Bermuda Conferences

BERMUDA CONFERENCES

BERMUDA CONFERENCES. During the twentieth century, officials from the United States and Great Britain met several times on the British-owned Atlantic island of Bermuda to discuss diplomatic issues. The first and most notorious Bermuda conference was held from 19 to 29 April 1943, when pressure from the news media, politicians, and religious leaders in both countries led the British and American governments to try to work out a common response to the Nazi murder of European Jews. The two governments selected Bermuda for a conference on refugees because wartime regulations restricted access to the island, assuring that no demonstrations or unwanted lobbying would take place. Rather than agreeing to take urgent measures to provide havens for Jewish refugees, the mid-level diplomats in attendance agreed that great difficulties would be presented if Nazi Germany released large numbers of Jews to the Allies. They avoided discussion of bringing pressure to bear upon countries allied with Germany, delivering food parcels, opening Palestine to additional Jewish immigration, or other rescue and relief efforts. Instead, each side made a point of touting its own actions taken on behalf of needy civilians; the United States even listed its incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans as evidence of steps taken to shelter refugees.

The main outcome of the Bermuda conference was to arrange the evacuation of two thousand Jewish refugees from Spain—and to dash hopes that the Allies might undertake more ambitious efforts. In despair at the paucity of results, a Jewish member of the Polish government-in-exile in London, Szmul Zygielbojm, committed suicide. Scholars generally share the assessment of Rabbi Israel Goldstein, who said: "The job of the Bermuda Conference apparently was not to rescue victims of Nazi terror, but to rescue our State Department and the British Foreign Office."

On 11 February 1946, American and British officials signed an agreement at Bermuda governing aviation between the two countries. International rules establishing pilot licensing standards, aircraft standards, aircraft safety, and territorial overflight regulations had been established during a meeting of representatives from fifty-three nations in Chicago two years earlier, but specific questions of access to national markets for individual carriers, routes, and capacity were left to bilateral negotiation. The 1946 agreement, known as Bermuda I, was the first such bilateral agreement; its principles of restricting service to protect flag carriers served as a model for other countries to follow until they were replaced by open skies policies in the 1990s in many markets. Air travel between the United States and the United Kingdom, however, remained tightly regulated through the end of the twentieth century.

From 4 to 8 December 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, British prime minister Winston Churchill, French premier Joseph Laniel, and French foreign minister Georges Bidault met at Bermuda to discuss issues relating to international security. The American officials urged their French counterparts not to oppose the incorporation of West Germany into the western alliance. Other topics under discussion included British control of the Suez Canal, the Vietnamese revolt against French rule in Indochina, and the end of the Korean War, but no major agreements were signed.

In January 1957, President Eisenhower invited British prime minister Harold Macmillan to a meeting designed to improve relations recently strained over U.S. criticism of the British role in the Suez Crisis. From 20 to 24 March, the two leaders met at Bermuda to demonstrate publicly their friendship—they had served together in North Africa during World War II—and to discuss privately their differences over Middle East issues. Eisenhower pressed Macmillan to set aside British bitterness toward Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser and recognize that restoring close relations with Egypt while working to isolate Nasser internationally would be more likely than outright hostility to serve Anglo-American interests in the region. Eisenhower and Dulles also urged the British to consider Saudi Arabia's King Saud as a potential rival to Nasser. The British, not prepared to give up their claims against Egypt, demurred and the distance between the two countries' positions was made clear a year later when the Eisenhower Doctrine established a unilateral role for the United States in defending its interests in the Middle East. Macmillan and Eisenhower did, however, reach an accord on security issues, agreeing that sixty American Thor missiles would be based in Great Britain, within range of the Soviet Union and under joint Anglo-American control.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashton, Nigel John. Eisenhower, Macmillan, and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955–59. New York: St. Martins' Press, 1996.

London, Louise. Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees, and the Holocaust. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York: New Press, 1984.

Max Paul Friedman

See also Eisenhower Doctrine ; Great Britain, Relations with ; Suez Crisis .