From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 9-12:
Roosevelt’s call for unconditional surrender accepted the challenge that Hitler now offered the world. It acknowledged that there could be no negotiating with the Nazis. Ten years of the Nazi regime had shown that with crystal clarity: the bad faith that Hitler had exhibited in the 1930s, blazing his way through the Versailles settlement while the West dithered about his intentions; his betrayal of his Soviet ally; the total disregard for human life, for institutions, the repression of so many, and the grotesque ideology that was the evil counterpoint to the ideals Roosevelt had proposed in the Atlantic Charter. Everything Hitler and the Nazis had done and stood for told Roosevelt there could be only one outcome in this war: the complete, total and unconditional surrender of Germany. The irony was that within Nazism, a core aim, a bitter principle, was to avoid any repetition of the end of the First World War. The myth of betrayal, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, could never be allowed to gestate and fester in Germany again. Unconditional surrender would ensure that it did not, that this time the war would come to the centre of the Reich, to Berlin, to the Reichstag, to within mortar range of the Führerbunker; that however the Allies chose to fight following the Casablanca Conference, the end of this war would be nothing like 1918. The generals would not be allowed to blame politicians, capitalists and unseen dark forces such as religious minorities. Ulysses S. Grant’s defeat of the Confederacy forces at Donelson in 1862 would come to the Brandenburg Gates.
The announcement that the Allies would be pursuing unconditional surrender was made by President Roosevelt at Casablanca without prior consultation on the morning of 24 January. The President, sat beside the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on the lawn of his villa, smiled benignly for the fifty pressmen assembled cross-legged like schoolchildren before them, waiting for their remarks at the conclusion of the ten-day conference. Roosevelt spoke first, reading from notes. ‘The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power’, he said in his precise, patrician and clipped East Coast accent, ‘means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.’ He paused for a brief moment then added a caveat. ‘That does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or Japan,’ he continued, ‘but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.’
Roosevelt later claimed that the phrase had just ‘popped into my mind’; Churchill was certainly wrong-footed by it, although he immediately supported the President. Yet while the announcement of this war-changing policy might have been unrehearsed, the two men had discussed it beforehand; Churchill had even written a long memo to the British War Cabinet four days earlier in which he specifically told them he and Roosevelt were anxious to announce their intention of pursuing unconditional surrender. FDR had also discussed the issue in Washington ahead of the conference. The President’s son, Elliott, even recalled Churchill making a toast to ‘unconditional surrender’ at a dinner ahead of the press conference that Sunday. Sitting there, in the sunshine of that warm January day in Morocco, Roosevelt may have told the press that his policy was the same as General Grant’s at Appomattox in 1865, but he was far from being the only person in the American establishment familiar with Civil War history, and besides he had misremembered Grant’s victory at Donelson.
All of this was neither here nor there, of course. The world now knew that the Allies would only end the war against the Axis Powers when they accepted unconditional surrender. Arguments raged at the time and have done so ever since about whether such a policy was too rigid and whether, ultimately, it extended the war longer than necessary. But by demanding unconditional surrender the Allies were offering moral clarity in clear political terms; it forged the Allies in agreement, and spared them the complications that trying to treat with Vichy France had thrown up. It was definitive yet at the same time vague: a plain demand that was short on detail but heavy with intent. Unlike the Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson had proposed back in 1919 – which had come to little – there were no matters of argument to engage with and twist, no promises made that could be misinterpreted or regurgitated at a later date. The Germans, the Japanese and the Italians must surrender, without any conditions whatsoever.
Then the Allies would dictate terms.
Far Outliers 