On this episode of Our American Stories, Stephen Ambrose shares a WWII story beginning in January of 1943 and ending with the Allied solution of Unconditional Surrender. Let’s jump right in with the Soviet victory over the Nazis at the Battle of Stalingrad.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 estate.
(00:52):
Today we'll be hearing the story from early nineteen forty
three during World War II. Let's jump right in with
the 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 this
(02:10):
very strange alliance, who's gonna get what at the end
of the war.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And Stalingrad for the.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Military from the military side in the Sentral War was
the great battle and the decisive battle. After Stalingrad, the
Germans never again took the offense of an 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 by.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Indeed, the truth of.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The Second World War is that no two of the
three Great Allies were sufficiently strong to defeat Germany. Britain
and 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
(03:44):
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,
found up the nineteen forty three invasion of France is
definitely off. We don't have the resources to do that.
(04:07):
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 dictator shaking with rage. He had been
(04:29):
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 we'll 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 the world was
(05:00):
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
(05:21):
when Hitler was overrunning France, What were 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 him. Well, leaving
that aside, Stalin obviously wasn't going to be embarrassed by
his past action. Stalin was in a desperate situation. The
(05:42):
Soviet Union was taking 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
(06:07):
of a second front.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Churchill had tried.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
To persuade Stalin that the campaign in North Africa was
a genuine opening of a second front, but to Stalin.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
That 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 not i and no longer on
(06:44):
its 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 over 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 Hibibi 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 Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
(07:56):
Go to Auramerican Stories 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
(08:17):
second 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 (08:32):
Now a combination of things came together here at this
cock Sublanco 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.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
That is, I I in to all.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And there and there were some uh feelers 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 peace, and it
had a certain appeal to Stalin, especially if he felt,
(09:44):
as he was beginning to feel, or increasingly 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, commune
Is killing Nazis. And he was right to feel that way,
(10:05):
because an awful lot of people in the Western world
did think exactly that.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Not however, the.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Leaders 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,
(10:31):
the Communists were going to win the war, and they
would end up with all of 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.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
The Nazi victory would be worse.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I think in retrospect, the time has proven 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
(11:26):
the other way with the Nazis victorious in Europe, 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. Anyway.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Stalin in nineteen forty three one or a second front,
and he weren't going to get one. And this was
a tough one to explain to him, and that fear
that he would make a separate peace was very real.
Oh and I should add that Stalin also had complaints
about the Darlaon deal. His attitude was the first time
(12:07):
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 get into Germany you're going
to cut a deal with German Germany's generals. I don't
(12:31):
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 no more Darlon.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Deals, that we would not.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Get into a cooperative mode with the German generals. Urge
them to overthrow Hitler and then we'll deal with you.
Roosevelt came up with a wholly new concept in war.
That decision, and that concept also came from it had
(13:17):
many many parents that also came out of avoiding the
mistake the Allies and particularly Woodrow Wilson, had 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 had been beaten, and he came up with
(13:39):
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 of the Axis Powers, Germany and Japan. Now
(14:02):
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 would
(14:26):
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 ever 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.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Had a formula for a surrender been.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Worked out, you could have had 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
(15:26):
Hilary was around, there was no possibility 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.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
That of course made the guilty Nazis fight all that
much harder, and it made all Germans fight that much
harder because unconditional surrender gave to Garbles, the propaganda minister,
an ideal.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Tool with which to whip up.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
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 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
(16:20):
unconditional surrender is going to mean. When it sure makes
a man fight when you hear something like that. The
other side of it, though, is unannational surrender had a
clearness to it, a wiping the slate clean, so that
when it was all over, you could start to rebuild
a new Germany, whether in the Russian on the Russian
(16:42):
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, We're not going
to deal with any more facts and we're in this
(17:04):
to the bitter end.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And a great job editing that piece by Greg Hangler,
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.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
It's in New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (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 estate.
(00:52):
Today we'll be hearing the story from early nineteen forty
three during World War II. Let's jump right in with
the 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 this
(02:10):
very strange alliance, who's gonna get what at the end
of the war.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
And Stalingrad for the.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Military from the military side in the Sentral War was
the great battle and the decisive battle. After Stalingrad, the
Germans never again took the offense of an 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 by.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Indeed, the truth of.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The Second World War is that no two of the
three Great Allies were sufficiently strong to defeat Germany. Britain
and 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
(03:44):
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,
found up the nineteen forty three invasion of France is
definitely off. We don't have the resources to do that.
(04:07):
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 dictator shaking with rage. He had been
(04:29):
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 we'll 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 the world was
(05:00):
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
(05:21):
when Hitler was overrunning France, What were 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 him. Well, leaving
that aside, Stalin obviously wasn't going to be embarrassed by
his past action. Stalin was in a desperate situation. The
(05:42):
Soviet Union was taking 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
(06:07):
of a second front.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Churchill had tried.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
To persuade Stalin that the campaign in North Africa was
a genuine opening of a second front, but to Stalin.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
That 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 not i and no longer on
(06:44):
its 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 over 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 Hibibi 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 Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
(07:56):
Go to Auramerican Stories 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
(08:17):
second 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 (08:32):
Now a combination of things came together here at this
cock Sublanco 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.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
That is, I I in to all.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And there and there were some uh feelers 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 peace, and it
had a certain appeal to Stalin, especially if he felt,
(09:44):
as he was beginning to feel, or increasingly 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, commune
Is killing Nazis. And he was right to feel that way,
(10:05):
because an awful lot of people in the Western world
did think exactly that.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Not however, the.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Leaders 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,
(10:31):
the Communists were going to win the war, and they
would end up with all of 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.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
The Nazi victory would be worse.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I think in retrospect, the time has proven 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
(11:26):
the other way with the Nazis victorious in Europe, 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. Anyway.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Stalin in nineteen forty three one or a second front,
and he weren't going to get one. And this was
a tough one to explain to him, and that fear
that he would make a separate peace was very real.
Oh and I should add that Stalin also had complaints
about the Darlaon deal. His attitude was the first time
(12:07):
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 get into Germany you're going
to cut a deal with German Germany's generals. I don't
(12:31):
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 no more Darlon.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Deals, that we would not.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Get into a cooperative mode with the German generals. Urge
them to overthrow Hitler and then we'll deal with you.
Roosevelt came up with a wholly new concept in war.
That decision, and that concept also came from it had
(13:17):
many many parents that also came out of avoiding the
mistake the Allies and particularly Woodrow Wilson, had 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 had been beaten, and he came up with
(13:39):
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 of the Axis Powers, Germany and Japan. Now
(14:02):
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 would
(14:26):
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 ever 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.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Had a formula for a surrender been.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Worked out, you could have had 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
(15:26):
Hilary was around, there was no possibility 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.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
That of course made the guilty Nazis fight all that
much harder, and it made all Germans fight that much
harder because unconditional surrender gave to Garbles, the propaganda minister,
an ideal.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Tool with which to whip up.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
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 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
(16:20):
unconditional surrender is going to mean. When it sure makes
a man fight when you hear something like that. The
other side of it, though, is unannational surrender had a
clearness to it, a wiping the slate clean, so that
when it was all over, you could start to rebuild
a new Germany, whether in the Russian on the Russian
(16:42):
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, We're not going
to deal with any more facts and we're in this
(17:04):
to the bitter end.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And a great job editing that piece by Greg Hangler,
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.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
It's in New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (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
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.