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ten. The Chiefs of Staff delivered their comments upon Churchill’s long strategic memoranda, which were discussed at a series of meetings under his chairmanship. They opposed a firm commitment to opening the major Second Front in Europe in 1943. Germany, they said, must first be weakened by intensified and protracted bombing. They urged acknowledgement of the fact that “the Japanese will be able to run wild in the Western Pacific” until Germany and Italy were disposed of. Churchill, who was undergoing one of his periodic bouts of scepticism about bombing, resisted any declaration of excessive faith in its potential. He warned against expecting the Americans to take as insouciant a view of Japanese Pacific advances as the Chiefs proposed. He said that it was essential to promote an offensive vision, rather than merely to advocate countermeasures against Axis thrusts. All this was very wise.

On December 22, Duke of York at last stood into Hampton Roads. The British party landed, and Churchill and his immediate staff boarded a plane for the short flight to Washington. Through its windows, they peered down through gathering darkness, fascinated by the bright lights of America’s capital after the gloom of blacked-out London. There to meet the prime minister at the airport was Franklin Roosevelt, whose guest he became for the next three weeks. If this was a tense time for the British delegation, it was also an intensely happy one for Churchill. Who could deny his deserving of it, after all he had endured during the previous eighteen months? That first Anglo-American summit was code-named Arcadia, the paradise of ancient Greek shepherds. To the prime minister, Washington indeed seemed paradisiacal. Installed in the White House, he enthused to Clementine: “All is very good indeed420; and my plans go through. The Americans are magnificent in their breadth of view.”

From his first meeting with Roosevelt, he emphasised the danger that Hitler might seize Morocco, and thus the urgent need that Allied forces should preempt him. Less convincingly, he cited the French battleships Jean Bart and Richelieu, sheltering in North Africa, as “a real prize.” He was galled when Dill suggested that shipping shortages might make it impossible to convey an American army across the Atlantic in 1942, and swept this argument aside. The two national leaders and their Chiefs of Staff discussed, then dismissed, arguments for creating a war council on which all the Allies and British dominions would be represented. It was agreed that while the dominions should be consulted, policy must be made between the Big Three.

This latter outcome was inevitable, but sowed the seeds of future unhappiness around the Empire, and especially in Australia. While in Washington, Churchill learned of the crippling of the battleships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth by Italian human torpedoes in Alexandria Harbour, together with the loss of two cruisers at sea. He was furious to hear that his deputy prime minister had informed the Australians and Canadians of the drastic weakening of the Mediterranean Fleet. “I greatly regret that this vital secret should be spread about the world in this fashion,” he cabled Attlee. “We do not give our most secret information to the Dominions.”

The British and American Chiefs of Staff held twelve joint meetings. To the relief of Churchill and his delegation, the U.S. leadership immediately confirmed the conclusion of earlier Anglo-American staff talks, that the Allies should pursue the policy of “Germany first.” It is sometimes insufficiently recognised how far Allied decisions for 1942 were influenced by shipping imperatives. The British were shocked, in the first weeks after Pearl Harbor, to discover how few bottoms would be available in the year ahead, before the huge U.S. “Liberty Ship” building programme achieved maturity. Britain required thirty million tons of imports a year to sustain itself, which had to be borne across the Atlantic by merchant fleets much diminished by sinkings.

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