The Arcadia Conference

On 22 December 1941, two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the British battleship Duke of York dropped anchor in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Prime Minister Winston Churchill came ashore, flew to Washington, and that same evening was sitting at table with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House. So began the conference code-named Arcadia, which lasted until 14 January 1942. Its participants confirmed that Germany was the principal enemy, created a joint British-American command body, set up the first Allied command in the Far East and prepared a declaration that was signed on 1 January 1942 by the states thenceforth called the United Nations. On 26 December, midway through the talks, Churchill addressed both houses of Congress.

Arcadia is often called the first official meeting of British and American political and military leaders. This needs qualifying. Staff officers of the two countries had already conferred in Washington from January to March 1941, and Churchill and Roosevelt, together with their chiefs of staff, had met in August 1941 in Placentia Bay, where they proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. Arcadia was, however, the first meeting of the two leaders and their staffs as allies at war – the first of the wartime conferences at which decisions on a common strategy were taken.

A voyage across the winter Atlantic

Churchill greeted the news of Pearl Harbor with relief that he made no attempt to hide: now that America was in the war, the war, in his view, was won. He was worried, however, that the Americans, shaken by the disaster in Hawaii, might turn all their strength against Japan and cut supplies to Britain and the USSR. According to his memoirs, as early as 8 December, the day on which both countries formally entered the war against Japan, he proposed a meeting to Roosevelt. The President wondered whether a crossing of the Atlantic in winter was not too dangerous, but agreed. When on 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, Churchill’s fear of two separate wars receded, but the need for a common plan only grew.

In mid-December the Prime Minister sailed from the Clyde in the new battleship Duke of York, sister ship of the Prince of Wales, which had been sunk off the coast of Malaya a few days earlier. He was accompanied by the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook; the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Dudley Pound; the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal; and Field Marshal John Dill, who was just handing over the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff to General Alan Brooke and was to remain in Washington. Also on board was the Prime Minister’s personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson, later Lord Moran. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was at that time in Moscow, where Joseph Stalin was demanding that the British recognise the Soviet frontiers of June 1941, and thus also the annexation of Poland’s eastern territories. Eden refused to make any commitment and referred the matter for agreement with the allies.

The voyage across a stormy ocean took more than a week. The escorting destroyers could not keep up with the battleship, and for part of the way the Duke of York sailed alone. Churchill used the time to prepare, with the chiefs of staff, memoranda on the overall strategy of the war, which in Washington became the starting point for the talks. When he arrived at the airfield in Washington on the evening of 22 December, Roosevelt himself was waiting for him. The Prime Minister stayed at the White House, in a room opposite that of Harry Hopkins, the President’s closest adviser, and for three weeks he shared his host’s days and nights, meals, maps and conversations into the small hours.

The first days at the White House

On 23 December Roosevelt and Churchill held their first meeting with the chiefs of staff of both countries, and in the afternoon a joint press conference in the President’s office. When journalists at the back called out that they could not see the Prime Minister, Churchill climbed onto a chair, to a storm of applause. From 24 December the British and American chiefs of staff met regularly in the Federal Reserve building on Constitution Avenue. By 14 January they had met twelve times. The American side was represented by the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall; the chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold; the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark; and Admiral Ernest King, just appointed Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. The Army planners were assisted at the time by Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, summoned to Washington a few days after Pearl Harbor.

At dusk on 24 December the two leaders lit the National Christmas Tree on the South Portico of the White House. Churchill told the crowd that he was spending Christmas far from his country and his family, yet could not truthfully say that he felt far from home. On Christmas Day they went together to a service at a Methodist church. That same day, after more than two weeks of fighting, Hong Kong surrendered. The news from the fronts was bad throughout the conference: the Japanese were advancing in Malaya, had landed on Luzon and Borneo, captured Wake Island on 23 December and entered Manila on 2 January. Only from Russia, where the Red Army was conducting its counter-offensive at Moscow, and from Libya, where in Operation Crusader the British had pushed Rommel back from Tobruk, did good news arrive.

“Germany first”

The first document of the conference was a British memorandum on common strategy, presented on 22 December and designated WW-1. Its central idea was this: Germany remained the principal enemy, and its defeat was the key to victory; once Germany was defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow. The powers fighting the Reich were to increase arms production and build up their armies, while in the meantime defending their own territory and their most important positions, tightening the ring around Germany and wearing it down by bombing, blockade and subversive operations, until the time came for the decisive blow, expected in 1943 at the earliest. Towards Japan the intention for the time being was only to hold the positions essential for waging the war against Germany.

The American chiefs of staff accepted this principle without much argument, because it was their own. As early as November 1940 Admiral Stark had submitted to the President a memorandum, the so-called Plan Dog, according to which, in the event of a two-ocean war, Germany should be defeated first while the United States stood on the defensive in the Pacific. On that basis the staff officers of the two countries had agreed the ABC-1 plan in March 1941. Pearl Harbor put this decision to the test: American public opinion demanded revenge on Japan, and the Navy, under King, wanted to concentrate its forces in the Pacific. Hitler’s declaration of war, however, settled the political question, and Marshall and Stark confirmed that the Atlantic and Europe remained the main theatre. The final version of the document, adopted at the end of December, became the basis of Western Allied strategy until the end of the war. The agreement was secret and was not made public.

A unified command and the Combined Chiefs of Staff

The most important military question turned out to be that of command. On 25 December Marshall put to the British a proposal that in each theatre of war all the Allies’ land, sea and air forces should be subordinate to a single commander. Without this, he argued, resources would be dispersed and each ally would defend its own possessions. The first to be dealt with was to be the area stretching from Burma through Malaya and the Dutch East Indies to the Philippines and northern Australia, where British, American, Dutch and Australian forces were fighting. Churchill and his chiefs of staff doubted whether one man could direct operations over so vast an area. They were won over when Marshall proposed that the commander should be a Briton, General Archibald Wavell, then commanding in India. To the British this was proof that the Americans did not intend to draw forces away from Singapore for the defence of the Philippines.

Thus was born the ABDA command (from the initials of the countries: American-British-Dutch-Australian). On hearing of his appointment Wavell is said to have remarked that he had heard of men having to hold the baby, but this was twins. He took up the command on Java on 15 January 1942. It was also agreed that Chiang Kai-shek would be Allied Supreme Commander in the China theatre, which also took in Thailand and Indochina.

To whom was Wavell to answer? Roosevelt, on King’s advice, inclined towards setting up a separate council in Washington with the participation of Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The British wanted strategy to be decided by the chiefs of staff of the two great powers. In the end the ABDA commander answered to a British-American committee, and out of this arrangement grew the most important organisational achievement of the conference: the Combined Chiefs of Staff. It consisted of the American chiefs of staff and representatives of the British chiefs of staff in Washington, with Dill at the head of the British mission. The conference also fixed a terminology that lasted throughout the war: the word “joint” would henceforth mean cooperation between the services of a single country, and “combined” cooperation between allies. The Combined Chiefs of Staff formally began work at the end of January 1942 and until 1945 prepared all the most important military decisions of the Western Allies. The Dutch and the Australians, who did not sit on it, accepted this with displeasure.

North Africa, Ireland and Iceland

Churchill brought to Washington his own idea for 1942: a landing in French North Africa, in Morocco and Algeria, which, together with an offensive from Egypt, would make it possible to seize the whole coast and open up the Mediterranean. The British called the plan Gymnast, and its enlarged British-American version Super-Gymnast. Roosevelt was well disposed towards it, the American military rather less so. The study of the operation ended without a decision: there were not enough ships, and reinforcements for the Pacific were more urgent. The plan resurfaced, however, in July 1942 and was carried out in November of that year as Operation Torch.

What was agreed was the dispatch of American troops to Northern Ireland, where they were to replace British divisions needed elsewhere, and to Iceland, where they were to relieve the British garrison and an American Marine brigade. The first American soldiers came ashore in Belfast on 26 January 1942. Arnold announced that American bombers would be sent to England to join the air offensive against the Reich.

Industry and supplies

As important as strategy were the numbers. Beaverbrook, who since the autumn had been negotiating supplies for the USSR, argued to Roosevelt and Hopkins that American production plans were far too modest for the needs of a war against three great powers. The President accepted his arguments, and on 6 January 1942, in his State of the Union address, he announced targets that seemed unrealistic at the time: 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and 125,000 in 1943; 45,000 tanks in 1942 and 75,000 in 1943; six million deadweight tons of new merchant shipping in 1942 and ten million in 1943.

For the joint management of resources it was agreed to set up combined boards: for munitions assignment, chaired in Washington by Hopkins, for raw materials and for shipping. The conference also confirmed that, despite the war with Japan, the United States and Britain would honour the commitments they had made to the Soviet Union in Moscow in October. In the first days after Pearl Harbor shipments had briefly been halted, but Roosevelt ordered them resumed.

The speech to Congress

On 26 December Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress in the Senate chamber of the Capitol. The speech, lasting about half an hour, was broadcast on the radio. At the outset the Prime Minister, whose mother, Jennie Jerome, was American, joked that if his father had been American and his mother British, instead of the other way round, he might have got there on his own. The chamber responded with laughter and applause.

Then he spoke about the war. He admitted that hard months lay ahead for the Allies and that further losses awaited them in Asia, but stressed that the British Empire, which the Germans had regarded eighteen months earlier as broken and ruined, was now incomparably stronger. He expressed the hope that the end of 1942 would find the Allies in a markedly better position, and that 1943 would enable them to seize the initiative on a large scale. Of the Japanese, who had attacked the United States and the British Empire at the same time, he asked: “What kind of a people do they think we are?” – and went on to say that they would never cease to fight them until they had been taught a lesson that neither they nor the world would ever forget. That passage was greeted with an ovation. In closing Churchill expressed the hope that the British and American peoples would in future walk together side by side “in majesty, in justice and in peace”. As he left, he gave the V sign.

On the night of 26–27 December, while trying to open a stuck window in his room at the White House, he felt short of breath and a dull pain behind the breastbone radiating to his left arm. According to Lord Moran’s diary, published in 1966, the doctor was in no doubt that these were symptoms of coronary insufficiency. The treatment at the time was six weeks in bed, and news that the Prime Minister was seriously ill could have damaged the Allied cause. Moran therefore told Churchill only that he had been overworking, and revealed his diagnosis to no one. Later students of Churchill’s medical history doubt whether this was a heart attack or coronary disease: the cardiologist John Parkinson, who examined the Prime Minister in February 1942, found no changes in his heart.

Ottawa and the Declaration by United Nations

On 28 December Churchill travelled by train to Canada, where he was the guest of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. On 30 December he addressed the parliament in Ottawa. He recalled that in June 1940 French generals had predicted that within three weeks England would have “her neck wrung like a chicken”, and added: “Some chicken! Some neck!”

Back in Washington, on 1 January 1942, in the President’s study, Roosevelt, Churchill, the Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov and the Chinese Foreign Minister Song Ziwen (T.V. Soong) signed the Declaration by United Nations. The next day representatives of 22 other states added their signatures, among them the Polish ambassador in Washington, Jan Ciechanowski. The signatories accepted the principles of the Atlantic Charter, undertook to employ all their military and economic resources against the members of the Tripartite Pact with which they were at war, and pledged not to conclude a separate armistice or peace with them. The name “United Nations” was Roosevelt’s idea. The text had been worked on since the first days of the conference: Litvinov agreed to a mention of religious freedom, the British secured the inclusion of India among the signatories, and the Free French, whom Washington did not recognise as a government, did not sign the declaration.

At the beginning of January Churchill rested for a few days in Florida, then returned to Washington for the final talks. On 14 January he flew to Bermuda, and from there by flying boat across the Atlantic to England, where he landed on 17 January.

Place in the war

Arcadia turned the cooperation of two states, one of which had until recently been neutral, into a wartime alliance with institutions of its own. The Combined Chiefs of Staff, the resource boards and the principle of unified command in each theatre of war lasted until 1945 and had no counterpart on the side of the Axis powers, which never agreed on a common strategy. The first experiment with a unified command ended in defeat: after the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 ABDA was dissolved on 25 February, and within a few weeks the Japanese occupied the whole area it was supposed to defend. The principle of a single commander nevertheless proved itself later, when Eisenhower commanded the invasion of North Africa and then that of Normandy.

The “Germany first” principle survived the pressure of public opinion, the demands of the US Navy and the disputes over where and when to strike at the Reich. Its implementation was debated at subsequent conferences: in Washington in June 1942, at Casablanca in January 1943 and at Tehran at the end of 1943, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin sat at the same table for the first time. The declaration of 1 January 1942 gave its name to the organisation that the victors founded in San Francisco in 1945. Poland, which had signed it as one of the first 26 states, was among the founding members of the UN, although its government-in-exile, which had put its signature to the declaration in 1942, was by then no longer recognised by the great powers.