"Developments from autumn 1941 to spring 1942" Topic

Allied strategy and controversies, 1940–42

"In the year following the collapse of France in June 1940, British strategists, relying as they could on supplies from the nonbelligerent United States, were concerned first with home defense, second with the security of the British positions in the Middle East, and third with the development of a war of attrition against the Axis powers, pending the buildup of adequate forces for an invasion of the European continent. For the United States, President Roosevelt's advisers, from November 1940, based their strategic plans on the "Europe first" principle; that is to say, if the United States became engaged in war simultaneously against Germany, Italy, and Japan, merely defensive operations should be conducted in the Pacific (to protect at least the Alaska–Hawaii–Panama triangle) while an offensive was being mounted in Europe.

Japan's entry into the war terminated the nonbelligerency of the United States. The three weeks' conference, named Arcadia, that Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers opened in Washington, D.C., on December 22, 1941, reassured the British about U.S. maintenance of the "Europe first" principle and also produced two plans: a tentative one, code-named "Sledgehammer," for the buildup of an offensive force in Great Britain, in case it should be decided to invade France; and another, code-named "Super-Gymnast," for combining a British landing behind the German forces in Libya (already planned under the code name "Gymnast") with a U.S. landing near Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The same conference furthermore created the machinery of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, where the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was to be linked continuously, through delegates in Washington, D.C., with the newly established U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization, so that all aspects of the war could be studied in concert. It was on January 1, 1942, during the Arcadia Conference, that the Declaration of the United Nations was signed in Washington, D.C., as a collective statement of the Allies' war aims in sequel to the Atlantic Charter…."
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Amicalement
Armand

Interesting article.

For those of us who have studied the actual historical timeline, it is often difficult to bear in mind how many options and potential paths were, or even had to be, considered.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Glad you enjoyed it my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand