wait to see what will happen to us next". Permanent Under-Secretary In 1938, Cadogan replaced Robert Vansittart as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. He considered his predecessor's style to be emotional and disordered compared to Cadogan's terse and efficient manner. There were, however, no significant divergences in policy although Vansittart's detestation of the dictators was more publicly known. Cadogan served in this capacity from 1938 to 1946 and represented Britain at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944, where he became well acquainted with Edward Stettinius and Andrei Gromyko. His work there was greatly respected. Winston Churchill told Parliament, "His Majesty's Government could have had no abler representative that Sir Alexander Cadogan and there is no doubt that a most valuable task has been discharged." Cadogan also accompanied Churchill to the Atlantic Conference in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, aboard the HMS Prince of Wales, acting as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in dress rehearsals to help him prepare. In preparation for the Yalta Conference, Cadogan expended a great deal of effort attempting to bring the "London Poles" under Stanislaw Mikolajczyk around to the idea of losing their eastern territories to the Soviet Union. After 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were shot by the Soviet Red Army in the Katyn massacre, Cadogan wrote in his diary on 18 June 1943 that "years before Katyn the Soviet Government made a habit of butchering their own citizens by the 10,000s, and if we could fling ourselves into their arms in 1941, I don't know that Katyn makes our position more delicate. The blood of Russians cries as loud to heaven as that of Poles. But it's very nasty. How can Poles ever live amicably alongside Russians, and how can we discuss with Russians execution of German 'war criminals', when we have condoned this?" He was also involved in discussions about the composition of provisional governments in Yugoslavia and Greece. Cadogan then accompanied the British delegation to the Yalta Conference in 1945. David Dilks, the editor of his published diaries, notes, "He looked on Yalta much as he had looked at Munich. Both agreements entailed serious injury to the rights of states which could not defend themselves against large and predatory neighbours; both reflected the military and geographical facts; neither was a matter for pride or for fierce self-reproach, since it hardly lay in British power at the material time to do other; both looked better