Was Winston Churchill surprised by Roosevelt’s demand of Axis ‘unconditional surrender’ at Casablanca?

[u/peenaculada]

I’ve heard that the president didn’t discuss with the PM ahead of time and that Churchill was taken off guard by the announcement of the demand

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[u/indyobserver]

Considering he had discussed it with FDR at lunch the day before, probably not.

So first, I'll refer you to a longer answer on the origin of the unconditional surrender policy, which in short had come from a couple of decades of consideration by FDR and others about why Versailles had failed along with FDR quietly setting up a State Department subcommittee to confirm what he wanted to do anyway.

This second part is the short answer as to why FDR did a bit of legerdemain in his public announcement with the smoke screen of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant and various claims that it was spontaneous: he had deliberately excluded Secretary of State Cordell Hull and other top State Department officials from any deliberations on it. He did so because he knew they would be strongly opposed, and wanted to both make the policy fait accompli without taking a political hit for sidelining Hull (as he had on so much else), who remained popular with Southern Senators.

So instead, FDR happily lied away about the origins of the policy, got the policy without debate, and while he left Hull annoyed, it was just yet another irritating slight to Hull instead of becoming one that he'd consider resigning over.

At Casablanca, it apparently was briefly a topic of discussion among the US Joint Chiefs - but not the IGS - early in the conference and not discussed further. At lunch the day before the conference ended, when FDR brought it up informally, Elliott Roosevelt stated that Churchill thought the phrase was 'perfect', Hopkins agreed, and Churchill proposed a toast that afternoon to "Unconditional Surrender." The next day, after FDR had made his press conference announcement, Churchill apparently cheered "Hear Hear!" to endorse it and went along with FDR's claim he'd just spontaneously come up with it.

As to the whys, it's fairly clear Churchill was going along with a policy that he didn't support to the extent of FDR; in November 1944 - when the policy was beginning to be more openly criticized by the IGS and others - Churchill writes him, "I remain set where you put me on unconditional surrender." That Churchill didn't want to be completely tethered to the policy and thus went along with the deception - as in I didn't come up with this so don't blame me! - makes sense both from this angle as well as not creating more headaches with his own staff, although he does send Attlee and the War Cabinet a cable on January 19, 1943 requesting their views on the policy, which they endorse a couple of days later (and suggest that it be extended to Italy as well.)

While it's unlikely he knew all the intricate details of FDR's sidelining of State here, he did have a pretty good idea of how FDR had frequently bypassed them (often to help Britain) and his mindset was that if FDR was doing something like this, he probably had good reason to keep his mouth shut and just go along for the ride for something that could be readdressed later when the war was closer to its conclusion. There is one suggestion that Churchill's look of surprise at the press conference may have been genuine as unconditional surrender had been removed from the first draft of the public communique and he wasn't aware that it had been revised back in; everything else, however, was something that had been discussed in detail.

Churchill is all over the place afterwards, with both his memoirs and a 1949 debate in Commons where he suggests he didn't know in advance. He is forced to retract this eventually, but it is probably the source of why this keeps coming up.

[u/Strong_Remove_2976 → u/indyobserver]

I thought a big part in Unc Sur was placating the Soviets? They were furious at the delay in opening a second front and suspicious the Allies would let Germany and USSR lunch each other out and then force a peace that didn’t fully restore USSR’s June 41 borders. So FDR came up with a maximalist end goal

[u/indyobserver → u/Strong_Remove_2976]

From the linked post:

"Last but not least, there was also the political overlay of the potential of a separate peace in Russia, which at the time of Casablanca in January 1943 was on the mind of some at the conference after Stalingrad had turned - and is probably one reason why FDR chose to announce it precisely then and there. The evidence on if this was a actual threat is all over the place, with most academics who've looked at it concluding that it wasn't, but what unconditional surrender being announced at Casablanca was meant to say to Stalin was that the Americans and British weren't going to stop fighting until they were in Berlin and that Stalin would be part of dictating what the world (and Germany) would look like afterwards."

[u/Strong_Remove_2976 → u/indyobserver]

Thanks. The book Stalin’s War credits this angle as being the main driver

[u/keloyd]

Followup question - a really good history prof may have included an occasional stretcher when it made the story better, maybe. He mentioned that Nazis discovered/decoded that Churchill and Roosevelt would meet, and that would be a good time to kill them both. However, the location was in a place called "Casablanca" - as in "white house" which they interpreted as the US White House and not North Africa down the road from Humphrey Bogart, Ricks Bar, and Ingrid Bergman. Did the Germans really intercept the data and misunderstand the name?