Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for New World Order: Chapter 5

Email this citation 5. The Quest for a New World Order: Postwar Planning and the Great Powers, 1942-1943
Under Welles's leadership, the postwar planners initially sought to investigate how the peace could be reconciled with America's war aims. But they soon exceeded that mandate, moving from broad discussions of postwar matters to more specific investigations of the postwar status of particular powers. They consequently expanded their investigations to almost every corner of the globe. Over the course of the eighteen months between January 1942 and July 1943, the advisory committees shaped U.S. policy in numerous areas. In addition to creating a new international organization and drafting a blueprint for international trusteeship for the colonial world, they investigated and made recommendations for Washington's relations with the exile governments, planned for the postwar reconstruction of Germany, Italy, and Japan, charted the postwar future of China, and attempted to stabilize relations between Moscow and Washington. They left almost no part of the world, no continent, no nation, unexamined, and when Welles resigned in September 1943, the foundations of the postwar order America would pursue were already in place.	1
The discussions in Welles's subcommittees took place in an open and exploratory atmosphere. Yet this approach created a number of problems. Welles wanted the committees to reach agreements rapidly, but his open-ended methods ensured that while the planners conducted their survey of the world, America's vital interests continued to expand to areas not previously considered relevant to U.S. security. During the lifespan of the committees, one of the most common and successful arguments followed the line that anything threatening the future peace of the world—anywhere—also threatened America's vital interests. This line of thinking foreshadowed American strategic doctrine during the subsequent Cold War period, when events in seemingly unimportant areas increasingly took on a greater urgency because of their supposed bearing on American security and prestige. Welles and his fellow planners would succeed in expanding the concept of U.S. vital interests to remote areas of the Far East, Africa, the Near East, and Eastern Europe. ₁
As the planners surveyed the world situation, it soon became clear that a dramatic change had occurred in their view of the world, and their definition of America's vital interests expanded accordingly. ₂ This transformed understanding of the world on the part of the planners presumed that the U.S. would intrude in the internal affairs of other nations and would go to great lengths to produce outcomes beneficial to U.S. interests. Welles endorsed, for example, a suggestion by Myron Taylor that the committees begin compiling lists of potential leaders of other nations who would be agreeable to American interests in the postwar period. The United States might then actively seek to promote these officials within their native governments. Anne O'Hare McCormick subsequently asked Welles to clarify their true mission. Is it, she asked, to determine "the kind of world we want?" "Exactly," he replied. ₃
Welles further suggested that the committees should begin to anticipate obstacles to an American-led world order. He and the planners began to grow concerned about the kind of delegates the other nations might send to an initial conclave of the United Nations. He wanted the other nations to select "good men." He thus thought Washington should have the final say in the selection of other nation's delegates. He suggested Taylor's roster of amenable foreign leaders might come in handy for such an enterprise. This could be finessed, Welles said, if the great powers simply said, "We won the war, we won back for you your self-esteem and independence, and we wish your advice in all decisions. Therefore, we want representatives from yourselves, by regions, to sit with us in the making of all decisions. For that purpose we have selected these men from you to join us in our deliberations." ₄
The planners also had aims that went beyond the political realm. Welles sought nothing less than the creation of a new economic order in the postwar world, facilitated in part by massive doses of U.S. postwar economic largess. He hinted that after the war the United States would transform itself from an arsenal of democracy supplying the world's military needs into the workshop of democracy providing the aid and materiel necessary for global reconstruction. ₅	5
He sought to exert U.S. influence in other ways as well, such as through the manipulation of exile movements. Throughout the first few years of the war he played a pivotal role as the liaison between the administration and various exile groups. In this capacity, he sought to influence the future course of these occupied countries and use his relations with exile movements to shape their postwar governments. He realized that the United States had much to gain through its dealings with exiles and expatriates. The Allies benefited from the collaboration of various national armed forces, some of which, such as the exiled Poles, constituted a movement of some significance. They took advantage of several substantive resistance movements, such as those in the Philippines, France, Burma, and Yugoslavia, which often included vast networks of intelligence agents. They gained access to millions of tons of valuable merchant shipping, mostly Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Yugoslav. The Allies also benefited from the continued existence of the many exile governments functioning in Allied territory, thus enabling the Allied propaganda effort to better combat Axis political warfare.
The French exiles constituted what was perhaps the most vigorous movement of all. Yet Welles's relations with the several Free French envoys sent to Washington represented some of the least cordial exchanges he had during the war. He believed the collapse of France and the controversies over the various French exile factions had given Washington an extraordinary opportunity to shape the destiny of France for years to come. He saw the Franco-German rivalry as the chief source of European instability, and hence he sought to treat France with little more favor than Germany. France would have little role in Welles's postwar designs, and he welcomed the possibility that the weakening of France would lead to a further reduction of European influence around the world. ₆
As part of Welles's "new European order," he wanted to see France disarmed, stripped of its empire, and removed from the ranks of the great powers at the end of the war. He believed that after the war the French empire would be a destabilizing force in the world and that the United States must use its power to bring French colonialism to an end. U.S. relations with emerging powers such as China would be strengthened, he reasoned, if only Washington could take a prominent lead in ending European empires such as the French. Pressuring them to make concessions in Indochina and the Levant would be a first step in that direction. French possessions in North Africa (and eventually the rest of Africa) would also be subject to such pressures.
Welles went even further with regard to metropolitan France. His views on the status of postwar France stemmed more from his vision of American interests than from any personal animus. He had very precise ideas about France's future. His concerns about the nature of the French exiles stemmed from his conviction that France, as one of the largest countries in Europe and the second largest colonial empire in the world, would also be a significant factor in any effort at European (or even global) reconstruction at the end of the war. He desired to see France reborn after the war as an effective engine of European economic reconstruction, but without the military power and pretensions to imperial splendor it had possessed prior to 1940. He acknowledged that European recovery absolutely required a strong France. But he also feared that a perpetuation of France's quest for national and imperial glory would merely perpetuate the instability at the heart of Europe. To Welles, de Gaulle represented the chief threat to American goals for a diminished postwar France.
Welles had steeled himself for the struggle over the postwar aims of France. He threatened to apply the Wilsonian principle of non-recognition to the provisional French government led by General Charles de Gaulle. Washington would seek to determine for itself if the French people genuinely supported their future government and whether the French government would be amenable to the implementation of certain reforms desired by Washington, such as disarmament and a commitment to trusteeship for French colonial possessions. Welles suggested that the United States should exert its leverage over the future of France by withholding recognition and aid if the postwar French government did not meet Washington's precise standards of legitimacy.	10
This resembled Woodrow Wilson's often arbitrary distinctions between de facto vs. de jure governments in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere, where the United States refused to officially recognize a government until it met certain specific criteria of "legitimacy." Welles believed that only adherence to the Four Freedoms could ensure a stable, peaceful, and legitimate postwar order in France. All governments, he argued, including the French, "must give their peoples such rights and apply them." He reminded his fellow planners that the United States should not wait for events to happen in places like France, but should instead adroitly exploit opportunities and take the lead in shaping the postwar world. France and the French colonial empire might prove to be ideal models for America to demonstrate its resolve in creating a new world order. ₇
Welles desired an exile regime more deferential to U.S. aims, and he thus became one of the harshest critics of General de Gaulle's Free French. ₈ He also viewed de Gaulle's movement as little more than a stalking horse for British interests in Europe and the colonial world. He would consistently defy entreaties by London to ease American hostility toward de Gaulle. He steadfastly clung to the position that the French Third Republic had merely been temporarily suspended by the war and that "everything that has happened since June 1940 is illegitimate." That included both the regime in Vichy as well as de Gaulle's Free French group based in London. ₉ Welles's stubborn opposition to everything the Free French leader represented would have important consequences for the Allies, and his visceral dislike of the General further reinforced President Roosevelt's deep distrust of the Free French. ₁₀
Welles feared that de Gaulle represented merely the latest manifestation of the traditional French enthusiasm for the "man on a white horse"—a yearning for authoritarianism which underlay the appeal of Napoleon I, Louis Bonaparte, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, General George Boulanger, and Petain. Welles thought he sensed just such an authoritarian streak in General de Gaulle, and he believed recent events merely confirmed his view of de Gaulle's unreliability and duplicity. Welles had distrusted de Gaulle as a dangerous and reckless incompetent ever since the failed Free French attempt to take Dakar in September 1940, an effort that had been undermined by numerous intelligence leaks that tipped off the defending Vichy forces. Perhaps most dismaying of all to Welles was de Gaulles's affront to Pax Americana when, on Christmas Eve 1941, Free French forces took control of the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the Newfoundland coast.
Welles's dim view of the Free French was reinforced by other French exiles. His suspicion of de Gaulle would be strongly confirmed by the French diplomat Alexis Léger, who held the senior civil service post of secretary general of the French foreign ministry from 1933 to 1940, and was seen by many as the "permanent master" of French foreign policy. ₁₁ Léger had become a zealous opponent of de Gaulle, whom he saw as an "apprentice dictator." ₁₂ After arriving in Washington in early 1941, Léger told Welles that he was prepared to surrender his diplomatic passport. Welles reassured Léger that, "as far as the State Department is concerned, you are still one of the foremost diplomats of France." ₁₃ With the assistance of Archibald MacLeish, Welles's friend at the Library of Congress, Léger took up a position as a consultant to the library on French poetry. Once settled, he worked with Welles to convince Roosevelt that de Gaulle could never be the legitimate head of a French government-in-exile. Léger suggested that de Gaulle lacked legitimacy because he had never offered himself to the French people in an election. ₁₄
Léger threw everything he had at de Gaulle. He warned Welles that de Gaulle and his movement sought communist support and that the general desired closer relations with Moscow as a means of escaping Anglo-American domination. He also told Welles that de Gaulle sought to scrap the Third Republic and replace it with a system featuring greater "order and discipline." As if that were not enough, Léger warned that de Gaulle remained "totally opposed to any type of international cooperation or world organization." ₁₅ Welles received similar warnings from other exiled French officials, and American concerns about de Gaulle's alleged "fascist" ₁₆ leanings were now compounded by alarm over his possible ties to communists, fears which led to an FBI investigation of the Free French representatives in Washington. ₁₇	15
Conceding that the Third Republic possessed numerous weaknesses that had contributed to the debacle of 1940, Welles suggested that the United Nations, and not de Gaulle, should draft a new constitution for France. He remained particularly concerned about the possibility of instability in a liberated France. While he opposed de Gaulle, he nonetheless believed France would need some means of strong and effective civil government after liberation. He grew increasingly alarmed by reports of the growing strength of communism in wartime France and expressed his concern about the possible emergence of radical "communes" in many of France's larger cities after liberation. He grew increasingly concerned that civil strife might erupt unless the various factions of the resistance resolved their differences. He warned of the possibility of massacres and reprisals along the lines of 1871. He feared that the new legislative assembly in postwar France would be controlled by the "extreme left," and he therefore favored United Nations military control in France immediately following the war. ₁₈
To prevent communists from gaining power in local politics and exercising "undue influence" at the national level, the planners proposed that the United Nations be prepared to impose local and national administration in a liberated France. They urged that the United States, working under the cloak of collective action, should seek to shape the postwar political future of France. They also proposed that outside powers should seek to ensure that the Four Freedoms be enforced in a postwar France, and that France's transportation facilities be internationalized. ₁₉
Welles feared that it would be difficult to restore a legitimate government in a liberated France and he sought to oppose any effort by de Gaulle to impose himself as the governing authority in liberated French territory. He suspected that de Gaulle was determined to manipulate future elections in a liberated France, and he worried that Washington's choices remained too limited. As Washington's relations with Vichy continued to deteriorate in the spring of 1942, Welles anticipated a complete break. He recognized that Washington would need to deal with some other entity representing French interests, but he remained unrelentingly hostile to de Gaulle's movement. He henceforth began to pay greater attention to the composition of de Gaulle's Free French committee, and by the spring of 1942 he became convinced that it needed to be completely reformed, which for the most part meant that it had to be thoroughly purged of the influence of General de Gaulle. ₂₀
In a top-secret, hand-delivered message sent in March 1942 to Admiral William Leahy, the U.S. Ambassador to Vichy, ₂₁ Welles acknowledged that the United States might soon have to recognize the Free French committee as the French government-in-exile. Yet this did not necessarily mean that Washington would have to recognize a Free French committee headed by de Gaulle. Welles and President Roosevelt wanted Leahy to establish contact with the man they desired to replace de Gaulle—Edouard Herriot, the French statesman who had held numerous cabinet posts in the Third Republic, including premier on three occasions. Welles and Roosevelt believed Herriot's long political career would garner him the support of the French people and the empire. But, perhaps most importantly, Welles knew Herriot, liked him personally, and believed he would prove to be more tractable than de Gaulle.
Oddly enough, Welles never seems to have paused to consider the unfortunate consequences of his previous experiment in Cuba, where he had sought and failed to secure the presidency for his longtime friend Carlos Manuel de Cespedes. Welles asked Leahy to approach Herriot about the possibility of catching a flight to a neutral capital such as Lisbon for eventual transit to Washington, where Welles hoped to begin grooming him to take over a newly unified exile movement. ₂₂ Welles's scheme soon encountered protests from other French exiles, who vehemently opposed Herriot on the grounds that he had recently served as president of the Chamber of Deputies in Vichy. ₂₃ Furthermore, Welles soon had to drop his plan when Herriot was placed under house arrest and deported to Germany. ₂₄	20
Welles continued his effort to find a replacement for de Gaulle. He understood that the British presented a formidable obstacle to getting rid of the French general. His efforts to depose de Gaulle inevitably brought him into conflict with the British Foreign Office, which continued to back the Free French leader and worried that the Americans would not be content until they had demoted France from the ranks of the great powers. The British had protested in December 1941 when Welles deliberately omitted the Free French from the United Nations Declaration. A few months later, the British minister in Washington, Sir Ronald Campbell, warned the Foreign Office that Washington remained steadfastly opposed to the Free French and that Welles believed de Gaulle to be a "fascist." ₂₅
Welles continued to press his case with the British. In May 1942, he sounded out Ambassador Halifax on the prospects for toppling de Gaulle. He told Halifax that the French committee needed to be expanded to include a broader spectrum of French public opinion. He argued that the Free French should never be granted provisional authority in liberated French territory and that London and Washington should seek to create a new exile movement. ₂₆
Welles warned Halifax that it would be wrong to recognize de Gaulle and the Free French as a legitimate government; nor did he think it a good idea to recognize the general as the head of the French resistance. He later told British Parliamentary under secretary Richard Law that he thought the time would soon come when the British would have to set de Gaulle adrift. Welles acknowledged that deposing de Gaulle would be a great shock to certain segments of French opinion, but he believed the interests of the Anglo-American allies would be better served by settling the matter now, rather than delaying and allowing de Gaulle to grow more powerful. Welles feared that de Gaulle might grab power and never relinquish it if he were allowed to return to Paris with the Allied armies. ₂₇
The British were somewhat alarmed by Welles's views. "Welles thought it would be a fatal mistake for the United States Government to recognize any refugee group as a government," Halifax cabled London. "Nor was he disposed to recognize de Gaulle as chief of French resistance. He thought that he lacked the personal qualities to fill this role, and was very badly advised by those around him. ... [Welles] thought that our two Governments would have to act together to [create a French exile government], even though we might dress it up as a spontaneous act of the Free French authorities." ₂₈ So much for open diplomacy.
A few days later, Halifax noted that, "Welles agreed that General de Gaulle could hardly be expected to like the idea, but made it plain that the United States Government were not prepared to play with General de Gaulle as chief of all French resistance, which in their view placed him in a position of practical dictatorship, distasteful to them." ₂₉ Welles warned Halifax that, unless de Gaulle was removed, the Anglo-American allies would find it difficult to expand the Free French committee to include Frenchmen of exceptional talent such as Alexis Léger. ₃₀	25
Anglo-American differences over French policy did not stop there. In an effort to derail Welles's effort to depose de Gaulle, Ambassador Halifax leaked the substance of their discussions to the New York Times, provoking a stinging rebuke from Welles, who told Halifax he found it "incredible that highly confidential views which I had expressed to the Ambassador in recent conversations ... should have appeared in extenso in recent news dispatches...." ₃₁ While de Gaulle was already aware that Welles had been pressuring the British to remove him, he was nonetheless infuriated by the report in the Times. ₃₂ Welles subsequently summoned Free French envoy Raoul Aglion to the State Department to explain that his opposition to the general was nothing personal, but rather a question of "legitimacy." "The National Committee of General de Gaulle," Welles told Aglion, "would not be, and could not be, recognized as a government in exile. Governments in exile are legitimate governments that have fled invasion. Such is not the case of France, where the government did not choose to go into exile but remained, and now is not free due to the pressure of the Nazis." He told Aglion that, "the majority of Frenchmen, even those who are opposed to Vichy and Laval, do not recognize de Gaulle's authority...." ₃₃
Welles and other U.S. officials remained highly sensitive to even the slightest criticisms coming from the Free French. Another of de Gaulle's wartime envoys, Adrien Tixier, had recently told Welles that de Gaulle might accept U.S. pressure to enlarge his committee, but Tixier added that it should not include anyone who was "in any way connected with the signing of the French armistice" and, most importantly, should not include anyone who had been critical of de Gaulle or any of his associates during the past few years. Welles was enraged. He lashed out at Tixier, saying that he found it "unbelievable in the present state of world affairs that French men and French women, who were supposedly determined to do their utmost to further the victory of the United Nations, should be spending ninety-five percent of their time in petty quarrels of the character which was only too evident among the Free French...." He accused Tixier of spreading inaccurate reports about his handling of Washington's French policy. Tixier called such accusations "malicious." Welles rejected Tixier's version of events. "What he said," Welles noted afterward, "and the manner in which he said it made it entirely clear that he had initiated the absurd reports which I had referred to." ₃₄
Matters did not improve, and the two continued to clash throughout the spring of 1942. When Tixier handed Welles a list of demands prepared by de Gaulle to help bolster the Free French movement, they included French participation in the Allied joint staff conversations and a lengthy shopping list of war materiel. Tixier told Welles that de Gaulle thought the Anglo-American war effort had thus far been "calamitous" and that the general was prepared to discuss these matters only with the highest authorities, but not "with little men who cannot see further than the ends of their own noses and who have no authority"—a comment Welles obviously thought directed at him. ₃₅
Relations between the U.S. and the Free French continued to deteriorate. When Welles scheduled the initial meeting between the president and Free French representatives for early November 1942, the French envoys inexplicably failed to appear. After four hours the meeting was canceled. At the eventual White House meeting between Welles, the president, and Free French envoys André Philippe and Tixier on November 20, the French representatives reacted heatedly to Roosevelt's casual remark that the United States would unilaterally determine which, "if any," Frenchman would administer any liberated French territory in the future. "It would be quite impossible," Welles noted, "to attempt to report the latter part of the conversation held by these two individuals with the President. They both of them howled at the top of their lungs and spoke at the same time, and paid not the slightest attention to what the President was saying to them." ₃₆
American plans for France's diminution continued apace. Throughout the fall and winter of 1942, Welles and his fellow planners resumed the debate over whether France should be completely disarmed at the end of the war. On the one hand, if Germany were disarmed there would be no good reason for the rearmament of France. Welles and the other planners thought the enforced disarmament of the two major powers of continental Europe would promote greater continental union and comity, thereby aiding in postwar reconstruction efforts. But they also noted that the French themselves would violently oppose such efforts, and they raised concerns that any reduction of French military power might ultimately redound to the advantage of the Soviet Union. ₃₇	30
At times, Welles seemed to imply that France should be treated no better than Germany. He told the other planners that Roosevelt was still determined to see France disarmed at the end of the war, but that France would need to be reassured that a new world organization would protect her national interests and defend her from a revanchist Germany. When Anne O'Hare McCormick reminded the committee that France had been defeated by the Axis and therefore should not be treated as an enemy state, Welles reminded them not to forget that France had made a "separate peace" with Germany in June 1940 in violation of its pledges not to do so. ₃₈
At the end of 1942, U.S. opposition to de Gaulle intensified. In December, Welles and the planners reasserted that the United States should "oppose recognition of General de Gaulle as the head of the French Government on the grounds that important French groups have failed to support General de Gaulle and that it is for the French people themselves to determine the character and the political head of the provisional and future French Government, possibly through the establishment during the war of a truly representative French national committee." ₃₉ Just how the "legitimacy" of a "truly representative French national committee" was to be determined was anyone's guess. In any event, Welles never acknowledged that his own efforts to undermine de Gaulle may have contributed to a lack of broader support for the general, and that it was this very lack of support that had provided Washington with the excuse to avoid extending recognition to the Free French. In the fall of 1942, Washington had excluded de Gaulle from participating in the planning and execution of Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, and instead the Allies cut an expedient deal with the Vichy Admiral Jean Darlan. The U.S. had already taken a further step by seeking to promote General Giraud as head of the French forces fighting alongside the Allies. ₄₀
Meanwhile, the French exiles in Washington stepped up their criticism of de Gaulle. At the beginning of 1943, Léger warned Welles that French trade union leaders feared de Gaulle's reactionary tendencies and that the general would never be able to unite the French people after the war. "Not a single step forward has been taken toward the creation of a common political platform that could be a guarantee against reactionary and fascist tendencies in a future France," Léger wrote to Welles. ₄₁ He was also receiving advice and proposals from Camille Chautemps, the three-time French premier during the 1930s, whom Welles had helped resettle in Washington. Welles maintained excellent relations with many of the French exiles not associated with de Gaulle, meeting with them frequently. ₄₂ In early 1943, Chautemps proposed to Welles that a committee be created in Washington to assist the State Department in formulating its French policy and to resist the momentum developing around the London-based Free French. Chautemps thought the committee might he headed by himself, and should consist of several other anti-de Gaulle exiles, including Léger. But Welles had good reason to fear that the department might have difficulty controlling the kind of French advisory committee proposed by Chautemps. Certainly the precedents for "controlling" the French exiles had not thus far been very encouraging. ₄₃
While in the spring of 1943 both U.S. and Free French officials made incremental, if clumsy, gestures toward greater understanding, hope of continued progress was temporarily shattered when Welles had a further confrontation with Free French representatives. He bluntly told Tixier that Free French intrigues "reminded me of nothing so much as an old fashioned farce which I used to see in my early days in the Palais Royal Theatre in Paris." He told Tixier that it was "pitiful" to see "General de Gaulle maneuvering for what he considered immediate political advantage rather than for effective and active cooperation in the war effort." ₄₄ Clashes such as these only further confirmed Welles's view "that we will not recognize any committee or group of French authorities as a government of France until the French people themselves have been liberated and have been afforded the opportunity of selecting such a government." ₄₅
Shortly thereafter, Drew Pearson (possibly with the surreptitious assistance of his friend Sumner) wrote in his nationally syndicated column that President Roosevelt saw de Gaulle as a laughably vainglorious figure of little importance. Pearson claimed that senior administration officials believed de Gaulle had a theatrical and inflated sense of himself and that Roosevelt thought de Gaulle "ridiculous" because he could not decide whether he was the reincarnation of Joan of Arc or Clemenceau. The column was repeated over Radio Paris and further soured U.S. relations with the Free French. ₄₆	35
The Americans continued to see de Gaulle as a British puppet. Welles worried that British "prestige" required that London stick by de Gaulle. He concurred with the views recently put forth by the American embassy in London that, "Whatever may be the consequences for the people of France or however fleeting his tenure may then be, it is required by British prestige that, when the day of liberation comes, 'the one Frenchman who stuck by us in the dark days of 1940' must be installed in France." During Anthony Eden's visit to Washington in March 1943, Welles expounded further on his opposition to de Gaulle, explaining that he favored "keeping the field open" in France so that any new leadership could emerge with the genuine backing of the French people. The British, meanwhile, continued to think it essential that France be given a place among the great powers, if only because without a rejuvenated France at the center of Europe, the challenge of creating a sound and free postwar order would prove more difficult. ₄₇
The alternatives to de Gaulle sought by Welles and Roosevelt never materialized, but the poisonous relations they had helped to foster between the general and the United States would continue to effect Franco-American relations for some time. For more than a year after Welles's departure from the State Department, President Roosevelt continued his opposition to de Gaulle, even in the wake of the liberation of Paris and after Hull argued in favor of recognition in September 1944. When Welles's friend Jefferson Caffery was dispatched to Paris in early October 1944, the president had curiously sent an envoy to a government he still refused to recognize. A few weeks later Roosevelt relented, but de Gaulle understandably maintained his cold hauteur.
There were more profound reasons for the gulf of misunderstanding between Washington and the Free French. De Gaulle's self-confidence and his uncompromising vision of a France reborn as a great power ran headlong into Welles's and Roosevelt's efforts to see France disarmed and demoted from the front ranks of the great powers at the end of the war. Throughout the early years of the war, Welles and other postwar planners often cited their concern for self-determination as an important reason for opposing de Gaulle and the Free French; in actuality, however, Welles had in effect sought to impede and condition self-determination through his meddling and heavy-handed efforts to shape the postwar future of France. Yet in the long run the contest would seem to be settled in de Gaulle's favor, as he would ultimately prevail despite heavy American opposition. While the once powerful and influential Welles would disappear into obscurity in the postwar years, the once obscure French general, who had risked everything in his defiance of the United States, would endure to one day remake France in accordance with his aims, not Washington's.
Welles welcomed the prospect that France, Germany, and even Britain would emerge from the war weaker than ever before, thus giving Washington an unprecedented opportunity to reorder European affairs. With regard to Britain, he shared little of the president's ease with the nation's ally, and, unlike Roosevelt, had few illusions about Churchill. Welles was one of the few Americans who throughout the war remained consistently impervious to Churchill's charms. When he met with Churchill at the Admiralty in March 1940, he reported to the president: "When I was shown into his office Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of a fire, smoking a 24-inch cigar, drinking a whiskey and soda. It was quite obvious that he had consumed a good many whiskeys before I arrived." He also remained unimpressed with Churchill's subsequent monologue. After the preliminary courtesies, Churchill proceeded to speak without interruption for the next two hours. "I was never given an opportunity to say a word," Welles reported. "It would have impressed me more had I not already read his book Step by Step (of which incidentally, he gave me an autographed copy before I left) and of which his address to me constituted a rehash." ₄₈
Despite the Anglo-American alliance, Welles often sought throughout the war to promote U.S. interests at the expense of Britain and the British Empire, which he saw as a potential source of postwar instability. Despite Cold War accounts depicting an often affectionate wartime Anglo-American "Special Relationship," Welles and many of the other planners saw Britain as a potential obstacle to U.S. aims in the postwar world. He frequently sought to cultivate relations with China and the USSR so that those powers might serve as effective counterweights to British aims. He and many of his colleagues in the planning process often saw Britain as a greater threat to their world aims than either China or the USSR. For example, the planning committee's Asia expert, Stanley Hornbeck, thought Washington should cultivate China and the USSR "to strengthen us for and in any critical controversies which might develop between us and the British." Hornbeck warned that Britain "will be the most conservative and the most aggressively minded, in the fields both of international politics and of international economics." ₄₉	40
The British were therefore correct in their wary initial assessment of Welles. Appearances notwithstanding, he was no Anglophile. ₅₀ At the Atlantic Conference he sought to exploit British weakness by pushing for far-reaching changes in imperial preference, as well as a more expansive British commitment to self-determination that might be interpreted as covering British colonial possessions and, throughout the war, he publicly declared that Britain's imperial days had drawn to an end. Welles often opposed the appointment of U.S. officials or emissaries whom he thought too pro-British, and he wanted to use Lend-Lease as leverage to pressure the British to open imperial markets and to relinquish parts of their empire, particularly their possessions in the Western Hemisphere, where Welles found the British presence especially loathsome. In the Americas, he kept up a caustically hostile verbal assault upon the British for their possessions such as the Falkland Islands, British Honduras, and territories throughout the Caribbean. He would do nothing to aid British political aims and would not hesitate to blame British officials for criticism of the administration in the press. He distrusted the British as indiscreet leakers, and he had a number of angry confrontations with British diplomats during the war. ₅₁
Welles warned his colleagues that the public statements of British officials did not usually represent London's true aims. For example, he suspected the British only sought to revive France as a great power so that it could serve as a "stalking horse" for British aims on the continent. ₅₂ Furthermore, despite London's reassurances, he worried that secret British promises to the exile governments would tie Washington's hands at the end of the war, much as they had during the First World War. He also complained about the attitudes of the wartime government in London. He never assumed that the word "Churchill" necessarily meant "Britain." He believed the Prime Minister's views on India to be archaic, and he was stunned by Churchill's contempt for China. In fact, he thought the wartime British government to be one of the most reactionary and hidebound of recent memory and believed it unrepresentative of the true wishes of the British people. He believed the Labour and Liberal parties would one day prove far more amenable to U.S. aims for Britain and the British Empire. Welles remained convinced that the end of the war would usher in a new era in British politics. ₅₃
Welles's vision of an American-led new world order depended upon the steady diminution of Great Britain as a world power. He believed the United States stood poised to fill the void as war continued to erode much of Britain's military and economic strength. He would devote several planning sessions to a detailed examination of the anticipated postwar status of Great Britain. The planners focused largely on the ways in which the United States could undermine the British Empire, but they also examined potential ways to promote America's postwar political and strategic interests vis á vis the empire. ₅₄
Welles believed the war had created an unstable and fragile environment on the British home front. He noted that the British had been able to carry on the war only with large amounts of assistance from elsewhere, particularly the United States. He concurred with recent U.S. intelligence assessments that Britain was an exhausted nation, incapable of defeating any power other than Italy, and that after the war the British government would be largely preoccupied with domestic crises. ₅₅ At one point in the spring of 1942 he shared with the president a report concluding that Great Britain would emerge from the war as nothing more than "an overcrowded island kingdom" with scant power to project around the world. ₅₆ His interest in the fate of postwar Britain also extended to the economic realm. In his numerous contacts with British officials during the war, Welles wasted few opportunities to press the need for greater trade liberalization, and he hoped that Britain's postwar exhaustion might help to destroy the imperial preference system once and for all. ₅₇
Welles nonetheless took a keen interest in London's efforts at postwar planning. He sought to monitor those efforts and arranged to have Halifax share documents on their progress. But the British had taken only tentative steps in that direction, with their work largely building upon the recently proclaimed Atlantic Charter. The British government had been preoccupied with the prosecution of the war and had not undertaken extensive and specific planning for the postwar world on the same scale as had the Americans. But in response to rumors about the far-reaching nature of planning in Washington, the Foreign Office began drafting outlines of its own in 1942. Concerned with the shape of the postwar order, British officials gave some consideration to the future of Germany and France and wondered what would be the role of the Soviet Union. British officials remained particularly concerned about article four of the Atlantic Charter, worrying that the Americans seemed adamant about abolishing imperial preference. Yet the question of how Great Britain could maintain itself as one of the great powers topped the agenda. ₅₈	45
In October 1942, Gladwyn Jebb, head of the Foreign Office's Economic and Reconstruction Department, produced a long memorandum that became the basis for subsequent British discussions about postwar planning. In it, Jebb surveyed American views on the postwar world and openly questioned whether Great Britain would find it possible to continue as one of the great powers after the war. He warned that at the end of the war the industrial capacity of Britain and the empire would be far less than that of the United States, and potentially less than that of the USSR. To a large extent, the United States would seek to impose its wishes on postwar planning, and the Soviet Union would be a mighty continental power, while Britain seemed at the end of its tether. British production of munitions lagged far behind the United States, and British manpower capacity had reached its limits. British currency reserves were depleted and much of her export trade had been lost during the war. After the war, Britain might find itself with few financial resources and huge currency imbalances, with the integrity of the empire itself under duress. Britain would need powerful allies like the United States in order to maintain itself as a great power. Jebb thought the current American trend toward internationalism was a hopeful sign, but he worried that, if the United States returned to isolationism, Britain might even find itself seeking the collaboration of a postwar Germany to assist in the containment of the Soviet Union. ₅₉
Welles's wartime pronouncements aroused Anthony Eden's concern that, rather than returning to isolation, the U.S. would instead push for a "New Deal for the World," or, even worse, "Tennessee Valley Authority nostrums for the organization of international society, which they tend to urge with missionary fervor." ₆₀ Eden told the war cabinet that Welles's pronouncements represented the clearest indication to date of Roosevelt's seriousness about shaping the new world order, and he thought British efforts at postwar planning should be accelerated in order to keep pace with the Americans. Speaking to Welles in late November, Ambassador Halifax praised the under secretary for his public remarks and endorsed his suggestion that the Big Three should at once begin to reach wartime agreements. Halifax explained that Churchill had not yet seriously focused on postwar matters and hinted that only Roosevelt could prompt the prime minister to begin discussing an eventual postwar settlement. "He felt very strongly," Welles wrote after his meeting with Halifax, "that the President should take the lead on this issue and should keep the initiative in his own hands." ₆₁
Welles worried that the British would seek to reestablish the balance of power in Europe by dividing the continent between a western bloc, allied to Britain, and an eastern bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union. He feared that British officials, particularly Churchill, desired a partitioned Germany that would be divided between British and Soviet spheres. Furthermore, he remained concerned that London would obstruct plans for a new international trading system after the war. He told the subcommittee that the British war cabinet itself remained divided over these matters and that there existed considerable differences of opinion between even Churchill and Eden. Welles warned the planners that, if the past offered any hint of a pattern, Churchill's aims would ultimately prevail and, while the planners might object to such views, there was very little they could do to change that result in the short term. ₆₂
Welles also led the planners to take on the daunting task of fashioning the blueprints for a reconstructed postwar Germany. He noted that the last war had been erroneously dubbed "a war to end all wars." Thus one of the most crucial questions facing the planners was whether they could reconstruct Germany in a way that would finally curb its expansionist ambitions. Only a few months after Germany's declaration of war on the United States, Welles and the planners began to chart a postwar future for Germany based on the assumption of its ultimate military defeat and unconditional surrender. ₆₃ Yet during his Memorial Day remarks at Arlington National Cemetery, Welles had also unmistakably called for a "soft peace" for the Axis powers, adding that "no element in any nation shall be forced to atone vicariously for crimes for which it is not responsible, and no people shall be forced to look forward to endless years of want and starvation." ₆₄
Welles had very definite views on the postwar future of Germany. He felt that Germany would have to be completely reconstructed and reconfigured before it could be allowed membership in his anticipated "new European order," where it would eventually come to play a crucial role in European economic integration. He sought to return Germany to what he called the "pre-Bismarckian period" of her history. He believed Bismarck's unification had created a dangerous and disruptive force at the center of Europe, and he assumed that reducing Germany to its status when it was less centralized would provide Europe with greater postwar stability. For centuries, the German states had been a conglomeration of fragmented principalities. Yet unification made Germany stronger than either France or Austria-Hungary. As Welles once told Lord Halifax: "It had not been until Prussia had obtained a complete domination over all of their other German states that the danger to the world had arisen." ₆₅	50
Furthermore, Welles did not completely exonerate the German people for the acts of Hitler and the Nazis. He believed the Germans had a tendency toward barbarism and cruelty and that strong measures would be needed to reform and control Germany in the postwar era so that it could once again become part of the community of nations. ₆₆ Roosevelt, too, believed strong measures would be necessary. Throughout the war he supported harsher treatment of the German people than Welles was usually willing to contemplate. While the president's true feelings about the issue (as with so many matters) were ambiguous, Welles labored to ensure that the views of his commander-in-chief and those of the committees were never too far apart.
Two months after the German declaration of war on the United States, Hitler had declared that if the German people would not fight, they might as well disappear. Yet Welles and his fellow planners had no such draconian goals. Instead, they embarked upon their discussions of Germany with the assumption that a postwar Germany would by necessity be an integral part of a reborn Europe. Welles thought that, "a careful study of the German federation set up as a result of the Congress of Vienna would be highly useful and appropriate when the need for a new European order arose." He thought that a federation such as the one constructed in 1815 would be "no menace to the rest of Europe or to the rest of the world." ₆₇
Initially the subcommittee discussed the possibility of dismembering Germany into several autonomous states. ₆₈ Welles's "new European order" required continental harmony, and he worried that a strong and centralized postwar Germany would make it more difficult to unite Europe on a continental scale. But several planners feared—as early as the spring of 1942—that a divided Germany might be rendered too weak to serve as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. They began to argue that a partition might be inadvisable. ₆₉
Welles suggested that the committee detach Austria from Germany. Austria could again become an independent state and the centerpiece of a future "Danubian Federation" made up of the states located between Germany and the Soviet Union. He thought that separating Austria would enable the committee to focus solely on Germany. ₇₀ In April 1942, he offered the committee his preliminary plans for a postwar Germany. He initially proposed a federation of German states, loosely connected, but without actual political union. As he described it, the federation would be held together by a customs union, or Zollverein, and then integrated with the rest of Europe and the world through free trade. He believed a loose federation could serve as a compromise between the status quo and more severe plans to pastoralize Germany and fragment it into numerous tiny, autonomous parts. He feared that the German people might oppose Washington's aims and that his plan would have to be "imposed" on Germany at the end of the war. ₇₁
Welles believed the subcommittee had to construct a solution that would seem "legitimate" in the eyes of the German people, one that would avoid "undue fragmentation." For example, he emphasized that Prussia should not necessarily be singled out and punished as a scapegoat for all of Germany's ills. After all, Bavaria, not Prussia, had been the birthplace of Hitler's movement in the 1920s. Furthermore, divisions and federations should be considered along religious and historical lines, while all postwar German states should be joined together in a customs union to promote the standardization of their economies for easy integration into the rest of Europe. He assumed that an economically prosperous Germany, fully integrated into the continental economy, might ameliorate many of the revanchist tendencies that had led to the current war. ₇₂	55
Welles and the political subcommittee debated the reconstruction of a postwar Germany in exhausting detail. The planners had a shared opposition to reparations, which they thought had been a cause of interwar instability and resentment. Yet for a time the committee remained divided between those who assumed that specific elements and institutions in Germany were the causes of aggression and those who believed that the German people, by their very character and history, could never again be trusted. Members of the first group, including Welles, sought to create a federated democratic Germany, somewhat akin to the doomed Weimar Republic, but with the added safeguards of territorial readjustments, the punishment of war criminals, disarmament, and the reeducation of the German people. Welles hoped that a federated Germany would bring about the kind of decentralization that would deprive the Junker class and the German General Staff of their traditional power. ₇₃
The planners were also split over the question of the division of Germany. Welles counted himself among those, along with Myron Taylor, Isaiah Bowman, Ben Cohen, and Norman Davis, who favored a form of partition, even within some type of federation; while Anne O'Hare McCormick, Adolph Berle, Leo Pasvolsky, and Hamilton Fish Armstrong supported a unified Germany. While Welles thought the Allies should seek to avoid the kind of reparations that were demanded at the end of the last war, he did desire German industries and transportation facilities be under international control in the postwar era. ₇₄
Welles also sought to organize an anti-Hitler exile movement that could be used for psychological warfare against Germany. Much of this effort centered around a former Hitler aide, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstangl, whom Welles referred to by the code name "Sedgwick." ₇₅ Welles succeeded in having Hanfstangl interned at Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia, and he used the newspaper columnist John Franklin Carter, who wrote under the pseudonym Jay Franklin, as a liaison between the administration and Hanfstangl. ₇₆ But after a few months it became apparent that Hanfstangl either knew far less about the Nazi regime than he had claimed or for some reason was withholding information. He had also embarrassed Welles by publishing a series of sensational articles about the German leadership in the women's magazine Cosmopolitan. Little ever came of the Hanfstangl scheme, but it demonstrated the lengths to which Welles would go to make political use of exiles. ₇₇
Several months of discussion of the German problem had further defined the views of the planners. In the fall of 1942, the political subcommittee recommended to the president that unconditional surrender should be demanded of Germany. The Nazi regime in Berlin would have to be completely overthrown and United Nations forces would occupy and disarm Germany at the end of the war. The subcommittee also made a number of political and territorial proposals designed to ensure that Germany would never again become a threat to world peace. But they also endorsed proposals for a "soft peace," stressing that the German people should be assured of a prosperous and peaceful future, and that any settlement should avoid harsh terms. The members emphasized that such measures would help avoid the mistakes of the Versailles settlement. The committee remained divided on the question of partition, but it was generally agreed that, if division became a necessity, Germany should not be dismembered into such small parts as to preclude its future economic viability. ₇₈
Welles also remained concerned about the possibility of postwar economic chaos in Germany as a result of the mass movement of war refugees that would follow her defeat. He initially opposed the Russian proposal for a massive transfer of populations in Eastern Europe, ₇₉ but the committee's surveys for 1942 showed that up to two million Germans might have to be forcibly removed from East Prussia at the end of the war, with another two million migrating from Pomerania and West Prussia, and upwards of three million leaving Bohemia. Several planners feared such demographic upheaval might lead to a "communist" revolution in Germany. ₈₀	60
In accord with Welles's desire that divisions and federations be considered along religious and historical lines, he generally favored a federated republic made up of three quasi-autonomous states: the first, consisting of Bavaria, W�rttemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and the Rhine-Ruhr region, including the Saar and Palatinate regions, would be predominantly Roman Catholic and somewhat liberal in its political outlook; the second, a North German confederation made up of Hesse, Thuringia, Westphalia, Oldenburg, and the Hamburg region, including Schleswig and Holstein, would be largely Protestant; and the third would consist of Mecklenburg, Saxony, Silesia, and a new Prussia, divested of East Prussia after its incorporation into Poland.
Welles argued that such a tripartite Germany would not possess a unified military capability, nor would it be overly centralized financially and commercially. While much concern had been expressed that a postwar Germany had to be disarmed and contained, the committee soon began to favor a reconstructed Germany that would possess sufficient strength to halt Soviet expansion. The planners also worried that a partitioned Germany would be more difficult to integrate into an American-led global economic system and would undermine efforts to make Germany an engine for Europe's economic revival. ₈₁
As in the case of France, Germany, too, would be taught to choose "good men." To aid in the reconstruction of Germany the planners suggested the United Nations seek out Germans possessing "moral leadership" as well as experience in local and democratic government. Of fundamental importance would be the reeducation of the German people and the introduction of a "Bill of Rights" in their future constitution to ensure personal freedoms. ₈₂
The planners believed it vital that future German economic prosperity not be jeopardized; they still feared that partition would reduce the efficiency of the German economy and thereby hinder European reconstruction. Yet they also wanted numerous industrial and strategic areas in Germany to remain under international control, despite the failure of a similar experiment in the Saar and the Ruhr after the previous war. With regard to territorial matters, they concluded that Germany would largely return to her pre-Munich frontiers. They envisaged no alteration of her western boundaries but feared that certain adjustments would be necessary in the east, particularly along the Polish-German frontier, to compensate for Polish losses on their frontier with the Soviet Union. ₈₃
Some members of the political subcommittee openly questioned how such massive population transfers and border reconfigurations could possibly be reconciled with the Atlantic Charter's pledges on territorial adjustments and self-determination. On such issues Welles sought to evade the details of the charter and instead labored to make the case that perhaps the charter's last pledge, promising a system of general security at the end of the war, should take precedence over the earlier points about territorial changes and self-government. The planners, remarkably, had thus rationalized that the charter should be interpreted as a general statement of principles that should not be interpreted too literally in situations that required a "balancing of factors." ₈₄	65
Meanwhile, British officials continued to lag behind their American counterparts in the area of postwar planning. ₈₅ Nonetheless, the British had given some consideration to the question of the future of Germany. Eden thought that, to avoid the danger of a postwar Russo-German alliance directed against the West, it would be best to convince the German people that their long-term interests would be better served within Western Europe. Eden thus seemed to hold views remarkably similar to Welles's when he noted that Germany could be divided into three independent, or quasi-independent states: North Germany, to include a "reformed" Prussia and Saxony; Western Germany, encompassing the Rhine-Ruhr area; and Southern Germany, made up of Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria. ₈₆
Eden assumed that a federal approach to the division of Germany would serve the purposes of world peace while not restraining Germany's economic reconstruction. The great difficulty was that, while it should be tightly controlled for security purposes, a lasting peace and postwar reconstruction were dependent on a prosperous Germany. The British had therefore discussed the question in the only very broadest terms, but enough to sustain preliminary discussions with American officials. Nevertheless, the British began to plan for the future of Germany in greater detail after Welles's resignation in the summer of 1943. ₈₇
What, in essence, were the long-term consequences of the planning committee's findings on Germany? Welles had started his investigation of the German question with a few simple assumptions. First, unconditional surrender should be demanded of Germany, and all traces of the Nazi regime should be completely purged from German society. Second, Germany should eventually be allowed back into the international system, without the burden of reparations payments that would disrupt its economic viability and that might destabilize Germany in the postwar period. Third, Germany should be partitioned into several autonomous states, but in a way that would avoid creating a power vacuum at the center of Europe through undue fragmentation and would allow customs union. And, finally, if the peace were to succeed at all there would have to be massive transfers of populations, mostly in East Prussia and the Germanic areas of Czechoslovakia, and perhaps the area west of the Polish border.
When the question of Germany was raised after Welles's departure from the State Department in the fall of 1943, Roosevelt at first criticized some of the postwar planning group's findings, particularly those opposing permanent dismemberment. Like Welles, Roosevelt argued that because of his childhood vacations to Germany he understood the German problem far better than the supposed experts. Yet Roosevelt later admitted to Hull in October 1943 that dismemberment might not work, and this was encouragement enough for the secretary to oppose dismemberment at the Moscow Conference. ₈₈ Although at the November 1943 Teheran Conference Roosevelt took a hard line on the dismemberment of Germany, his opinions on the matter continued to evolve. The controversial reaction to the publication of the draconian Morgenthau Plan for German dismemberment in the fall of 1944 embarrassed Roosevelt, and when he departed for the February 1945 Yalta Conference he avoided an outright endorsement of dismemberment.
Throughout the war, Welles had argued that a German economic revival would be essential to the postwar economic health of Europe. He foresaw that an economically powerful Germany would be necessary to serve as the engine of European reconstruction, and his support for a "soft peace" eventually carried the day, as did his plan for a massive program of postwar reconstruction for the defeated Axis powers. What finally emerged, though in ways he had not foreseen, was a powerful West German state closely allied to the West, and rearmed by the victorious allies only a few years after the war. Nor had he anticipated how profoundly Germany would be shaped by postwar tensions among the Grand Alliance partners. While he foresaw how a revived Germany might once again serve as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, his ideas for a loose federation and permanent disarmament were soon overwhelmed by Cold War considerations.	70
Neighboring Austria, while in many ways linked to the German question, presented a less complicated challenge for the planners. Welles thought the allied powers should guarantee Austria's independence, with Vienna serving as the headquarters of an East European Federation. As early as the spring of 1942, Welles's political subcommittee began preliminary discussions on the possibility of creating an East European Federation that would include a band of states between Germany and Russia, running from the Baltic to the Adriatic. ₈₉ Welles hoped that a federation based in Vienna might encourage an Austrian commitment to free trade and greater interdependence in Central and Eastern Europe. Welles and his fellow planners also sought to revive the prewar Czechoslovakia, which they hoped would serve as a bulwark of democracy and free trade within a future federation. ₉₀
Welles liked to evoke the nineteenth-century Czech statesman Francis Palacky, who said that, if the Austrian Empire had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it, ₉₁ and he believed that any regional federation would have to serve as a "counterpoise to both Russia and Germany." ₉₂ It was hoped that a union among Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, and possibly Finland, Greece, and Turkey might successfully check and contain both Germany and the Soviet Union and promote economic union and stability in the region. The committee subsequently discussed specific aspects, such as customs and monetary union as well as the elimination of borders. ₉₃ Members sought to organize the nations in the region to provide a "strong and stable counterweight and buffer to Germany and Russia" so that the area would no longer "be a field for the intrigues and maneuvers" of Berlin and Moscow. Yet they acknowledged that active American participation in an East European Federation would represent a "departure from old conceptions" about America's vital interests. ₉₄
Traditionally, the Habsburg Empire had stood as Europe's bulwark against Russian expansion. Accordingly, Welles and the committee briefly discussed a possible revival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the return of Archduke Otto Habsburg, the pretender to the imperial throne, who might also be groomed during the war to serve as the leader of an Austrian exile movement. The planners fancied that the pretender might return to Vienna at the end of the war as the head of a "federal Danubian state." ₉₅
Yet Welles developed serious misgivings about the mere mention of Otto. Fearing that discussions about the Habsburgs might become public, he warned Roosevelt against getting entangled with the pretender, whom Welles suspected was seeking the president's "official benediction." ₉₆ The exiled Italian Count Carlo Sforza warned Welles that the feeling in parts of Eastern and Central Europe was one of "Better Hitler than the Habsburgs." Sforza added: "Peace and order cannot be based on rotten failures of the past." ₉₇
Welles and the committee ultimately rejected reviving the Habsburg system, but they!conducted a detailed survey of the old Habsburg Empire to determine if any of its institutions and political structures could serve as models for a new federation. Welles thought the sporadic attempts at Central American Union might serve as an example for imitation in Eastern Europe, and that a future federation for the region could begin with a customs union, advance to monetary union and, eventually, political union. The key features of Welles's plan for an East European Federation included a regional police force, an agency to control trade and industry, a regional judicial system, and an East European parliament with a political executive, based in Vienna. "Articles of Confederation" would be drafted for the region to determine the relationship among states within the federation. ₉₈	75
The planners understood that the question of Eastern Europe remained inextricably linked to that of Russia. The Second World War had demonstrated the huge human, natural, and industrial potential of the Soviet Union, and Welles optimistically assumed that Moscow and Washington might together do a better job of policing world affairs than the previous great powers. ₉₉
The subcommittee understood that the Soviet Union would seek the restoration of its 1941 boundaries at the end of the war and that it might have even grander territorial aspirations. Welles thought the Russians might not be content until they recouped their pre-World War I boundaries. The planners assumed the USSR would probably take whatever it saw as essential to its security and that it would, at the very least, insist that "friendly" governments be installed in all of the adjacent European countries. What that meant, however, was anyone's guess. The planners accepted the fact that the Red Army would be in control of many contested areas at the close of the war and, unless the United States was prepared to "fight World War III" against the Soviet Union in the near future, concessions to Moscow's demands would have to be made. ₁₀₀
Welles and his fellow planners also had very specific ideas for the postwar future of Italy. ₁₀₁ Much like their approach to Germany, the planners desired that Italy be reconstructed as part of a future liberal economic and political system in a new European order. As early as the spring of 1942 the planners established that peace with Italy would require the complete destruction of the Mussolini regime. Welles and the planners concluded that the United Nations should take advantage of any desire on the part of the Italian people to make a separate peace, but that no discussions should be undertaken with the Fascist regime in Rome, whose disappearance would be a precondition to complete reconstruction.
Before Fascism, Welles noted, Italy had been a liberal country and a respected member of the family of nations. He saw the Italian people as reluctant belligerents, unenthusiastic about their German allies. The planners feared that Italy would find it difficult to overcome postwar shortages of vital resources such as oil, coal, and iron. Welles believed that, with New Deal-style planning on a large scale and increased emphasis on free trade and technical knowledge, Italy might return to prosperity soon after the war. Money previously wasted on armaments and grandiose public works projects would be better spent on education, reconstruction, and reform and modernization in industry and agriculture. ₁₀₂
As early as December 1942, Welles envisioned a future when Italy would be detached from its alliance with Germany, and he began to cast about for a successor regime. The Vatican had alarmed U.S. envoy Myron Taylor with warnings of the danger of a communist revolution in post-armistice Italy and underscored the urgent need for the Italian monarchy to play a stabilizing role. Welles gave some thought to the Royal House of Savoy, which, he believed, with Allied guidance might be groomed to play a role as the civilian authority in the immediate armistice period. Taylor and Anne O'Hare McCormick thought the Allies should seek to strike a deal with King Victor Emmanuel III, but Welles feared such a move might undermine efforts to establish lasting democratic institutions in Italy. He believed Washington should avoid anything with the potential to become another Darlan imbroglio.	80
He toyed with the idea that Count Carlo Sforza, an early anti-fascist politician who had fled Italy in 1927 and had long lived in the United States, could be groomed into an effective leader of a "Free Italy" movement. Privately, Welles had doubts about Sforza's abilities and wondered whether he had the stature necessary to be transformed into a Masaryk for Italy, which seemed preferable to Sforza becoming an Italian de Gaulle. ₁₀₃
Welles had briefed Roosevelt on Sforza in early 1942 and suggested to the president that the Italian exile could serve as a symbol around which a campaign of psychological warfare could be waged against Fascist Italy. He told the president he had visions of organizing some 200,000 Italian prisoners of war into a Free Italian army, a curious aim given the headaches the Free French had given Welles. But, for whatever reason, he believed Sforza would prove more pliable than de Gaulle. ₁₀₄ He arranged for Sforza to go to Uruguay and Argentina to rally the large Italian populations there against the Mussolini regime, an effort which Welles thought would have "very considerable propaganda value in opposition to the Axis efforts in those two countries." But Sforza wanted more. He desired Lend-Lease aid for his movement, and, picking up on what was emerging as a trend amongst Washington exile groups, he warned that if the United States did not fill the void after the departure of Mussolini, it would lead to the emergence of revolutionary communism throughout the Italian peninsula. ₁₀₅
State Department specialists warned that Sforza had very little support or prestige in Italy, and cautioned that recognition of his movement as a government-in-exile might upset relations with anti-fascist forces already in Italy. ₁₀₆ Welles, too, began to doubt if such a scheme was workable. To Welles, Sforza began to present problems akin to those posed by de Gaulle. Sforza began to annoy him, burdening him with numerous demands and suggestions. One such request prompted Welles to complain to Adolph Berle: "What in the name of the Lord am I to reply to [Sforza's] telegrams?" ₁₀₇
Welles and the planners also investigated the future status of the Italian colonial empire. They assumed that the future of the Italian colonies would be closely tied to the future status of the British and French colonies in Africa, but they concluded that Italy's possession of Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Italian Somaliland represented nothing more than a futile demonstration of Italian national pride. They did not believe the Italian empire to be an important component of Italy's future economic health. The subcommittee agreed that Libya should be placed under international trusteeship, but no consensus emerged over the future of Eritrea or Italian Somaliland other than the conviction that Italy should be stripped of them as soon as was politically possible. ₁₀₈
The planners hoped that Britain and France could be induced to lead the way by transferring their colonies in the Near East and North Africa, along with Italy's possessions there, into a regional trusteeship. The planners thought the Italian possession of the Dodecanese Islands (the mostly Greek-inhabited islands off the coast of Turkey which include Rhodes and Leros) should be granted to Greece, although the Italians had stripped the islands from Turkey in 1915. Welles even broached the possibility of detaching the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia, Sicily, and Pantelleria from Italy. He thought the tiny island of Pantelleria, strategically lying astride the hundred mile-wide strait separating Sicily from Tunisia, might serve as an important international base after the war. ₁₀₉	85
Welles sought a postwar solution for Italy that would be in accord with Washington's liberal internationalist ideals. He feared that London, concerned only with safeguarding British interests in the Mediterranean, would settle for something akin to fascism without Mussolini. Welles also may have feared the British wanted even more, such as extending their dominion over postwar Italy as part of a larger effort to dominate the entire Mediterranean. ₁₁₀
As in their approach to Italy, the postwar planners hoped to pursue similar steps with regard to the Axis alliance's Asian partner. Japan, too, would be allowed rehabilitation within Welles's new world order. His views of Japan were neither naive nor vindictive. He had genuine regard for the Japanese people, which derived from his posting in Japan during the last war. He had then been entrusted with the task of supervising German prisoners of war and internees scattered throughout the Japanese home islands. During that period Welles had numerous opportunities to observe Japanese interaction with foreigners, which he believed they handled with "decency and consideration" and with none of the xenophobia that the West had so often attributed to them. His views of Japan's postwar potential were largely a product of his exposure to Japan during that period.
Welles sought to return Japan to a less militaristic state, a period he believed predated Tokyo's quest for regional mastery, much as he believed Germany could be rehabilitated and reintegrated into the world system by recapturing a distant pre-Bismarckian past. He foresaw an eventual rapprochement between Washington and Tokyo based upon the foundations of strong commercial ties and regional economic integration.
Welles had very precise ideas on reordering postwar Japan. He believed the attack on Pearl Harbor was the climax of a long geopolitical rivalry between Washington and Tokyo. He vividly recalled that, after Japan entered the war on the side of the Allies in August 1914, she moved swiftly to seize Germany's Pacific possessions north of the equator. The Allies again looked the other way when in 1915 Japan coerced a weak and divided China to grant it extensive economic privileges in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, as well as the right to German concessions on the Shantung Peninsula. In a moment of desperation in the darkest period of the war in 1917, the British secretly promised to support Japan's permanent claims to these former German possessions. ₁₁₁
During the Second World War, Tokyo developed extensive plans of its own for the "new order" that would supplement its empire. ₁₁₂ Yet, to Welles, Japan could become a great laboratory for an experiment in national reconstruction and would be remodeled in a way that would lend support to U.S. interests in Asia. Welles and the planners concluded that, in the wake of Japan's unconditional surrender, it would be stripped of most of its empire, including Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, Korea, Formosa, the Kwangtung leased territory, all of its recent acquisitions since its taking of Indochina, and all the Pacific islands placed under Japanese mandate in 1919. "Japan should not start off the new era with territories obtained through its aggressive action," Welles told the planners in August 1942. No one at the time disputed that all of Sakhalin should pass to the USSR. ₁₁₃	90
While Japan would lose these territories, its economic viability would be maintained by allowing it to play a prominent role in America's free trade regime for the Far East. Japan would thus become a key component of Welles's liberalized world order. He and the other planners believed it should be prohibited from reverting to economic autarchy, but should instead be integrated into the larger regional and world economies. The planners discussed these proposals with an eye toward creating a postwar state that would play a preponderant role in the economic revitalization of the Far East, and would fill a key position in the American-led new order in Asia. While Japan would be occupied and divested of its extensive military-industrial complex, democratic institutions would be reintroduced and free trade and open markets would be promoted as an alternative to militaristic expansion. ₁₁₄
To cement Tokyo to the new international economic order, Japan would be made dependent upon world markets. The planners believed free trade and free enterprise would enable Japan to obtain the raw materials it required without again resorting to conquest. The Japanese military aircraft, manufacturing, and shipbuilding industries would be "liquidated," and a tolerable standard of living would be maintained by promoting an extensive manufacturing and export sector directed toward peaceful pursuits. ₁₁₅
The planners worried that postwar societal and cultural upheaval would imperil their plans. Demographic turmoil might also provoke a crisis in the immediate near term. Japan would need to find room for some seven million people repatriated from her former empire. Thus, in a further effort at social engineering, birth control would be mandated as a means of imposing population controls. President Roosevelt even went so far as to suggest "cross-breeding" the Japanese with "gentler" Pacific islanders. While the planners had been reluctant to discuss such eugenic solutions for the other Axis powers, they did not hesitate to raise them with regard to the Japanese. Whereas Welles had precise ideas for a larger Japanese role in the postwar order, Roosevelt gave little thought to Japan's postwar issues, and he allowed Welles and the other State Department officials to take the lead in more specific planning. Roosevelt believed that China would emerge as the predominant Asian power after the war and that Japan would recede to the status of a mere regional power. ₁₁₆
One of the key issues that precipitated the Japanese-American war in the Pacific was the refusal of the United States to accept Japanese hegemony in China. The future status of China had also come to represent a significant area of disagreement among the Allies. Whitehall and the Kremlin harbored misgivings that the United States schemed to promote China to "great power" status in an attempt to obtain support for American aims on the executive council of a future international organization, and there was much truth in those suspicions. ₁₁₇ In accordance with the president's wishes, Welles worked to promote China as one of the "Four Policemen" and as a great power in the postwar world. A strong China might serve to check the power of Britain, the USSR, and a reconstructed Japan. While such views may have been in conflict with Welles's rhetoric about forever ending spheres of influence and the balance of powers, he justified such a course because he saw China as essential to the success of a postwar system of collective security. Thus, like Roosevelt, Welles saw China as absolutely fundamental to Washington's postwar plans. ₁₁₈
He believed the United States had an important opportunity to rectify the wrongs of the past with regard to China. He felt the Chinese had been betrayed at Versailles, and recalled that their delegates at the peace conference in 1919 refused to sign the treaty after learning that the Allies would do nothing to remove the Japanese from Chinese territory. ₁₁ This time around, Washington would have to avoid such mistakes and instead make a strong showing on behalf of Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. Welles and Roosevelt thought that, as the colonial powers faded into history, China would emerge as the "keystone" to a "new order" to be established in the Far East, and they felt that no other nation would be so crucial to the success or failure of their plans for Asia. They assumed that, in the wake of the postwar dissolution of the colonial empires, the Middle Kingdom would reemerge as a great Asiatic power. In an effort to strengthen Chiang Kai-Shek's hand, they desired to return all territory that had been stripped from China since 1895. Washington itself would surrender its extraterritorial rights and ease restrictions on emigration to the United States. China would be groomed to become a cooperative regional policeman in Asia, one ready to aid in the promotion of U.S. interests in the Far East. For example, while Formosa would be returned to China, Welles wanted to press for its use as a strategic base for an international security purposes. ₁₂₀
Welles feared that a continuation of the civil war in China had the potential to draw in the great powers, much like the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. He thus sought to create a strong and economically prosperous China. He failed to grasp that, throughout the war, the Chinese central government had only a tenuous hold throughout much of the country. To further compound matters, he and the State Department planners had only a superficial understanding of the current and future prospects for China, or of the true strength of the Chinese communist movement.	95
The planners acknowledged that the "Chinese Communist Problem holds the greatest danger to Chinese unity in the postwar period, and upon Chinese unity the stability of the Far East area may depend," but they were blind to many of the more acute aspects of its turmoil and instability. They feared that Soviet troops would be in control of Manchuria at the end of the war and might attempt to destabilize the rest of China. They thus believed that Washington should assume a larger role in attempting to resolve China's civil war and should make a greater effort at strengthening the Kuomintang regime.
As part of this view, pacification would be buttressed by an immense program of internal improvements and development—a virtual Tennessee Valley Authority for China—underwritten by American investment. The plan would include the promotion of industry, the development of public utilities extending electricity to the countryside, the improvement of communications, the increased utilization of mineral resources, expansions and improvements in public health and education, water and soil conservation, drought control, and the promotion of greater agricultural stability. Interestingly enough, democracy was not deemed absolutely necessary for China. Like Latin America, China would merely be required to support U.S. interests in exchange for Washington's continued largess. ₁₂₁
Welles's views on the improvement of postwar Sino-American relations resembled the track he pursued with Brazil. In fact, Brazil may be seen as a model for his approach to China. As he desired to do with China, Welles sought to direct strategically targeted economic assistance to promote Brazil at the expense of her neighbors so that she would emerge from the war as the dominant power in the Southern Hemisphere, one that would also be amenable to U.S. interests. Unlike Chile or Argentina, Brazil actively cooperated with the United States during the war and sent a 25,000-man expeditionary force to Europe. Welles sought to promote Brazilian strongman Getulio Vargas in much the same way he supported Chiang. Welles admired Vargas's effort to manage Brazil through his Estado Novo, which Vargas patterned after Italian and Portuguese corporatist/fascist models. Welles assumed Brazil might provide the U.S. with a valuable ally in the Southern Hemisphere, one willing to undertake postwar policing responsibilities in South America and perhaps even West Africa. ₁₂₂
Yet the question of how best to recreate a China on American terms continued to bedevil the planners. Appeasing Chinese desires in the region (if only so long as China's desire for status remained consistent with Washington's political and economic requirements) might be one way to promote a postwar China willing to follow the U.S. lead in the Far East. This meant giving strong consideration to ending European control of Hong Kong and Macao, while protecting Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Korea from Russian designs.
Chinese demands for an end to European control in India and Indochina should, the planners felt, also be supported. When the Office of War Information's Asia expert, Owen Lattimore (who had been an advisor to Chiang and who would later become a target of Senator McCarthy and the China Lobby), warned that the Chinese would oppose any effort at international control in Asia, Welles asserted that they would not always be allowed to have the final say in the region because after the war the United States would also be one of the great powers in the Far East. ₁₂₃	100
The British remained dismayed by Washington's efforts to cultivate good relations with China. Throughout the war, Churchill and the Foreign Office opposed American attempts to play the midwife in an effort to create a Chinese great power amenable to U.S. interests. Considerable rancor arose between the allies over the issue. ₁₂₄ Far from believing that China would emerge from the war as a great power, British officials thought it lacked internal stability and military power and would probably descend into chaos. On the surface this may seem somewhat foresighted. Yet Churchill, in his disdain, did not sufficiently consider that China's stubborn refusal to capitulate to the Japanese effectively tied down substantial Japanese forces that might otherwise have been available for the Burma-India theater. Furthermore, London felt threatened by American plans to promote China. The British felt they could only reluctantly accede to Chinese involvement on an executive council of a future world organization, and they sought to prevent Chinese participation in regional councils where China did not have a direct national interest. In addition, the British detested Chinese interference in the affairs of India and Hong Kong. ₁₂₅ Indeed, he State Department's planners had already concluded by the fall of 1942 that Hong Kong's postwar status should be geared toward aiding China's "postwar unity and strength" through repatriation with the mainland, and during Eden's March 1943 visit to Washington Roosevelt offhandedly suggested the British relinquish Hong Kong as a matter of "good will." ₁₂₆
London also worried about Chinese participation in a regional council for the Near East, where China might make trouble for the British on matters such as the future status of the Suez Canal. Furthermore, the British vehemently opposed the prospect of future Chinese involvement in European matters and set themselves firmly against Chinese participation on a European regional council. ₁₂₇ The British had some cause to fear China as a member of the four great powers. During the war, American officials told British officials that China might serve as a useful counterweight to the USSR both in the Far East and in the councils of a new international organization. No doubt the British privately feared that China would also serve as a counterpoise to British interests in those areas. ₁₂₈
Welles's efforts to have China share responsibility for a stable postwar order may have been misguided, and China may have been nothing more than a illusory great power during the war. ₁₂₉ Yet in his support for China he saw vast benefits for U.S. foreign policy in other areas. Regardless of what happened to Chiang after the war, Welles believed Washington's support for China placed the United States on the side of the oppressed in the colonial struggle. Furthermore, throughout the war China would serve as a useful proxy for a number of Welles's foreign policy goals, particularly decolonization. China also had the potential to provide a counterweight to British and Soviet aims in the Far East. To maintain this balance throughout the war and on into the postwar period, Washington sought to groom China as an ally on the security council of a future world organization.
Throughout the war, Welles seemed to believe that Washington should continue to support Chiang while urging him to reach a peaceful accord with the communists and to introduce democratic reforms and vast internal improvements as well as industrial and agricultural modernization. He never fully understood that Washington could do little to determine the outcome of China's path to great power status. Furthermore, the U.S. could in no way guarantee that China's rise would occur on terms favorable to American interests in the Far East. ₁₃₀
By the time the planning committees were disbanded in the summer of 1943, Welles and his fellow planners had succeeded in conducting the first in-depth examination of Washington's postwar aims toward the other powers. At the time of his resignation in August 1943, the planners had already concluded that Germany, Italy, and Japan should be reconstructed and eventually rehabilitated after the war with an eye toward postwar stability, disarmament, and economic viability. ₁₃₁	105
When considering the postwar status of Eastern Europe, the planners feared that instability and fragmentation would make the region susceptible to Russian hegemony, and they therefore sought ways to provide Eastern Europe with greater unity and cohesion. As for France, Welles and the planners failed to reach a definitive decision about recognizing an exile movement, but their hostility toward de Gaulle would continue to animate America's French policy throughout the war, as would their conviction that France should be kept out of the ranks of the great powers in the postwar era.
They had also had concluded detailed discussions on how China should be promoted as one of the four great powers, and they hoped that a friendly and pro-American China would serve as a future counterweight to Russian, British, and Japanese interests in the Far East. Furthermore, intimate relations with postwar China could help place the United States on the side of the aspirations of the rising Asian peoples, as opposed to backing the immoral and declining European colonial powers. In short, not only did these discussions serve as a foundation for future decisions on matters related to postwar planning and reconstruction, they would also provide the basis for U.S. decisions at future wartime conferences.
Notes: Note 1: Minutes of the Advisory Committee on Post-War Policy, May 2, 1942, Notter files, box 54, RG 59, National Archives; P minutes 2, March 14, 1942, Notter files, box 55. During a number of his wartime addresses, Welles repeated the theme that the threat of war anywhere in the world threatened U.S. security. He warned that the "Four Policemen" thus had to be prepared to use their powers to prevent future threats from materializing into wars. See P minutes, March 7, 1942; Welles, "Free Access to Raw Materials, " delivered at the National Foreign Trade Convention, October 8, 1942, speech files, box 195, folder 7, FDRL; Welles, "Blueprint for Peace," New York Herald Tribune Forum, November 17, 1942, speech files, box 195, folder 7, FDRL. Back. Note 2: Some have persuasively argued that the global nature of the war helped to promote a new weltanschauung among the American people, what Alan K. Henrikson called an emergent ideology of "Air-Age Globalism." See Henrikson, "The Map as an 'Idea': The Role of Cartographic Imagery During the Second World War," The American Cartographer 2:1 (April 1975): 19-53. Back. Note 3: Minutes of the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, February 12, 1942, Notter files, box 54. Back. Note 4: P minutes 4, March 28, 1942. Back. Note 5: Sumner Welles, "Commercial Policy After the War," October 7, 1941, speech files, box 195, folder 2, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 6: Nevertheless, the administration had reassured Vichy leaders in January 1942 that "the word 'France' in the mind of the President includes the French Colonial Empire." See Hull to Leahy, January 20, 1942, FRUS, vol. II, 123-124. Welles thus told the French ambassador in April 1942 that Washington recognized the jurisdiction of France over its overseas possessions. Robert Murphy also assured French General Henri Giraud that French possessions would be recovered after the war. Nevertheless, these comments did not stop Welles from plotting against the French empire, particularly Indochina, during his leadership of the postwar planning committees. Back. Note 7: P minutes 4, March 28, 1942, box 55; P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P document 158a, "Official Statements and Views Affecting the Future Status of France and the French Empire," January 29, 1944, box 57. Back. Note 8: An excellent account of the attitudes of Welles and Roosevelt toward de Gaulle and the Free French is Robert O. Paxton and Nicholas Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), particularly the essay "The United States and the Free French" by Kim Munholland. Milton Viorst's Hostile Allies: FDR and Charles de Gaulle (New York: Macmillan, 1965) is more sympathetic to de Gaulle, as is Dorothy Shipley White, Seeds of Discord: De Gaulle, Free France and the Allies (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1964). Back. Note 9: This despite U.S. diplomatic relations with Vichy until November 1942. Back. Note 10: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942. Back. Note 11: Elizabeth R. Cameron, "Alexis Saint-Léger Léger," in The Diplomats: 1919-1939, ed. Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 379. Back. Note 12: Léger doubled as a Symbolist poet, writing under the name St. John Perse. He had been an ally of the French statesman Aristide Briand in the 1920s, and had fled Paris after the French collapse. See, for example, Elizabeth R. Cameron, "Alexis Saint-Léger Léger," 378-405. Back. Note 13: Washington Times-Herald, January 6, 1941. Back. Note 14: Léger to Welles, August 23, 1941, box 70, Welles papers, FDRL; Welles to Léger, August 25, 1941, box 70, Welles papers, FDRL; Raoul Aglion, Roosevelt and de Gaulle: Allies in Conflict, A Personal Memoir (New York: Free Press, 1988), 115; Nicholas Wahl supports Aglion's view of Welles's role in shaping the American attitude toward the Free French. Wahl adds that, while Léger "didn't get to see Roosevelt personally, he did see Sumner Welles, and Sumner Welles was the single most important counselor for Roosevelt in foreign policy at the time." See Paxton and Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United States, 95-97. Welles ultimately brought Roosevelt and Léger together during a dinner at Oxon Hill Manor. Back. Note 15: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Léger, August 13, 1942, box 80, folder 10, Welles papers, FDRL; Welles to Roosevelt, August 13, 1942, PSF 77, Papers of FDR, FDRL. Back. Note 16: Despite de Gaulle's defiance of Hitler, the feeling persisted in Washington that he had fascist inclinations. "[The British] have built up this French Adolf for the past three years," wrote H. Freeman Matthews. See Walter LaFeber, "Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina," American Historical Review 80:5 (December 1975): 1288. Back. Note 17: Léger to Welles, August 15, 1942, box 80, folder 10, Welles papers, FDRL; Welles to Léger, October 19, 1942, box 80, Welles papers, FDRL; Munholland, "The United States and the Free French," in De Gaulle and the United States, 88-89. Back. Note 18: Welles to Léger, November 26, 1943, with enclosure by Welles, "Our Obligation to the People of France," box 89, folder 9, Welles papers, FDRL; P minutes 38, December 19, 1942; P minutes 46, March 6, 1943. Back. Note 19: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 21, August 8, 1942, box 55; Notter and Rothwell, "The Possibilities of Revolution During and Immediately Following the Present War," August 30, 1941, Notter files, box 8 Back. Note 20: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942. Back. Note 21: Welles had been behind Roosevelt's choice of Leahy in December 1940, angering William Bullitt, who was not consulted in the appointment. In the wake of the already deep differences between Bullitt and Welles over the Welles Mission and the sleeping car porter scandal, the Leahy appointment further increased the animosity between them. Back. Note 22: Welles to Leahy, March 27, 1942, box 80, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 23: This accusation against Herriot is somewhat misleading. The Chamber and Senate were specially convened at Vichy to vote full powers to Petain. Herriot certainly voted in favor, but so did hundreds of others. Neither the Chamber nor Senate met again. Back. Note 24: Welles to Leahy, March 27, 1942, box 80, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 25: FO 371/31949 Campbell to Foreign Office, April 13, 1942, PRO. "Minister" in this case refers to the number two posting in the embassy, not to a cabinet level position. Back. Note 26: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, "Free French movement," May 8, 1942, box 164, folder 3, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 27: FO 371/ 31965, Halifax to Foreign Office, May 8, 1942, PRO; Anthony Eden, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), 340-41. Back. Note 28: FO 371/31965, Halifax to Foreign Office, May 8, 1942, PRO. Back. Note 29: FO 371/31965, Foreign Office to Dominions, May 16, 1942, including copy of Halifax to Foreign Office, May 11, 1942, PRO. Back. Note 30: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, "Free French Movement," May 25, 1942, box 164, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 31: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, May 28, 1942, FRUS, vol. II, 521-523. Back. Note 32: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, May 28, 1942, FRUS, vol. II, 521-523; Aglion, Roosevelt and de Gaulle, 114-115. Back. Note 33: Aglion, Roosevelt and de Gaulle, 114-115. Back. Note 34: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Tixier, May 13, 1942, box 85, folder 5, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 35: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Tixier, June 21, 1942, box 85, folder 5, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 36: Memorandum of conversation between Roosevelt, Welles, Tixier, and Philippe, November 20, 1942, box 85, folder 5, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 37: P minutes 38, December 19, 1942, box 55; P document 158, "Policies Affecting the Postwar Position of France," December 18, 1942, box 57; P document 158a, "Official Statements and Views Affecting the Future Status of France and the French Empire," January 29, 1944, box 57. Back. Note 38: P minutes 46, March 6, 1943. More accurately, France had not signed a "separate peace" with Germany, but only an armistice. Back. Note 39: P document 158, "Policies Affecting the Postwar Position of France," December 18, 1942, box 57. Back. Note 40: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Tixier, January 29, 1943, box 162, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 41: Léger memorandum to Welles, January 19, 1943, box 89, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 42: After their arrival in Washington, Chautemps and his wife began to annoy Welles after Madame Juliette Chautemps began making requests of Welles to arrange for her to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra. "I do not see my way to becoming a concert agent for his wife," Welles wrote. Welles to Dunn, May 27, 1942, box 77, Welles papers, FDRL; Welles to Juliette Chautemps, February 12, 1942, box 77, Welles papers, FDRL; Juliette Chautemps to Welles, February 8, 1942, box 77, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 43: Chautemps to Welles, February 17, 1943, box 87, Welles papers, FDRL; Atherton to Welles, March 1, 1943, box 87, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 44: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Tixier, March 23, 1943, box 162, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 45: Welles to Atherton, June 16, 1943, box 88, folder 6, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 46: Washington Post, April 26, 1943. Back. Note 47: FO 371/35994, Foreign Office Minute, April 1943, PRO; Welles to Harry Hopkins, January 2, 1943 with enclosed Matthews telegram to Welles, January 1, 1943, box 88, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 48: See the unedited version of Welles's report to the president in Welles, "Memorandum of Conversation with Churchill," March 12, 1940, Welles Report, 1940, Part II, PSF 6, FDRL. Back. Note 49: Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 62. For accounts that wartime Anglo-American relations were less than harmonious, see, for example, William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: the United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Back. Note 50: Welles also had no hesitation about openly clashing with Churchill at the Atlantic Conference. This contrasts with Harry Hopkins, who tended to be enamored of the British, and Churchill in particular. Upon meeting Churchill for the first time, Hopkins sat in a chair muttering "Jesus Christ! What a man!" See FO 371/26179, minute by Cadogan, January 29, 1941, PRO. See also, for example, George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 137-139. For a critical official British assessment of Welles see FO 371/21541 "Records of Leading Personalities in the U.S.," January 12, 1937, PRO. Back. Note 51: Welles to Atherton, March 6, 1943, box 88, folder 3, Welles papers, FDRL; memorandum of conversation between Welles and Campbell, March 4, 1943, box 164, Welles papers, FDRL. Although Welles often accused the British Embassy of leaking information damaging to the U.S. administration, this was in fact a favorite practice of his own. Welles often used the press to indirectly criticize British policies, but his own newspaper columns after his resignation, when he was suddenly freed from his official status and could now more freely speak his mind, often placed the blame more directly upon the British. See, for example, Drew Pearson, "Confessions of an S.O.B.," Saturday Evening Post, November 3, 1956; Roosevelt to Caroline Phillips, August 30, 1944, President's Secretary's Files, Roosevelt Papers, FDRL; Sumner Welles, "Welles Sees Opportunity for U.S. to Lead in New Far East Policy," New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1944; Sumner Welles, "Welles Says Allied Conferences Must Deal with Colonial Issues," New York Herald Tribune, April 4, 1945. Back. Note 52: As Christopher Thorne has argued, "Britain urgently needed a strong, friendly France after the war, both for reasons of European defense and as a counterweight to the growing predominance in world affairs of the United States and the Soviet Union." See Christopher Thorne, "Indochina and Anglo-American Relations," Pacific Historical Review, 45:1 (February 1975): 85. Back. Note 53: An example of Welles's views toward the British government can be seen in P minutes 37, December 12, 1942, box 55. In his syndicated column, Welles publicly described the Churchill cabinet as reactionary and intransigent. See, for example, "Welles Sees Colonial Policies Reshaped by Attlee Victory: Believes Labor's Sweep May Challenge Imperial Traditions and Result in Peace Settlements in Keeping With Popular Aspirations," New York Herald Tribune, August 8, 1945. Back. Note 54: P minutes 37, December 12, 1942; P minutes 48, March 20, 1943; "Problems confronting the United States in connection with the British Empire," by Division of European Affairs, December 12, 1942, box 193, Welles papers, FDRL; P document 218, "Agenda for Meeting of April 3, 1943," April 1, 1943, box 193, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 55: Donovan to Welles, February 21, 1942 and March 6, 1942, box 77, folder 12, Welles papers, FDRL; E document 200, "The Financial Problems of Postwar Britain," October 26, 1943. Back. Note 56: Welles to Roosevelt, April 6, 1942, box 150, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 57: Welles memorandum of conversation with Law and Halifax, "Postwar Problems," August 25, 1942, box 164, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 58: CAB 65/19 WM(41) 89th, September 4, 1941, PRO; CAB 65/19 WM(41) 91st, September 8, 1941, PRO. The British also noted that the Russians seemed less than satisfied with the results of the Atlantic Charter. In London, Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky complained to Eden that it seemed "as if England and the USA imagine themselves as almighty God called upon to judge the rest of the sinful world, including my country." See Lloyd Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Divide Europe from Munich to Yalta (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993), 102. Back. Note 59: FO 371/ 31525, "Four Power Plan," by Jebb, September 9, 1942, PRO; WP(42)516, "Four Power Plan," by Eden, November 8, 1942, PRO. Back. Note 60: FO 371/31525 "Four Power Plan," by Eden, November 8, 1942, PRO. Back. Note 61: CAB 65/28 WM(42) 157th conclusions, November 23, 1942, PRO; memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, November 30, 1942, FRUS, vol. III, 1-2. Back. Note 62: P minutes 37, December 12, 1942. Back. Note 63: Welles often dominated such discussions because of his long association with the German question. He had visited Germany almost annually throughout his life, beginning as a boy during his yearly visits to Europe with his family. He also spoke the language and had a wide circle of German friends. Welles's long association with Germany is explained in Welles to Bailey, March 8, 1948, box 129, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 64: "The Realization of a Great Vision," May 30, 1942, speech files, box 195, folder 5, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 65: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, February 18, 1942, FRUS, 1942, vol. III, 520. Back. Note 66: P minutes 7, April 18, 1942, box 55 Back. Note 67: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Halifax, February 18, 1942, FRUS, 1942, vol. III, 520. Back. Note 68: Several scholars have commented on the views Welles held at that moment on the Germany question. Keith Sainsbury has noted that, "it is significant that the party in favour of partition in this committee was led by Sumner Welles, widely regarded as 'Roosevelt's man' in the State Department, and one who might be presumed to know the trend of presidential thinking." See Sainsbury, Churchill and Roosevelt at War: The War They Fought and the Peace They Hoped to Make (London: Macmillan, 1994), 146. But Welles's views on Germany were constantly evolving. While he favored some kind of partition of Germany, he sought to find a middle ground between complete unification and more draconian aims being developed in Washington to pastoralize Germany or fragment her into hundreds of tiny states. He soon came to support a federation of several autonomous German states within a new Zollverein, or German customs union. He also toyed with the idea of having autonomous German states integrated into a larger, federated, Western Europe. See P document 175, "Agenda for Meetings on Germany," January 15, 1943, box 57; P document 186, "Memorandum to Welles from Division of Political Studies," January 22, 1943, box 57; P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 6, April 11, 1942; as well as Welles's chapter "The German Menace Can Be Ended" (including a detailed map of Welles's recommendations for Germany) in The Time For Decision, 336-359. Back. Note 69: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 6, April 11, 1942; P minutes 7, April 18, 1942; P document 12, "Why the Division of Germany is Desirable," 1942, box 56; Welles to Representative John Bennett, February 19, 1948, box 129, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 70: Throughout the course of the subcommittee's discussions on Germany, Welles would change his mind several times on the postwar status of Austria. By the June 20, 1942 meeting of the political subcommittee Welles would return to his initial impulse and recommend that an independent Austria be restored at the end of the war. He would note that this decision received "almost unanimous" approval. See P minutes 16, June 20, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 71: P minutes 7, April 18, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 72: P minutes 7, April 18, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 73: P minutes 42, January 23, 1943, box 55; P minutes 43, January 30, 1943, box 55; P document 187, "Some Economic Problems Involved in Application of a Proposals to Divide Germany into Three Independent States," January 30, 1943, box 57; P minutes 7, April 18, 1942, box 55; P minutes 30, October 24, 1942, box 55; P document 177, "Postwar Policies Related to Germany," January 15, 1943, box 57. Back. Note 74: P minutes 9, May 2, 1942, box 55; P minutes 16, June 20, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 75: A Harvard graduate with an American mother, Hanfstangl served Hitler for a time as a press adviser and unofficial court jester. While on a flight to Spain at the height of that country's Civil War in 1937, Hanfstangl learned that he was to be thrown out in mid-air over Republican-held territory. He escaped during a stopover in Switzerland. Back. Note 76: John Franklin Carter to Ronald Campbell, May 26, 1942, box 164, Welles papers, FDRL; John Franklin Carter, "Memorandum for Mr. Welles: Plan to Recruit German and Italian Nationals," October 22, 1942, box 77, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 77: Ronald Campbell to Welles, January 27, 1943, Welles papers, box 164, FDRL; Welles to Carter, September 13, 1946, with enclosure, box 116, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 78: P minutes 30, October 24, 1942, box 55; P document 121-a, "Tentative Views of the Subcommittee on International Organization," October 22, 1942, box 56. Back. Note 79: P minutes 29, October 17, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 80: T document 130, "Transfer of German Populations From Eastern Europe to the Reich," October 22, 1942, box 61; T document 131, "German Capacity to Absorb Additional Population into a Reduced Territory," October 21, 1942, box 61; P minutes 29, October 17, 1942, box 55; P minutes 30, October 24, 1942, box 55; P document 175, "Agenda for Meetings on Germany," January 15, 1943, box 57; P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 6, April 11, 1942. Back. Note 81: P document 175, "Agenda for Meetings on Germany," January 15, 1943, box 57; P document 186, "Memorandum to Welles from Division of Political Studies regarding Germany," January 22, 1943, box 57; P document 182, "Myron Taylor memorandum on Germany," January 23, 1943, box 57; P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 6, April 11, 1942; P document 121-a, "Tentative Views of the Subcommittee on International Organization," October 22, 1942, box 56. Back. Note 82: P document 236, "Political Subcommittee: Summary of Views: March 1942 to July 1943," July 2, 1943, box 57; P document 182, "Memorandum Concerning an Approach to the Post-War Rehabilitation of Germany and to a Basis for Lasting Peace on the European Continent," Jan 23, 1943, box 57. Back. Note 83: CAB 66/37 WP(43)217 "Annex: Armistice and Related Problems," March 24, 1943, PRO; P document 236, "Political Subcommittee: Summary of Views: March 1942 to July 1943," July 2, 1943, box 57; P document 182, "Memorandum Concerning an Approach to the Post-War Rehabilitation of Germany and to a Basis for Lasting Peace on the European Continent," Jan 23, 1943, box 57; P document 186, Division of Political Studies memo to Welles (Germany), January 22, 1943, box 57; P document 186, "Postwar Policies Relating to Germany," January 15, 1943, box 57; P minutes 42, January 23, 1943, box 55. Back. Note 84: P document 121-a, "Tentative Views of the Subcommittee on International Organization," October 22, 1942, box 56; P minutes 42, January 23, 1943, box 55; P minutes 43, January 30, 1943, box 55; P document 187, "Some Economic Problems Involved in Application of a Proposals to Divide Germany into Three Independent States," January 30, 1943, box 57. Back. Note 85: "In terms of hours of discussion," wrote William Roger Louis, "the amount of talk and paperwork [at the State Department] must have surpassed the British equivalent a hundredfold." See Louis, Imperialism at Bay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 70. Back. Note 86: CAB 66/34 WP(43)96, "The Future of Germany," by Anthony Eden, March 8, 1943, PRO. Back. Note 87: Keith Sainsbury has argued that Eden tacked "backwards and forwards on the issue of German partition, which left both allies and colleagues in doubt as to his real views, and does not add to his reputation as Foreign Minister." See Sainsbury, Churchill and Roosevelt at War, 140. See also CAB 66/34 WP(43)96, "The Future of Germany," by Anthony Eden, March 8, 1943, PRO; CAB 66/35 WP(43)144, "The Future of Germany," by Lord Selborne, Minister of Economic Warfare, April 8, 1943, PRO; CAB 66/35 WP(43)322, "Postwar Settlement-Policy in Respect of Germany," by Attlee, July 19, 1943, PRO; CAB 65/35 WM(43)107th Conclusions, July 29, 1943; CAB 66/39 WP(43)350, "Ministerial Committee on Armistice Terms and Civil Administration," by Churchill, August 4, 1943, PRO. Back. Note 88: Pasvolsky memorandum of conversation with Roosevelt and Hull, October 5, 1943, FRUS, 1943, vol. I, 541-543; Minutes of the seventh meeting of the foreign ministers, Moscow, October 25, 1943, FRUS, 1943, vol. I, 631-632; Cordell Hull, Memoirs, vol. 2, 1265-1266. Back. Note 89: Welles's ideas for an East European Union will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Seven. Back. Note 90: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 7, April 18, 1942; P minutes 8, April 25, 1942; P minutes 9, May 2, 1942; P document 121-a, "Tentative Views of the Subcommittee on International Organization," October 22, 1942, box 56; P minutes 31, October 31, 1942, box 55; P minutes 39, January 2, 1943, box 55. Czechoslovakia held a special place in many of their hearts. Several planners believed Woodrow Wilson had been the midwife of the Czechoslovak republic, born at Paris in 1919, and which between the wars formed an island of democracy in Central Europe. Welles had visited Czechoslovakia numerous times before the war and had much respect for Thomas Masaryk. Back. Note 91: Palacky: "Assuredly, if the Austrian state had not already existed, the interests of Europe and indeed of humanity would have required that we create it, and that as soon as possible." For Welles's use of Palacky's dictum see, for example, P minutes 45, February 20, 1943, box 55. Back. Note 92: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 10, May 9, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 93: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 10, May 9, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 94: P minutes 11, May 16, 1942, box 55; P minutes 13, May 30, 1942; P minutes 14, June 6, 1942; P document 16, "Plan for Central European Union," May 27, 1942, box 56; E document 25, "Economic Subcommittee memorandum to Political Subcommittee: Tentative Economic Organization of the East European Federation: Economic Relations of the East European Federation with the United Nations Organization," box 56. Back. Note 95: P minutes 10, May 9, 1942, box 55; P minutes 8, April 25, 1942; Welles to Roosevelt, August 30, 1942, PSF 77, Roosevelt Papers, FDRL; Gen. Joseph McNarney to Welles, August 29, 1942, Roosevelt Papers, PSF 77, FDRL. Back. Note 96: Welles to Roosevelt, March 31, 1942, box 77, folder 12, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 97: Sforza to Welles, November 21, 1942, box 83, Welles papers, folder 10, FDRL. Back. Note 98: P minutes 12, May 23, 1942, box 55. Back. Note 99: Welles's ideas on postwar planning for the Soviet Union will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Seven. Back. Note 100: T document 228, "Soviet Rule in Eastern Poland, 1939-1941," January 23, 1943, box 62; P document 121-a, "Tentative Views of the Subcommittee on International Organization," October 22, 1942, box 56; P minutes 2, March 14, 1942, box 55; P minutes 19, July 18, 1942, box 55; P minutes 35, November 28, 1942; P document 236, "Political Subcommittee: Summary of Views: March 1942 to July 1943," July 2, 1943, box 57; T document 378, "Soviet Rule in the Baltic States, June 1940-June 1941," September 16, 1943, box 65. Back. Note 101: The most exhaustive study of U.S. postwar planning for Italy has concluded that the planning committees "had laid the basis for wartime American political reconstruction policy by mid-January 1943." See James Edward Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940-1950: The Politics of Stabilization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 44. Back. Note 102: P minutes 5, April 4, 1942, box 55; P minutes 26, September 26, 1942, box 55; P minutes 39, January 2, 1943, box 55; P document 121-a, "Tentative Views of the Subcommittee on International Organization," October 22, 1942, box 56; Miller, The United States and Italy, 35-37. Back. Note 103: Sforza to Welles, June 19, 1941, Sforza to Welles, September 2, 1941, Welles to Atherton, September 10, 1941, box 73, folder 3, Welles papers, FDRL; P minutes 39, January 2, 1943, box 55; P document 163, "Italy," January 1, 1943, box 57; T document 202, "The Italian Empire: Political Considerations," December 29, 1942, box 61; Miller, The United States and Italy, 44. Back. Note 104: Welles to Roosevelt, February 24, 1942, box 151, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 105: Memorandum of conversation between Welles and Ronald Campbell, "Free Italian Movement," August 14, 1942, box 164, Welles papers, FDRL; memorandum of conversation between Welles and Sforza, February 8, 1943, box 92, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 106: Jones to Welles, November 14, 1942, box 83, Welles papers, FDRL. Back. Note 107: Welles to Berle, November 9, 1942, box 83, Welles papers, FDRL. Count Sforza returned to Italy in September 1943 but refused to join Marshal Pietro Badoglio's government until the abdication of King Victor Emmanuel, whom Sforza called the "Petain of Italy." He was elected president of Italy's parliamentary assembly in September 1945. Back. Note 108: P document 236, "Political Subcommittee: Summary of Views: March 1942 to July 1943," July 2, 1943, box 57; T document 202, "The Italian Empire: Political Considerations," December 29, 1942, box 61. After the war, the guidelines for the future of Italy produced by the planners would be for the most part realized. Italy would be stripped of its African empire and reconstructed along liberal, democratic, and capitalist lines. Back. Note 109: Agenda for the meeting of January 2, 1943, "The Territorial Problems of Italy," box 193, Welles papers, FDRL; P minutes 39, January 2, 1943, box 55, Notter files; T document 202, "The Italian Empire: Political Considerations," December 29, 1942, box 61, Notter files; P document 168, "The Italian Colonies," January 2, 1943, box 57; P document 164, "The Dodecanese Islands," January 2, 1943, box 57; P document 167, "The Metropolitan Islands," January 2, 1943, box 57. Back. Note 110: Berle Diary, May 12, 1943, Berle papers, FDRL. Back. Note 111: Welles, Time For Decision, 272-276; P minutes 20, August 1, 1942, box 55, Notter files; P minutes 47, March 13, 1943, box 55, Notter files; P document 213, "Agenda for the meeting of March 13, 1943: Part I: Treatment of Japan," March 10, 1943, box 193, Welles papers, FDRL; S document 18a, "Conditions for Japanese Surrender to the United Nations," March 13, 1943, box 76, RG 59, Notter Files; E document 155, Japanese Postwar Economic Considerations," July 21, 1943, box 82, Notter files. Back. Note 112: Akira Iriye, Power and Culture, 66-69; Francis Clifford Jones, Japan's New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937-1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 332. Back. Note 113: P minutes 20, August 1, 1942, box 55, Notter files; P minutes 47, March 13, 1943; P document 213, "Agenda for the meeting of March 13, 1943: Part I: Treatment of Japan," March 10, 1943, box 193, Welles papers, FDRL Back. Note 114: Akira Iriye has noted that, even at this early date (c.1942), "postwar Japan was being visualized as a nonaggressive, noncolonial country whose survival would hinge upon the establishment of an economically interdependent world." See Iriye, Power and Culture, 61. Back. Note 115: P minutes 20, August 1, 1942, box 55; P minutes 47, March 13, 1943; P document 213, "Agenda for the meeting of March 13, 1943: Part I: Treatment of Japan," March 10, 1943, box 193, Welles papers, FDRL; E document 155, "Japanese Postwar Economic Considerations," July 21, 1943, box 82, Notter files. Back. Note 116: An excellent summary of America's more draconian suggestions for postwar Japan can be found in Rudolf V. A. Janssens, What Future For Japan?: U.S. Wartime Planning For The Postwar Era, 1942-1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 52-54; as well as in Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3-4; and the early portions of John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999). Back. Note 117: Roosevelt and Welles were less concerned about a Soviet or revolutionary threat in East Asia than they were about the continuance of the British Empire in the region. According to Michael Schaller, the British "in particular feared that American policy had determined to pull down the foundations of the empire even before a final verdict was rendered. ... Churchill believed Roosevelt's game was to make China strong enough to 'police' Asia while remaining essentially dependent upon the United States. The prime minister complained to subordinates that the Americans expected to use China as a 'faggot vote on the side of the United States in an attempt to liquidate the British overseas Empire.'" See Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 91-93. Back. Note 118: Welles offered a detailed description of his wartime views of China in his "Milwaukee Town Hall Speech," October 23, 1950, speech files, box 199, FDRL. See also E document 109 "Postwar Problems of China," April 15, 1943, box 81, RG 59, Notter Files; and P document 213, "Agenda for the meeting of March 13, 1943: further problems for consideration: Part II: the Problems of China," March 10, 1943, box 193, folder 9, Welles papers, FDRL; as well as P minutes 47, March 13, 1943, box 55, Notter files. Back. Note 119: For a detailed analysis of U.S. policy toward China during the First World War see, for example, Warren I. Cohen, "America and the May Fourth Movement: The Response to Chinese Nationalism, 1917-1921," Pacific Historical Review 35:1 (February 1966): 83-100. Back. Note 120: Welles, "Milwaukee Town Hall Speech," October 23, 1950, speech files, box 199, Welles papers, FDRL; P minutes 47, March 13, 1943, box 55, Notter files; Ta Jen Liu, A History of Sino-American Diplomatic Relations, 1840-1974 (Taipei: China Academy, 1978), 250-251. Back. Note 121: "What Do We Desire of China? Preliminary Considerations," no date [c.1942], box 11, Notter Files; P document 213, "Agenda for the meeting of March 13, 1943: further problems for consideration: Part II: the Problems of China," March 10, 1943, box 193, folder 9, Welles papers, FDRL; Welles, Where Are We Heading?, 290. Back. Note 122: See, for example, Sumner Welles, Time for Decision, 220-223. See also: Irwin Gellman, Good Neighbor Policy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933-1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 172-174; and Frank McCann, Jr., The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 53, 282-283, 325. Back. Note 123: P minutes 47, March 13, 1943, box 55, Notter files; P document 213, "Agenda for the meeting of March 13, 1943: further problems for consideration: Part II: the Problems of China," March 10, 1943, box 193, Welles papers, FDRL; P minutes 21, August 8, 1942, box 55, Notter files. Back. Note 124: A detailed account of Britain's prewar indifference toward the plight of China can be found in Aron Shai, "Was there a Far Eastern Munich?" Journal of Contemporary History 9:3 (July 1974): 161-169; while London's low opinion of the Chinese during the war is partially explained in Shai's "Britain, China and the End of Empire," Journal of Contemporary History 15:2 (April 1980): 287-297. Back. Note 125: FO 371/31632 Foreign Office Minute on China, January 26, 1942, PRO. Back. Note 126: T document 137, "The Problem of Hong Kong: Possible Solutions," October 25, 1942, box 61, Notter files; T document 136, "The Problem of Hong Kong: Basic Data," October 23, 1942, box 61, Notter files; P minutes 22, August 15, 1942, box 55, Notter files; Walter LaFeber, "Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina," 1280. Back. Note 127: FO 371/31632 Foreign Office Minute on China, January 26, 1942, PRO; Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. 4 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1975), 488-522; T document 302, "The Suez Canal and Egyptian Interests," April 1, 1943, box 63, Notter files. Back. Note 128: CAB 65/34 WM(43) 53rd, April 13, 1943, PRO; P document 117, "British Political Ferment Involving Postwar Objectives, " October 17, 1942, box 56, Notter files. Back. Note 129: See, for example, Steven W. Mosher, China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 46-50. Washington's extensive investments in China went beyond the political and military spheres and included the State Department's pursuit of an aggressive cultural policy toward China. See, for example, Frank Ninkovich, "Cultural Relations and American China Policy, 1942-1945," Pacific Historical Review 49:3 (August 1980): 471-498; as well as Wilma Fairbank, America's Cultural Experiment in China, 1942-1949 (Washington: Department of State, 1976); and Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 1931-1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Back. Note 130: With the American island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, the Chinese theater became more peripheral to Roosevelt's wartime strategy. In any event, in May 1944 Roosevelt began easing his efforts to develop China as one of the four great powers. See LaFeber, "Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina," 1288. For an account that Roosevelt held exaggerated beliefs about China's prospects, see Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 307-309, 724. Furthermore, Michael Schaller in his The U.S. Crusade in China sees U.S. officials as having been blind to significant changes occurring within wartime China. Back. Note 131: The July 1945 Potsdam declaration on Japan closely resembled the conclusions of Welles's planning committees. Akira Iriye has declared that, "the Potsdam declaration was clearly an American product, summing up more than three years of planning and deliberations within the United States government. See Iriye, Power and Culture, 263. Back. Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943