Arcadia

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill formulated allied grand strategy at a series of high-level conferences held in Washington, DC, Casablanca, Quebec, Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. At the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, the Russian leader, Joseph Stalin, also played a major role. Under policy guidance from their national leaders, the newly formed US Joint Chiefs of Staff and their British counterparts, known collectively as the Combined Chiefs of Staff, hammered out the military details of allied strategy. The minutes of the Combined Chiefs' meeting at the major conferences touch on virtually every policy and strategy issue of World War II, from initial troop deployments to counter Axis aggression, through the debates about the location and timing of the principal Anglo-American offensives, to the settlement of post-war occupation boundaries. Besides being an invaluable primary source on the early years of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and on the planning and conduct of World War II, these documents also offer insights for today on the problems of managing a global coalition war. Originally highly classified documents, the minutes were declassified on October 3, 1973. ARCADIA (Washington, D.C., 24 December 1941-14 January 1942). Roosevelt, Churchill, and the U.S. and British Chiefs of Staff conducted their first post-Pearl Harbor strategy conference. The political leaders drafted and signed the Declaration of the United Nations. The military chiefs discussed an invasion of North Africa, completed arrangements for American forces to relieve British troops in Iceland and Northern Ireland, made plans for American reinforcement of the South Pacific, and set up a combined allied command for Southeast Asia.