Second Quebec Conference Is Held

Churchill, Roosevelt and their advisers met for a second time in Quebec in a conference codenamed Octagon.

(The first Quebec conference had been held more than a year earlier, in August 1943.)

The two leaders discussed the war in the Pacific, and Churchill offered the aid of a British fleet. Roosevelt leapt at the opportunity against the advice of Admiral King, considered one of the greatest naval strategists in US history. Roosevelt's words were, '... the British fleet was no sooner offered than accepted'. Thus Task Force 57 was born and operated in the Pacific from March to August 1945.

The conference returned to the Lend-Lease Agreements and it was confirmed that the arrangement would continue as long as the war in the Pacific was still being waged.

Roosevelt issued an executive order on January 22, 1944 that established the War Refugee Board (WRB).

During the same year, Morgenthau devised a plan for the occupation of Germany, known as the Morgenthau Plan. It advocated harsh measures to ensure Germany could not go to war again. According to the plan, Germany was to be partitioned into two states, its industry internationalized or annexed by neighboring countries, and its heavy industry dismantled. Although Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed a modified version of the plan in September 1944 at the Second Quebec Conference, the victorious Allies never fully implemented it. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson firmly opposed the policy as did British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Moreover, in the first postwar years, the Truman administration's concern about the developing “Cold War” and the need to strengthen the western zones of occupied Germany reinforced opposition to implementation of the Morgenthau Plan.