New book offers detailed look at wartime Quebec Conferences
Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
According to a newly published book, the first step in the long fight to beat the Nazis and liberate Europe from their grip began in the Salon Rose of the Château Frontenac in August 1943.
The Quebec Conference, bringing together British prime minister Winston Churchill and United States president Franklin Roosevelt, committed the Allies to the invasion of Normandy the following spring, code name Overlord, which became known as D-Day.
The momentous Quebec City meeting is chronicled in fascinating detail in historian, retired naval officer and QCT contributing writer Charles André Nadeau’s new book, Churchill et Roosevelt à Québec: Grande et petite histoires des conférences de 1943 et de 1944. (It’s available only in French at the moment, pend- ing translation arrangements.)
The book launch on Sept. 12, naturally, took place in the Salon Rose, little changed from when the chiefs of staff of Great Britain and the United States met there to debate the grand strategy for the rest of the war in Europe 81 years ago. In attendance were Nadeau’s family and friends, his naval comrades, fellow historians and the man who initially proposed the book project, former Château Frontenac director general Robert Mercure, himself a history buff.
Nadeau said the book, initially imagined as a pamphlet, would help Mercure respond to one of the most-asked questions by visitors about the landmark hotel, namely what happened when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec in August 1943 and again in September 1944.
Mercure, who wrote a foreword to the book, applauded Nadeau at the launch for “having succeeded in bringing alive” the events at the two conferences. He confessed to getting a “frisson” each time he enters the Salon Rose, knowing what took place there.
Nadeau said his background as a student of military strategy at the U.S. Naval War College provided the context for the book, which lays out in accessible detail how the president and prime minister approved the “grand strategy” for the reconquest of Europe.
Nadeau notes that by pure coincidence, the 1943 Quebec conference took place at a crucial turning point in the war in Europe, the Allied forces having captured Sicily on Aug. 17, with the Italian boot literally in view across the Strait of Messina.
Churchill, Nadeau said, “was a better politician than a military strategist,” preferring to launch an invasion of Europe through Italy rather than northern France from across the English Channel. Churchill’s reticence, Nadeau said, was partly due to his role as British naval minister in the disastrous and bloody invasion of Turkey in the First World War.
“He saw Normandy as a potential Gallipoli,” Nadeau said. Besides the fascinating account of the strategy for the next crucial stage of the war hammered out by military commanders in the Salon Rose, the Citadelle and other places in the city, Nadeau offers up countless colourful details of the eight-day gathering.
One that boggles the mind is that of British vice-admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, taking out his revolver in the Salon Rose and firing bullets at a block of ice and one made of a new material called pykrete, developed to clad an aircraft carrier, an experiment that got no further than a lake in Alberta.
The overall conclusion of the Quebec Conference, as Nadeau asserts in the book, is that henceforth the United States would be the dominant force in the selection of the strategy of the war in both Europe and the Pacific.
As Nadeau observes, “kilometre zero” in the long road to win the war in Europe was the Salon Rose in the Château Frontenac.
Churchill et Roosevelt à Québec is available in local bookstores and online.