Cairo Conference

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cairo Conference brought together three of the most powerful leaders in the world for five days in November 1943, against the backdrop of a war that was still far from won. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, Chairman of the National Government of China, gathered near the Giza pyramid complex to decide the fate of Asia. Their meeting place was the Cairo residence of Alexander Comstock Kirk, the American ambassador to Egypt, roughly 8 miles from the centre of the city.

  The conference carried the codeword Sextant, and it was one of fourteen summit meetings held by Allied leaders during World War II. Behind the formal agenda of counterattacking Japan and shaping post-war Asia lay a tangle of competing ambitions, mutual suspicions, and conflicting visions for what the world should look like once the guns fell silent. Churchill distrusted Chinese power. Roosevelt was quietly building a different vision of the post-war order. And Chiang arrived in Cairo knowing that his country's lifeline, its last overland supply route, had been severed since the fall of Burma in April 1942. What remained was a 500-mile airlift over the Himalayas known as the Hump route.

  The questions the conference had to answer were enormous. Could three leaders with fundamentally different interests forge a real military alliance? Would China emerge from the war as a genuine world power? And what exactly was Japan being asked to surrender? The Cairo Declaration, issued on the 1st of December 1943 and drafted by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's special secretary, gave one answer. Whether the promises behind it would be honoured was a different matter entirely.

• 2. Fault Lines Among Allies

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  Britain and the United States had issued a joint declaration on the 11th of January 1943, announcing the abrogation of all unequal treaties imposed on China over the previous century. The gesture was significant. But beneath the diplomatic language, Sino-British relations were not harmonious, and both sides knew it.

  Churchill held what the source describes as a conservative colonialist mindset, refusing to believe that Asians could unite and fight effectively for an Allied victory. He was also openly prejudiced against China and had no desire to see it rise as a world power. The British feared that a China asserting strong independence from the West could inspire independence movements in British colonies across Asia, including India, where discontent was already brewing. Lord Alan Brooke, the British Chief of Staff, was recorded as being even more contemptuous of China than Churchill himself.

  Roosevelt's vision was almost the opposite of Churchill's. He wanted European colonial powers to grant independence to their colonies and saw Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination as a guide for the post-war world. He was also working toward a concept he called the Four Policemen: the United States, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China, who would together guard the world from future conflict. That vision placed China on equal footing with the other three powers, something neither Britain nor the Soviet Union was prepared to accept easily.

  The Soviet Union had signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, which made it difficult to be seen cooperating openly with Chiang's government against Japan. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull had to lobby hard at the Moscow Conference in October 1943 to get China included as a signatory to the Moscow Declaration of the 1st of November 1943, a joint statement by four powers committing to fight until victory and demanding unconditional surrender from Nazi Germany. It was a diplomatic breakthrough, but it masked how isolated China remained in the alliance.

• 3. The Burma Problem

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  Burma sat at the centre of the Cairo agenda because it sat at the centre of China's survival. When Japanese forces seized Rangoon and then the rest of Burma by April 1942, the last overland supply route into China was cut. The only remaining option was the Hump route, an airlift over the Himalayas that could carry no more than 500 miles of goods at a stretch.

  For China, reopening the Burma road was a military necessity. For Britain, Burma was a political affair with no immediate strategic urgency. The British wanted their military strength concentrated in Europe, and after the fall of Rangoon, British enthusiasm for the Burma theatre faded sharply. The British military argued their navy was needed in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Politically, after the Japanese conquest, the Burmese had become largely pro-Japanese and anti-British, which made Burma an even less appealing investment.

  At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, codenamed Quadrant, Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to establish a new joint South East Asia Command, with British Field Marshal Lord Mountbatten as Supreme Commander. On the 2nd of October, Mountbatten travelled to Chongqing to present the Quebec Resolution to Chiang, along with a secret letter from Churchill that specifically tied any military action in southern Burma to Chinese military action in northern Burma first.

  At Cairo, Mountbatten presented three possible plans of action. Operation Tarzan called for British and Chinese forces to attack Burma on multiple fronts, with the British Fourteenth Army's XV Corps crossing the Maungdaw-Buthidaung line in mid-January. Operation Musket proposed seizing Cape Sumatra. Operation Buccaneer was an amphibious assault on the Andaman Islands, located 300 miles south of Rangoon in the Bay of Bengal. Churchill was most drawn to Operation Musket, hoping to use it as a path to recapturing Singapore. But Chiang's position was firm: no ground offensive without simultaneous naval operations in the Bay of Bengal. Without control of the sea and air, he argued, any advance into Burma would be a costly waste of manpower.

• 4. Five Days of Negotiation

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  Stilwell was the first to arrive, reaching Cairo on Saturday the 20th of November 1943. Chiang came the following day with his wife, Soong Mei-ling, and Churchill, who sailed into Alexandria Harbour aboard HMS Wilhelmina before flying on to Cairo. Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic on the battleship USS Iowa, stopped in Oran and met General Eisenhower in Tunis, and arrived on Monday the 22nd of November.

  The official sessions began on Tuesday the 23rd. Chiang made clear in the morning session that Burma was, in his view, the key to the entire Asian campaign, and he insisted on strong and powerful naval operations as a condition for committing Chinese ground forces. That afternoon, he chose not to attend the meeting of the British and American Joint Chiefs of Staff and sent his generals instead, arriving at 3:30 p.m., later than the Allied officials had expected. Marshall criticised Chiang for being too keen to acquire US transport planes while being unable to guarantee a stronger ground force.

  Stilwell used the conference to present a detailed memorandum: aid northern Burma, fight for overland communications to China, train the Chinese Army, intensify bombing of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, prevent Japanese control of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, and recover Canton and Hong Kong. He suggested moving American troops from India to China after the occupation of northern Burma, and attacking Shanghai and Taiwan if necessary.

  By the 25th of November, the talks between Roosevelt, Marshall, and Stilwell produced an agreement in principle for a joint counterattack on Burma. Roosevelt promised Chiang that Operation Tarzan would be supplemented by a massive amphibious offensive in the Bay of Bengal. He also verbally pledged to equip and train 90 Chinese army divisions, with 30 to be equipped immediately and 60 more to follow. Roosevelt went further still, verbally promising to increase the monthly airlift supply to China from 8,900 tonnes to 12,000 tonnes, and to have US Air Force B-29 Superfortress bombers strike Japan from Chinese bases.

  On the 26th of November, Soong Mei-ling met Roosevelt to discuss a loan of US$1 billion, and Roosevelt immediately agreed. That afternoon, the leaders gathered for tea at Roosevelt's residence to finalise the plan of action for the following March. Chiang left Cairo the following morning after a meeting with Dwight Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of Allied forces in North Africa.

• 5. The Cairo Declaration

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  Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's special secretary, drafted the Cairo Declaration. Roosevelt amended it. Churchill revised it. The final text was issued on the 1st of December 1943, broadcast as a communique via radio.

  The Declaration addressed Japan's territorial acquisitions with unusual precision. It stated that all territories Japan had taken from China after the September 18 Incident, including Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, as well as the leases on Lushun and Dalian, would be restored to the Republic of China. Japan would also be expelled from all other territories seized by violence and greed, including from the Pacific islands it had seized or occupied. Japanese public and private industries in China, as well as Japanese merchant ships, would be fully received by the Chinese government.

  For Korea, the Declaration stated that in due course Korea shall become free and independent, the first international guarantee of Korean independence to emerge from the war. The Ryukyu Islands, however, were a more contested question that the Declaration deliberately left unaddressed. China believed they should be returned to China, while Britain and the United States disagreed. The United States privately considered leaving the Ryukyu Islands to Japan after the war if they were completely demilitarised.

  The Declaration's most significant demand was its first for Japan: unconditional surrender. Roosevelt had also included a reference in his draft to an attack on Japan from China and Southeast Asia, but Churchill's revised version deleted that passage, on the grounds that amphibious operations in the Bay of Bengal would draw resources away from the planned Normandy landings. The Declaration's demand for unconditional surrender later served as the foundation for the Potsdam Proclamation of July 1945, which China, Britain, and the United States issued as an ultimatum to Japan.

• 6. Promises Broken

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  The Tehran Conference ran from the 28th of November to the 1st of December, and it changed everything decided at Cairo. Stalin dominated the proceedings. He pushed for a rapid end to the war in Europe, argued that the main theatre against Japan should be the Pacific, and disapproved of Allied operations in Southeast Asia. Churchill declared that fighting the Japanese deep in the Burmese jungle was like jumping into the sea and fighting sharks. He urged Roosevelt to go back on his promise to Chiang.

  Roosevelt agreed. The shortage of landing craft was estimated at only 18-20 vessels, but the US and Britain decided their ships were needed for the Western Front in France. On the 5th of December, Roosevelt telegraphed Chiang suggesting that China either launch the Burma counterattack alone, or wait until November 1944. Operation Buccaneer was formally cancelled. Operation Tarzan was also cancelled by the British-American Joint Chiefs of Staff in December. On the 21st of December, Churchill authorised Mountbatten to mobilise 20,000 men for an operation, but the target was changed from the Andaman Islands to a different attack on the Rakhine coast.

  In January 1944, Stilwell commanded the American-trained Chinese Expeditionary Force in India to advance on Mon-Kwan. Chiang refused for some time to send troops from Yunnan into Burma to support what he saw as a substitute for the promised amphibious operation. In April, the US issued an ultimatum: send the Yunnan troops to Burma or face a cutoff of Lend-Lease aid. Chiang finally agreed.

  The billion-dollar loan agreed to over tea on the 26th of November was quietly reversed. American officials viewed the request as extortion, and Roosevelt declined to submit it to Congress. He also capped the monthly cost of US troops in China at US$25 million. The 60 additional Chinese divisions he had verbally promised were never equipped. In August 1945, Soong Tse-vung visited the United States to raise the matter with President Harry Truman, who renounced the commitment. Roosevelt himself had told Marshall: I am still so disgusted with what is going on in the China-Burma-India theatre that... The worst thing is that we have broken our word every time and we have not fulfilled any of our promises.

  To build the nine airfields needed for B-29 bombers to strike Japan from Chinese soil, 450,000 civilian workers were mobilised in Chengdu. Each runway was 9,000 feet long. The first American Air Fortress B-29 bombers landed 60 days after construction began, and all nine airfields were completed within 90 days.

• 7. What Cairo Left Behind

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  Chiang returned to Chungking to a hero's welcome. He told his diary that the results of the Cairo meeting were as expected, which is certainly an important achievement in the revolutionary cause. He found Roosevelt's demeanour superb and described the feeling of having met him at first sight. He also noted, presciently, that regarding the timing of the counter-offensive in Burma, I can conclude that there is no hope of implementation until autumn next year.

  Churchill, by contrast, complained that the meetings with Chiang were too long and a waste of time, and that Chinese affairs, which had been of the least importance in Cairo, had taken precedence. The British Chief of Staff Alan Brooke concluded that Chiang was shrewd and cunning, determined to take advantage of the bargain despite failing to grasp the situation. Yet Churchill himself privately acknowledged that Chiang was far-sighted and sophisticated, which is rare among modern statesmen. Chiang's own assessment of Churchill was equally backhanded: he called him far-sighted and sophisticated, rare among modern statesmen, while publicly predicting that Britain would never sacrifice the slightest interest to help others.

  Roosevelt, influenced partly by Stilwell, came away from Cairo with a lowered opinion of Chiang, feeling that the Nationalist army was more focused on monitoring the Chinese Communist forces than on fighting Japan. The conference that had opened with all three leaders on equal footing ended with Roosevelt doubting whether China deserved that status at all.

  Historian Rana Mitter has noted that the Cairo Conference attracted far wider interest in China than in the West, especially in the years leading up to its 70th anniversary in 2013. For the Chinese government, the text of the Cairo Declaration carries ongoing relevance: they regard it as legitimising their claim to the disputed Senkaku Islands. Emperor Hirohito convened the Imperial Council shortly after the Declaration was announced, and within it, moderate forces grew in influence as the militarists weakened. In October 1944, Konoe Tadamaro, brother of former Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, secretly negotiated a peace approach to Chiang's forces based on the Cairo Declaration terms.