Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at War: Signed by Both at the Great Conferences of World War II

To find the signatures of Churchill and Roosevelt on one piece, obtained at the great war time Conferences, is an extraordinary rarity, this being our first ever

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire, presided over by Turkey, was allied with Germany. Winston Churchill sought to break the stalemate in the trenches in Europe by attacking Turkey, knocking it out of the war, and thus safeguarding the Suez Canal, protecting Britain’s interests in the Middle East, and bringing Greece and other nations to the Allied side. In World War II, all of Turkey’s neighbors had joined the Axis or the Allies. In the west, Bulgaria was a German ally, Greece was occupied by German troops, and Italy held some of the Greek Islands. The USSR was a neighbor of Turkey to the northeast. To the south were Syria, which joined the Free French, and Iraq, which was part of the British Empire. Turkey was faced with a dilemma; for reasons of security, it remained officially neutral for much of the war, but its sympathies lay with the Allies. In the early stages of the war, to forestall a German attack on its territory, Turkey stayed out of the conflict and even signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1941. Turkish neutrality, however, was assailed by the USSR as opportunistic and hypocritical, and Churchill was dissatisfied because he felt that with Turkey in the war as an ally, Germany and its allies in south-eastern Europe would be put under pressure. With the Allied attack on Europe upcoming, he thus favored an attempt to draw Turkey into the conflict.

The Casablanca Conference took place just two months after the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa in November 1942. The Casablanca Conference was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill held in the city of Casablanca, Morocco, that took place from January 14–24, 1943. At this meeting, Roosevelt and Churchill focused on coordinating Allied military strategy against the Axis powers over the course of the coming year. They resolved to concentrate their efforts against Germany in the hopes of drawing German forces away from the Eastern Front, and to increase shipments of supplies to the Soviet Union. While they would begin gathering forces in England in preparation for an eventual landing in northern France, they decided that first they would concentrate their efforts in the Mediterranean by launching an invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland designed to knock Italy out of the war. They also agreed to strengthen their strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Finally, the leaders agreed on a military effort to eject Japan from Papua New Guinea and to open up new supply lines to China through Japanese-occupied Burma. On the final day of the Conference, President Roosevelt announced that he and Churchill had decided that the only way to ensure postwar peace was to adopt a policy of unconditional surrender. The President clearly stated, however, that the policy of unconditional surrender did not entail the destruction of the populations of the Axis powers but rather, “the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.”

During the Conference, Churchill proposed to press Turkey to join the Allies in the war. General George Marshall and other high-ranking members of the US military feared the extension of the war to a new Turkish front and were opposed. However, President Roosevelt gave Churchill the green light on January 18, 1943, to “play the Turkish hand”. On January 25, Churchill, through Britain’s Ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, asked for a meeting with Turkish President Ismet İnönü, and it was Knatchbull-Hugessen’s great diplomatic coup to arrange for Churchill to meet Turkish leadership. There, from January 30 to February 1, Churchill met with İnönü and other Turkish officials at the Adana Conference. The teams were headed by İnönü and Churchill. The other members of the Turkish side were Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu, Foreign Minister Nuğman Kemal Menemencioğlu, and a group of advisers. The British team had Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, who oversaw the final stages of the evacuation from Dunkirk and subsequently served as Commander-in-Chief of British forces Middle East, Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, and others. Churchill assured the Turks that the Allies would continue to guarantee Turkish security, and would supply Turkey with supplies necessary for self-defense. As an ally, Turkey would be eligible for the U.S. Lend-Lease Program and receive significant amounts of such aid. Although Churchill did not extract any binding commitment from İnönü, he did obtain the assurance that Turkey would do all it could to aid the Allies without violating its neutrality.

From November November 22–26, 1943, the First Cairo Conference was held in Cairo, Egypt, with President Roosevelt again crossing the Atlantic to attend, along with an impressive entourage that included such U.S. luminaries as Generals George Marshall and Hap Arnold, and Admiral Ernest King. The British were in attendance in the persons of Churchill, General Brooke, and Field Marshal John Dill, among others. Chiang Kai-shek attended to represent China. The Cairo Declaration was issued on November 27, 1943, and stated the Allies’ intentions to continue deploying military force until Japan’s unconditional surrender. Japan would be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she had seized or occupied, and all the territories Japan had “stolen” from the Chinese would be restored.

The Second Cairo Conference was held the following week, from December 4–6, 1943, in order to address the part Turkey could play in aiding the Allied war effort. In addition to the attendees at the first conference the week before, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen took part, as did numerous Soviet representatives. Churchill again wanted Turkey to immediately join the war on the Allied side, and the biggest reason for Turkey’s hesitation to do so was the eventual reduction of the amount of financial and military aid which Churchill had promised in Adana. By December 1943 the Anglo-American authorities felt the overall situation had changed so fundamentally that a much smaller scale of assistance than that provided for in the earlier meting would be necessary. The British proposed a reduced scale of aid. The Turks, on the other hand, wished to make certain that upon their entry into the war they would be strong enough to defend their homeland, and they doubted that the new plan would fully meet their security needs. Churchill, faced with Operation Overlord only six months away, reluctantly concluded that the resources demanded and the time required for strengthening Turkey could not be conceded. The U.S. Chiefs of Staff and their planners, on the other hand, felt relieved that this possible threat to concentration on Operation Overlord had at last been removed. At the end of the conference, it was decided that Turkey’s neutrality should be maintained. It was also decided to build the Incirlik Air Base near Adana for possible Allied air operations in the region, but construction only began after the end of the war. Incirlik Air Base later played an important role for NATO during the Cold War. Roosevelt and İnönü got what they wanted, while Churchill was a bit disappointed at the result, because he believed that an active Turkish participation in the war would quicken the German defeat by hitting their “soft underbelly” in the southeast. Turkey eventually joined the war on the side of the Allies on February 23, 1945.

American aviators invented the idea of a “short snorter” in the 1920s, the early days of aviation. These were bank notes signed by those who travelled together on an airplane. This grew into a custom where the signatories included notables and those working together on a common enterprise, and soon spread to the military. During World War II, Americans frequently collected short snorters on their travels. The British took up this custom with great enthusiasm.

This is a British pound note “Short Snorter” kept by Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, British Ambassador to Turkey, who has signed and dated it December 1, 1942. The first names he obtained appear to be crew members that returned him to Turkey after a late 1942 visit to Britain. Following is the signature of Frank A. Kaufman, a US Lend Lease representative. Knatchbull-Hugessen attended the Adana Conference, and there he obtained the signatures of Winston Churchill, Turkish President Ismet Inönü (his signature dated 30 January 1943), and Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu. Under those appear names likely associated with bring him from Turkey to Cairo for the Second Cairo Conference. In Cairo, his short snorter was signed by British Foreign Secretary (and future prime minister) Anthony Eden and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

From time to time, one sees posters signed by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Atlantic Conference, which was a show of solidarity before the U.S. entered the war. But to find the signatures of Churchill and Roosevelt on one piece, obtained at the great war time Conferences, is an extraordinary rarity. So rare, in fact, that this is our first in all our decades in this field.