But to be too firm, too unyielding, is to prolong the conflict or worsen it. Franklin Roosevelt had universally angered almost every one of the Allied generals at Casablanca when he told the media that he would accept only one outcome from the Germans: Unconditional Surrender. He hadn’t been thinking of policy, the words had just popped out in a press conference, but he could not take them back. The people who actually had to do the cleaning up, who needed to fight the war to a close, knew that this kind of language would only make the job harder. It had deprived Germany of a way to end the
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