On this episode of Our American Stories, the late great Stephen Ambrose shares a WWII story that begins in January 1943 and ends with the Allied solution of unconditional surrender.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we love hearing stories from you, our listeners. Send
them to our American Stories dot com. That's our American
Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites. Stephen Ambrose
was one of America's leading biographers and historians. At the
(00:31):
core of Ambrose's phenomenal success is his simple and straightforward
belief that history is biography, history is about people, he
would always say. Ambrose passed in two thousand and two,
but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here
at Our American Stories thanks to those who run as
his state. Today we we'll be hearing the story from
(00:54):
early nineteen forty three during World War II. Let's jump
right in with the Soviet victory over the Nazis at
the Battle of Stalingrad.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Nineteen forty three got off to a great start for
the Allied cause because at the end of January General
von Pavas surrendered at Stalingrad. The Red Army took a
bag of two hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, had probably
killed a killed and wounded another half million German soldiers
(01:26):
in this titanic struggle at Stalingrad and had lost themselves
the Red Army a million men. But of course the
Red Army could make up those man power losses in
a way that the Germans could not, So Stalingrad was
the pivot point of the war. After Stalingrad, there really
(01:49):
was not much, if any question as to who was
going to win this war. The questions now were how
long is it going to take, what price is going
to have to be paid? And increasingly among the allies
Britain in the United States and the Soviet Union in
(02:10):
this very strange alliance, who's gonna get what at the
end of the war.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
But Stalingrad, for.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
They from the military side in the Secral War was
the great battle and the decisive battle. After Stalingrad, the
Germans never again took the offense of the Eastern Front.
Having said all that, and adding to that, the Americans
need to remember always that eight out of every ten
(02:39):
Wehrmacht soldiers killed in the Second World War were killed.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
By the Red Army.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
That doesn't mean by any stretch that the Red Army
won the war by itself, but it does mean that
they made a contribution without which Britain and America could
never have won the war. Indeed, the truth of the
Second World War is that no two of the three
Great Allies were sufficiently strong to defeat Germany. Britain and
(03:09):
the Soviet Union together couldn't have done it. The United
States and the Soviet Union without Britain couldn't.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Have done it. It took all three.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
January nineteen forty three also saw the Great Wartime Conference,
the second of them. The first had been the Arcadia
Conference at the end of nineteen forty one. At the
beginning of nineteen forty three, the second Great Conference between
the Western Allies took place at Casablanca in Morocco. Roosevelt
and his staff met with Churchill and his staff to
(03:43):
plan operations for nineteen forty three. At these meetings, the
first thing the Americans said to the British was, well,
of course, you understand that having mounted Torch and put
all of this strength that we have into North Africa,
the nineteen forty three invasion of France is definitely off.
(04:04):
We don't have the resources to do that. Churchill was astonished,
or said he was to hear this, and whether he
was telling the truth or not, can't be said. The
announcement to Stale that there was not going to be
a second front in nineteen forty three left the Soviet
(04:25):
dictator shaking with rage. He had been demanding a second
front ever since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June
of nineteen forty one.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Now, and you meet.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Russians today, and who will talk about why was there
this terrible long delay before the second front was mounted?
And of course we won the war, the Russians will
tell you, and more or less by ourselves. And you
guys didn't even dare come in until we had ultorably
defeated the Hrmacht, and there was just a shell of
the force that Hitler bragged was an army sections of
(04:59):
the world was never seen by the time you guys
came into the real war in nineteen forty four. But
here I can't forbear saying that it really came hard
to hear Stalin begging for a second front nineteen forty two,
in nineteen forty three, and you know, the French could
have said, well, where the hell was the second front
in nineteen forty when Hitler was overrunning France, What were
(05:23):
you guys doing? That's when the Second Front should have
been launched, you should have been attacking the Germans instead
of cooperating with them, instead of entering into an alliance
with them. Well, leaving that aside, Stalin obviously wasn't going
to be embarrassed by his past action. Stalin was in
a desperate situation.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
The Soviet Union was taking.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Horrendous casualties the Germans that occupied very large parts of
the Soviet Empire, and Stalin desperately needed to have the
pressure taken off him. He was fighting up to two
hundred German and Allied divisions on the Eastern Front, and
so naturally he demanded the opening of a second front.
(06:08):
Churchill had tried to persuade Stalin that the campaign in
North Africa was a genuine opening of a second front,
but to Stalin that.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
It was utterly unacceptable.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The Germans never had more than three divisions in North Africa.
North Africa was clearly not going to be a decisive
theater in this war. Russia very much still had her
back against the wall. Even after the victory at Stalingrad.
The Soviet Union was.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Not and no longer on its.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Last legs, but the price of taking on the Wehrmacht
by themselves was going to be very high, and he
was desperate to get a Stalin, was to get a
second front opened in France to force the Germans to
transfer divisions from their eastern front ord to France to
take the pressure off the Russians.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
And you're listening to Stephen Ambrose tell the story of
a year nineteen forty three, a critical year in World
War Two. When we come back, more of Stephen Ambrose
here on our American Stories. Lie Hibibe here the host
(07:33):
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Alamericanstories dot com and
click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
(07:56):
Go to Alamericanstories dot com and give And we continue
with our American Stories. And we last left off with
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill meeting for a second
(08:18):
time during the war in January of nineteen forty three
in Casablanca in Morocco to plan operations for that year.
Let's pick up where we last left off with Stephen Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Now a combination of things came together here at this
Cox Blanker meeting. First of all, the decision we're not
going to have a second front nineteen forty three, and
somebody's got to explain this to Stalin. And I pause
there to make this point. What I say, had to
explain it to Stalin. What I mean is the great
fear on the part of the Western Allies in World
(08:53):
War Two was always that Stalin would make a separate
peace and you would go back to the situation that
prevailed before June of nineteen forty one. That is, I in,
to all practical purposes, Germany and the Soviet Union would
be allies.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
If that happened.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
There wasn't a chance in the world that the United
States and Britain could invade France against.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
All of Hitler's strength, And there were some.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Fears came out from Berlin in the fall of nineteen
forty two as the Stalingrad Battle was beginning, and they
continued through the winner of forty two forty three. The
Germans wondering if Stalin would be interested in a separate piece,
and it had a certain appeal to Stalin, especially if
he felt, as he was beginning to feel, or increasingly
(09:47):
was feeling, that the Western Allies were willing to sell
the Soviet Union down the river, or more precisely, if
the Western Allies were perfectly happy to watch Nazis killing
Communists as killing Nazis. And he was right to feel
that way, because an awful lot of people in the
Western world did think exactly that.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Not however, the leaders.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Either especially not the military leaders, all of whom realize
that if you tried to play that game, the Nazis
would very likely win the war, and if they did,
they would then take over the world. And if they didn't,
the Communists were going to win the war, and they
(10:34):
would end up with all the resources, especially the human resources,
of Western Europe under their control.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
And that wouldn't be a world that we would want
to live in either.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
But as between the two dangers, a Nazi dominated Europe
or a Communist dominated Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill and Marshall
and Allen Brook and Eisenhower and all of the leaders
of the of the Great Alliance of Britain in the
United States. We're in agreement that the Nazi victory would
be worse. I think in retrospect, the time has proven
(11:08):
them right. We now reached the point in world history
and where both of those isms are in the act
can of history. Nazism has been gone since nineteen forty five,
and now Communism is gone. If World War II had
turned out the other way with the Nazis victorious in Europe,
(11:29):
I don't know how we ever gotten rid of the Nazis.
I don't think that they would have withered on the
vine in the way that the Communists did, or that
they would have their own people would have turned against them.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Well, that's a lot of speculation.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Anyway, Stalin in nineteen forty three one or a second front,
and he wasn't going to get one. And this was
a tough one to explain to him, and that fear
that he would make a separate piece was very real.
Oh and I should add that Stalin also.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Had complaints about the Darlaon deal.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
His attitude was the first time the Americans go to
the offensive in this war. Within a day of the attack,
they've cut a deal with a fascist general or in
this case, Admiral Admiral Darlan, and Stalin wondered aloud to
the American ambassador, what does this mean that when you
(12:24):
get into Germany you're going to cut a deal with
the German Germany's generals. I don't like the smell of
this at all. To reassure Stalin both as to America's
determination to stay in this war to the end an
America's commitment to the Soviet Union is an ally and
more specifically, to guarantee to Stalin that there would be
(12:49):
no more Darlon deals, that we would not get into
a cooperative mode with the German generals, urging them to
overthrow Hitler and then we'll deal with you.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Roosevelt came up with a wholly new concept in war.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
That decision, and that concept also came from it had
many many parents that also came out of avoiding the
mistake the Allies and particularly Woodrow Wilson made in nineteen eighteen.
Roosevelt wanted to make certain that the Germans would never
again be able to claim that they were stabbed in
the back. He wanted the Germans to understand that they
(13:34):
had been beaten, and he came up with the formula
called unconditional surrender from Casablanca. He issued a pronouncement seconded
by Churchill, calling on or setting as the objective for
the Allies and the Second World War, the unconditional surrender
(13:57):
of the Axis powers.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Germany and Japan.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Now what this meant, nobody knew, nobody'd ever asked for
an unconditional surrender before. It raised a lot of questions,
who's going to be running Germany after she surrenders, where's
the government going to come from? What kind of a
system do you intend to impose on her? And of
course the strange alliance. It could be that the Russians
(14:25):
would get a part of Germany and this unconditional surrender
from Germany with me and the Russians could impose on
the Germans or at least that part of Germany if
they occupied their system. Presumably the Americans of the British
would impose their system on the other.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Part of Germany. How could that whatever work out? Well?
Nobody had an answer to that at the time.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Unconditional surrender has received a lot of criticism because of
its vagueness and because of the argument that it forced
the Germans and the Japanese to fight on when the
fight was hopeless, so that it cost a lot of
a American and British lives that it. Had a formula
for a surrender been worked out, you could have had
(15:07):
a much earlier surrender and to save a great deal
of the destruction of the Second World War. The problem
with that argument is, how can anyone imagine a scenario
in which the German generals managed to get rid of Hitler.
So long as Hilary was around, there was no possibility
(15:28):
of dealing with him, And in fact, Roosevelt, in the
unconditional surrender announcement, made it clear that he and there's
something else that Wilson hadn't done, that we were going
to put war criminals on trial. There was going to
be punishment for the guilty Nazis. Now that of course
made the guilty Nazis fight all that much harder, and
(15:49):
it made all Germans fight that much harder, because unconditional
surrender gave to Garbles, the propaganda minister, an ideal tool
with which to whip up sentiment within German to get
the old men to tuck their beards into their shirts
and pick up a rifle and go out and fight,
and to get the young boys to do the same
because there was a lot of loose talk in the
(16:10):
United States. There were a couple of centers who were
talking about we got to castrate all German males, and
Garbles was able to pick up on that and tell
the German people, that's what unconditional surrender is gonna mean. Well,
it sure makes a man fight when you hear something
like that. The other side of it, though, is unconditional
surrender had a clearness to it, a wiping the slate clean,
(16:37):
so that when it was all over, you could start
to rebuild a new Germany, whether in the Russian on
the Russian model or on the American model, you could
start to build a new Germany. And it also had
a positive effect on morale within the United States. But
most of all, the audience for unconditional surrender wasn't the
American people, and it wasn't even so much policy towards
the German people, as it was a reassurance to Stalin,
(17:00):
We're not going to deal with any more facist and we're.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
In this to the bitter end.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And a great job editing that piece by Greg Hengler,
and a special thanks to the Ambrose Estate for allowing
us to use the audio of their father. And he
died in two thousand and two, but we had our
American Stories. Want to keep his voice alive. It is
such an important voice. By the way, the World War
Two Museum Steven Ambrose helped start that. It's in New Orleans,
(17:28):
Pay a visit, go online, listen to the stories. It
is hands down the best museum in this country. Stephen
Ambrose The story of nineteen forty three and unconditional surrender
terms fashioned by Roosevelt. The pros and the cons here
on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we love hearing stories from you, our listeners. Send
them to our American Stories dot com. That's our American
Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites. Stephen Ambrose
was one of America's leading biographers and historians. At the
(00:31):
core of Ambrose's phenomenal success is his simple and straightforward
belief that history is biography, history is about people, he
would always say. Ambrose passed in two thousand and two,
but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here
at Our American Stories thanks to those who run as
his state. Today we we'll be hearing the story from
(00:54):
early nineteen forty three during World War II. Let's jump
right in with the Soviet victory over the Nazis at
the Battle of Stalingrad.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Nineteen forty three got off to a great start for
the Allied cause because at the end of January General
von Pavas surrendered at Stalingrad. The Red Army took a
bag of two hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, had probably
killed a killed and wounded another half million German soldiers
(01:26):
in this titanic struggle at Stalingrad and had lost themselves
the Red Army a million men. But of course the
Red Army could make up those man power losses in
a way that the Germans could not, So Stalingrad was
the pivot point of the war. After Stalingrad, there really
(01:49):
was not much, if any question as to who was
going to win this war. The questions now were how
long is it going to take, what price is going
to have to be paid? And increasingly among the allies
Britain in the United States and the Soviet Union in
(02:10):
this very strange alliance, who's gonna get what at the
end of the war.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
But Stalingrad, for.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
They from the military side in the Secral War was
the great battle and the decisive battle. After Stalingrad, the
Germans never again took the offense of the Eastern Front.
Having said all that, and adding to that, the Americans
need to remember always that eight out of every ten
(02:39):
Wehrmacht soldiers killed in the Second World War were killed.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
By the Red Army.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
That doesn't mean by any stretch that the Red Army
won the war by itself, but it does mean that
they made a contribution without which Britain and America could
never have won the war. Indeed, the truth of the
Second World War is that no two of the three
Great Allies were sufficiently strong to defeat Germany. Britain and
(03:09):
the Soviet Union together couldn't have done it. The United
States and the Soviet Union without Britain couldn't.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Have done it. It took all three.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
January nineteen forty three also saw the Great Wartime Conference,
the second of them. The first had been the Arcadia
Conference at the end of nineteen forty one. At the
beginning of nineteen forty three, the second Great Conference between
the Western Allies took place at Casablanca in Morocco. Roosevelt
and his staff met with Churchill and his staff to
(03:43):
plan operations for nineteen forty three. At these meetings, the
first thing the Americans said to the British was, well,
of course, you understand that having mounted Torch and put
all of this strength that we have into North Africa,
the nineteen forty three invasion of France is definitely off.
(04:04):
We don't have the resources to do that. Churchill was astonished,
or said he was to hear this, and whether he
was telling the truth or not, can't be said. The
announcement to Stale that there was not going to be
a second front in nineteen forty three left the Soviet
(04:25):
dictator shaking with rage. He had been demanding a second
front ever since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June
of nineteen forty one.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Now, and you meet.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Russians today, and who will talk about why was there
this terrible long delay before the second front was mounted?
And of course we won the war, the Russians will
tell you, and more or less by ourselves. And you
guys didn't even dare come in until we had ultorably
defeated the Hrmacht, and there was just a shell of
the force that Hitler bragged was an army sections of
(04:59):
the world was never seen by the time you guys
came into the real war in nineteen forty four. But
here I can't forbear saying that it really came hard
to hear Stalin begging for a second front nineteen forty two,
in nineteen forty three, and you know, the French could
have said, well, where the hell was the second front
in nineteen forty when Hitler was overrunning France, What were
(05:23):
you guys doing? That's when the Second Front should have
been launched, you should have been attacking the Germans instead
of cooperating with them, instead of entering into an alliance
with them. Well, leaving that aside, Stalin obviously wasn't going
to be embarrassed by his past action. Stalin was in
a desperate situation.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
The Soviet Union was taking.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Horrendous casualties the Germans that occupied very large parts of
the Soviet Empire, and Stalin desperately needed to have the
pressure taken off him. He was fighting up to two
hundred German and Allied divisions on the Eastern Front, and
so naturally he demanded the opening of a second front.
(06:08):
Churchill had tried to persuade Stalin that the campaign in
North Africa was a genuine opening of a second front,
but to Stalin that.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
It was utterly unacceptable.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The Germans never had more than three divisions in North Africa.
North Africa was clearly not going to be a decisive
theater in this war. Russia very much still had her
back against the wall. Even after the victory at Stalingrad.
The Soviet Union was.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Not and no longer on its.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Last legs, but the price of taking on the Wehrmacht
by themselves was going to be very high, and he
was desperate to get a Stalin, was to get a
second front opened in France to force the Germans to
transfer divisions from their eastern front ord to France to
take the pressure off the Russians.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
And you're listening to Stephen Ambrose tell the story of
a year nineteen forty three, a critical year in World
War Two. When we come back, more of Stephen Ambrose
here on our American Stories. Lie Hibibe here the host
(07:33):
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Alamericanstories dot com and
click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
(07:56):
Go to Alamericanstories dot com and give And we continue
with our American Stories. And we last left off with
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill meeting for a second
(08:18):
time during the war in January of nineteen forty three
in Casablanca in Morocco to plan operations for that year.
Let's pick up where we last left off with Stephen Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Now a combination of things came together here at this
Cox Blanker meeting. First of all, the decision we're not
going to have a second front nineteen forty three, and
somebody's got to explain this to Stalin. And I pause
there to make this point. What I say, had to
explain it to Stalin. What I mean is the great
fear on the part of the Western Allies in World
(08:53):
War Two was always that Stalin would make a separate
peace and you would go back to the situation that
prevailed before June of nineteen forty one. That is, I in,
to all practical purposes, Germany and the Soviet Union would
be allies.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
If that happened.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
There wasn't a chance in the world that the United
States and Britain could invade France against.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
All of Hitler's strength, And there were some.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Fears came out from Berlin in the fall of nineteen
forty two as the Stalingrad Battle was beginning, and they
continued through the winner of forty two forty three. The
Germans wondering if Stalin would be interested in a separate piece,
and it had a certain appeal to Stalin, especially if
he felt, as he was beginning to feel, or increasingly
(09:47):
was feeling, that the Western Allies were willing to sell
the Soviet Union down the river, or more precisely, if
the Western Allies were perfectly happy to watch Nazis killing
Communists as killing Nazis. And he was right to feel
that way, because an awful lot of people in the
Western world did think exactly that.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Not however, the leaders.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Either especially not the military leaders, all of whom realize
that if you tried to play that game, the Nazis
would very likely win the war, and if they did,
they would then take over the world. And if they didn't,
the Communists were going to win the war, and they
(10:34):
would end up with all the resources, especially the human resources,
of Western Europe under their control.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
And that wouldn't be a world that we would want
to live in either.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
But as between the two dangers, a Nazi dominated Europe
or a Communist dominated Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill and Marshall
and Allen Brook and Eisenhower and all of the leaders
of the of the Great Alliance of Britain in the
United States. We're in agreement that the Nazi victory would
be worse. I think in retrospect, the time has proven
(11:08):
them right. We now reached the point in world history
and where both of those isms are in the act
can of history. Nazism has been gone since nineteen forty five,
and now Communism is gone. If World War II had
turned out the other way with the Nazis victorious in Europe,
(11:29):
I don't know how we ever gotten rid of the Nazis.
I don't think that they would have withered on the
vine in the way that the Communists did, or that
they would have their own people would have turned against them.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Well, that's a lot of speculation.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Anyway, Stalin in nineteen forty three one or a second front,
and he wasn't going to get one. And this was
a tough one to explain to him, and that fear
that he would make a separate piece was very real.
Oh and I should add that Stalin also.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Had complaints about the Darlaon deal.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
His attitude was the first time the Americans go to
the offensive in this war. Within a day of the attack,
they've cut a deal with a fascist general or in
this case, Admiral Admiral Darlan, and Stalin wondered aloud to
the American ambassador, what does this mean that when you
(12:24):
get into Germany you're going to cut a deal with
the German Germany's generals. I don't like the smell of
this at all. To reassure Stalin both as to America's
determination to stay in this war to the end an
America's commitment to the Soviet Union is an ally and
more specifically, to guarantee to Stalin that there would be
(12:49):
no more Darlon deals, that we would not get into
a cooperative mode with the German generals, urging them to
overthrow Hitler and then we'll deal with you.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Roosevelt came up with a wholly new concept in war.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
That decision, and that concept also came from it had
many many parents that also came out of avoiding the
mistake the Allies and particularly Woodrow Wilson made in nineteen eighteen.
Roosevelt wanted to make certain that the Germans would never
again be able to claim that they were stabbed in
the back. He wanted the Germans to understand that they
(13:34):
had been beaten, and he came up with the formula
called unconditional surrender from Casablanca. He issued a pronouncement seconded
by Churchill, calling on or setting as the objective for
the Allies and the Second World War, the unconditional surrender
(13:57):
of the Axis powers.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Germany and Japan.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Now what this meant, nobody knew, nobody'd ever asked for
an unconditional surrender before. It raised a lot of questions,
who's going to be running Germany after she surrenders, where's
the government going to come from? What kind of a
system do you intend to impose on her? And of
course the strange alliance. It could be that the Russians
(14:25):
would get a part of Germany and this unconditional surrender
from Germany with me and the Russians could impose on
the Germans or at least that part of Germany if
they occupied their system. Presumably the Americans of the British
would impose their system on the other.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Part of Germany. How could that whatever work out? Well?
Nobody had an answer to that at the time.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Unconditional surrender has received a lot of criticism because of
its vagueness and because of the argument that it forced
the Germans and the Japanese to fight on when the
fight was hopeless, so that it cost a lot of
a American and British lives that it. Had a formula
for a surrender been worked out, you could have had
(15:07):
a much earlier surrender and to save a great deal
of the destruction of the Second World War. The problem
with that argument is, how can anyone imagine a scenario
in which the German generals managed to get rid of Hitler.
So long as Hilary was around, there was no possibility
(15:28):
of dealing with him, And in fact, Roosevelt, in the
unconditional surrender announcement, made it clear that he and there's
something else that Wilson hadn't done, that we were going
to put war criminals on trial. There was going to
be punishment for the guilty Nazis. Now that of course
made the guilty Nazis fight all that much harder, and
(15:49):
it made all Germans fight that much harder, because unconditional
surrender gave to Garbles, the propaganda minister, an ideal tool
with which to whip up sentiment within German to get
the old men to tuck their beards into their shirts
and pick up a rifle and go out and fight,
and to get the young boys to do the same
because there was a lot of loose talk in the
(16:10):
United States. There were a couple of centers who were
talking about we got to castrate all German males, and
Garbles was able to pick up on that and tell
the German people, that's what unconditional surrender is gonna mean. Well,
it sure makes a man fight when you hear something
like that. The other side of it, though, is unconditional
surrender had a clearness to it, a wiping the slate clean,
(16:37):
so that when it was all over, you could start
to rebuild a new Germany, whether in the Russian on
the Russian model or on the American model, you could
start to build a new Germany. And it also had
a positive effect on morale within the United States. But
most of all, the audience for unconditional surrender wasn't the
American people, and it wasn't even so much policy towards
the German people, as it was a reassurance to Stalin,
(17:00):
We're not going to deal with any more facist and we're.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
In this to the bitter end.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And a great job editing that piece by Greg Hengler,
and a special thanks to the Ambrose Estate for allowing
us to use the audio of their father. And he
died in two thousand and two, but we had our
American Stories. Want to keep his voice alive. It is
such an important voice. By the way, the World War
Two Museum Steven Ambrose helped start that. It's in New Orleans,
(17:28):
Pay a visit, go online, listen to the stories. It
is hands down the best museum in this country. Stephen
Ambrose The story of nineteen forty three and unconditional surrender
terms fashioned by Roosevelt. The pros and the cons here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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