of which we shall certainly make efforts to meet again. I feel justified in asking the House to believe that their business is being conducted according to a definite design and, although there will surely be disappointments and failures – many disappointments and serious failures and frustrations – there is no question of drifting or indecision, or being unable to form a scheme or waiting for something to turn up. For good or for ill, we know exactly what it is that we wish to do. We have the united and agreed advice of our experts behind it, and there is nothing now to be done but to work these plans out in their detail and put them into execution one after the other.
I believe it was Bismarck – I have not been able to verify it, but I expect I shall be able to find out now – who said in the closing years of his life that the dominating fact in the modern world was that the people of Britain and of the United States both spoke the same language. If so, it was certainly a much more sensible remark than some of those that we have heard from those who now fill high positions in Germany. Certainly the British and American experts and their political chiefs gain an enormous advantage by the fact that they can interchange their thoughts so easily and freely and so frankly by a common medium of speech.
This, however, did not in any way diminish our great regret that Premier Stalin and some of his distinguished generals could not be with us. The President, in spite of the physical disability which he has so heroically surmounted, was willing to go as far east as Khartoum in the hope that we could have a tripartite meeting. Premier Stalin is, however, the supreme director of the whole vast Russian offensive, which was already then in full swing and which is still rolling remorselessly and triumphantly forward. He could not leave his post, as he told us, even for a single day. But I can assure the House that, although he was absent, our duty to aid to the utmost in our power the magnificent, tremendous effort of Russia and to try to draw the enemy and the enemy’s air force from the Russian front was accepted as the first of our objectives once the needs of the anti-U-boat warfare were met in such a way as to enable us to act aggressively.
We have made no secret of the fact that British and American strategists and leaders are unanimous in adhering to their decision of a year ago, namely, that the defeat of Hitler and the breaking of the German power must have priority over the decisive phase of the war against Japan. I have already some two months ago indicated that the defeat of the enemy in Europe may be achieved before victory is won over Japan, and I made it clear that in that event all the forces of the British Empire, land, sea and air, will be moved to the Far Eastern theatre with the greatest possible speed, and that Great Britain will continue the war by the side of the United States with the utmost vigour until unconditional surrender has been enforced upon Japan. With the authority of the War Cabinet, I renewed this declaration in our Conference at Casablanca. I offered to make it in any form which might be desired, even embodying it in a special Treaty if that were thought advantageous. The President, however, stated that the word of Great Britain was quite enough for him. We have already, of course, bound ourselves, along with all the rest of the United Nations, to go on together to the end, however long it may take or however grievous the cost may be. I therefore think it only necessary to mention the matter to the House in order to give them the opportunity of registering their assent to that obvious and very necessary declaration.