The 1943 Trident Conference involved the two-key World War II allies of the USA and Britain. Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Washington to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here, William Floyd Jr. looks at what happened during the conference and its impact on the later years of World War II.
Churchill and Roosevelt fishing - when taking a break from the conference. Source: FDR Presidential Library & Museum, available here.
On May 10, 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, identifying himself as “Naval Person”, wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt from on board the ocean liner, “Queen Mary”, “Since yesterday we have been surrounded by U.S. Navy and we all greatly appreciate high value you evidently set upon our continued survival. I look forward to being at White House with you tomorrow afternoon, and also going to Hyde Park with you at weekend. The voyage has been so far most agreeable and Staff have done vast amount of work.”
The ocean liner “Queen Mary” had made her first voyage on May 27, 1936, as a passenger liner, primarily sailing on the North Atlantic until 1967. With the beginning of World War II, it was converted to a military ship transporting Allied soldiers. Her colors of red, white, and black were now gone under a pewter gray to make the ship less visible. She would become known as the “Gray Ghost.” On Tuesday morning, May 11, 1943, she would arrive in New York carrying her very special passengers, the Prime Minister and about one hundred staff. The ship also had 5,000 German prisoners, on board, captured in the North African Campaign and bound for POW camps in the American Southwest.
The Prime Minister and his staff would be meeting with the President and his aides to map out a plan to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Waiting at the dock to greet the Prime Minister was the President’s closest aide, Harry Hopkins, along with a special presidential train for the trip to Washington D.C. As the train came to a stop at Union Station, the limousines pulled onto the platform. The President was lifted from the lead vehicle and placed in a wheelchair. All of Roosevelt’s symptoms of stress and age seemed to go away at the sight of the Prime Minister approaching in his yacht squadron uniform. The two men beamed at each other before driving off to the conference. The President insisted that the Prime Minister stay at the White House.
The Trident Conference would become one of many between the United States and Great Britain including Casablanca, Quebec, Cairo, Tehran, Malta, Yalta, and Potsdam. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin attended the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences.
Objectives
The first meeting of the conference took place at the White House on May 12, 1943 at 2:30 P.M. The President, Prime Minister, and their staffs would be in attendance. The President welcomed Mr. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff stating that it was very appropriate that they should meet again just as Operation Torch (North African Campaign) was coming to a satisfactory conclusion. He also said that he thought the keynote should be to employ every resource of men and munitions against the enemy. Nothing that could be brought to bear should be allowed to stand idle.
He then asked the Prime Minister to open the discussion. Churchill would deliver some opening remarks and then proceeded to go through a number of objectives to consider. The first objective was the Mediterranean Theatre. The great prize was to get Italy out of the war by whatever means possible. The second objective should be taking the weight off of the USSR. Stalin had stated that the best way of taking the weight off of the Soviet front, in 1943, would be to knock Italy out of the war forcing the Germans to send a large number of troops, from the Soviet front to hold down the Balkans. The third objective, as mentioned by the President, was to apply the greatest possible numbers of our armed forces for the campaign. The fourth objective was to make it absolutely clear that his majesty’s government earnestly desired to undertake a full-scale invasion of the continent. The fifth and final objective should be aid to China and the hope that the USSR could be brought in for the fight against Japan.
In his closing statement the Prime Minister stated that he hoped his remarks would help to frame an agenda for the Combined Chiefs of Staff and serve as a guide for their discussions. The President expressed his gratitude to the Prime Minister for the open way in which he had presented his views.
The conference in Washington D.C. happened at a time of greater optimism for the Allies. There had been success in North Africa, a number of islands in the Pacific had been retaken, the Soviet Union had withstood the siege of Stalingrad, the battle of the Atlantic was turning in favor of the Allies, and preparations were going forward for Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily).
Discussions
One of the main topics was that, if the British were interested in further operations in the Mediterranean Theatre while the Americans were insistent that these actions be limited so they would not interfere with a cross-Channel invasion in 1944. If the British would not commit themselves to the European invasion of Western Europe in 1944, then all bets were off and the United States would focus on Japan. There was much disagreement, even among those on the same side as to what the next step should be. However, Churchill and his generals were thus far right in that it was imperative to attack the Italian mainland, which was the only battlefield where Anglo-American ground forces could engage the Germans in 1943. Other topics of discussion included an increase in air attacks on Axis targets with an emphasis on the bombing of oil fields, recapturing Burma from the Japanese and reopening the supply line to China. There was also discussion of refugees leaving Europe, but no final decision was arrived at.
The President and Prime Minister had spent ample time together when they met for the 1943 conference, so they were used to each other’s moods for better or worse. They were each comfortable through the long hours of conversation. When the subject of the 1944 presidential election came up, Churchill told Roosevelt, “I simply can’t go on without you.” Churchill would write to Clementine from Washington, “Although after 12 arduous years he would gladly be quit of it. It would be painful to leave with the war unfinished and break the theme of his action. To me this would be a disaster of the first magnitude.” The United States and Britain, Churchill said in Washington, “could pull out of any mess together.” In Roosevelt’s mind, however, Churchill had become less of a force to contend with and was now a permanent part of Roosevelt’s universe, one in which he was in charge.
During his time in Washington, Churchill would give another full -scale address to Congress. It was again a success. According to his typing secretary, Churchill spent nine and a half hours dictating it to her and it commanded the approval of the President.
After opening remarks on May 12, the first meeting would take place in Roosevelt’s oval study, a small hideaway above the Blue Room. As would be expected nautical paintings and etchings decorated the walls. The President would sit in his armless wheelchair greeting the Prime Minister and ten other men mostly from the Combined Chiefs. At this conference, the Americans were much better prepared than they had been at Casablanca where they felt they had been outfoxed by the British.
The President’s advisers worked hard to overcome what many thought was the biggest obstacle to American strategic leadership: Roosevelt himself, and his willingness to be swayed by Churchill’s oratory. The U.S. Joint Chiefs had met with Roosevelt three days before and had gotten from him a promise to press the British for a commitment to a cross-Channel invasion of Europe. They also reminded the President that a large segment of the American public considered the Japanese the real enemy.
The President and Prime Minister would meet six times with the Combined Chiefs of Staff at the White House over the course of the conference. The Combined Chiefs, themselves, would meet almost every day in the Board of Governor’s Room at the Federal Reserve Building. On May 15 the two staffs had been able to take a rest-and-relaxation break at nearby Williamsburg, Virginia, the restored capital of 18th century Virginia. They would tour the town and feast on traditional foods of that era. Everyone from both sides seemed to enjoy themselves.
Final outcomes
Back in Washington, the meetings would continue until May 25. However, many major decisions would be reached on Wednesday, the nineteenth. On May 21, the Combined Chiefs presented their results to the President and the Prime Minister. In his diary Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote, “We spent about one and a half hours listening to PM and President and holding forth on strategy and shivering lest either of them should suddenly put their foot right into it and reopen some of the differences which we had reconciled with some difficulty! ... Thank heaven we got through safely!” Brook spoke too soon. Three days after writing this, he again stated in his diary that Churchill, “wished to repudiate half” of the agreement, “which would have crashed the whole” agreement. Fortunately, Roosevelt’s adviser, Harry Hopkins, was able to get the Prime Minister to withdraw his revisions and only do minor rewording of some text.
The result of the Trident Conference, as that of Casablanca, for the near future pointed to the continuation of both the Mediterranean and Pacific offensives. However, barriers had been set at the Washington meetings to contain or limit the Mediterranean advance and these plans had mostly shifted to operations, which would set the stage for the planned cross-Channel invasion. There had also been progress in putting together the Pacific and European operations into tentative long-range planning in the war against both Japan and Germany. As welcome as these signs were to military planners, events would soon indicate that all the pieces in the worldwide strategic puzzle had not yet fallen into place and that the Mediterranean issue was still far from finished.
Ending the conference
At 4:00 P.M. on May 25, exactly two weeks after his arrival in Washington, Churchill walked down the corridor to the oval office. He would be leaving by flying boat from the Potomac River the next morning. After much debate, the code name for this departure would be “Neptune.” Roosevelt sat in his armless wheelchair, with Churchill now at his side, and gave a nod to let a large number of reporters in. “We are awfully glad to have Mr. Churchill back here,” the President told the gathering. “Considering the size of our problems, these discussions have been done in practically record time.” When asked about our plans for the future, Churchill replied, “Our plans for the future are to wage this war until unconditional surrender is procured from all those who have molested us, and this applies equally to Asia and Europe.”
At the final Trident meeting with the Combined Chiefs and the President, Churchill proposed that Marshall accompany him to Algeria where they would meet with General Eisenhower. Churchill hoped to get from Ike irreversible promises to launch a campaign on the Italian mainland soon after “Husky.” Churchill also intended to try and get Marshall to accept some of his further plans in the eastern Mediterranean. However, Marshall remained skeptical as to the wisdom of invading mainland Italy. He would forcefully remind Churchill and the others that they had set a definite date for the cross-Channel attack in France for May 1, 1944.
Eisenhower stated that the invasion of the Italian mainland would be an easy operation. Marshall disagreed. In fact, the invasion of Italy would be a bloody twenty-four month long struggle up the Italian boot that would cost the Allies more than three hundred thousand casualties, including 23,500 American deaths, and would turn most of the country into a wasteland.
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Sources
1. Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).
2. Chapter VI-The Trident Conference-New Patterns: 1943, history.army.mil.
3. Debi and Irwin Unger, General Marshall (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).
4. The Trident Conference: May 1943, U.S. Government Bookstore, https://bookstore.gpo.gov.
5. Trident Conference Home, Eisenhower Presidential Papers and Minutes of Meetings, https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov.
6. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
7. Max Hastings, The World at War: 1939-1945 (New York: Random House, 2011).
8. The Trident Conference-May 1943 by Joint History Office (U.S.)
9. Jon Meacham. Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2003).
10. Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).
11. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Penguin Group, 2002).
12. The Trident Conference, Defense Media Network.
