Subscribe now and receive weekly newsletters with educational materials, new courses, interesting posts, popular books, and much more!
Articles
How Arcadia Blueprinted History’s Greatest Wartime Coalition
John F. Shortal, Code Name Arcadia: The First Wartime Conference of Churchill and Roosevelt. Volume 167, Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series. (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2021), 320 pages, $45, Amazon $16.13, Kindle $15.34.
The basic building blocks of history are primary sources, mined for monographs. These are narrow in scope, very detailed, and based on exhaustive research and primary sources. Government archives and personal papers are included, the basis of later, more general accounts. John Shortal, a retired brigadier general, has written a very good, monographic account of the December 1941-January 1942 “Arcadia” conference in Washington. It was the first wartime meeting of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and their respective military chiefs.
Although it has commanded less historical attention than some of the war’s later “summits,” Arcadia was very important. It brought together for the first time the small group that, sustainably unchanged, would manage the largest, most complex coalition war in recorded history—and first impressions are crucial.
Equally important, Arcadia shaped the controlling machinery and outlined the grand strategy for pursuing the war. Constructing an alliance of military-civil bureaucracy can make for dull reading at moments. But without it, effective Anglo-American cooperation and coordination would have been much harder, if not impossible. The war would then probably have been lengthened.
Impedimenta
It is important to remember the context within which Arcadia took place. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had pitchforked the U.S., poorly prepared mentally and militarily, into a global war. Its primary partner was a nation that, historically, many Americans deeply distrusted. The British had fought an essentially defensive war since June 1940. They had little in the way of success to show, deepening American suspicion of British competence. The British did however have an experienced and smoothly running machine for running their national war effort. By contrast, current American arrangements were very weak. How could all of this be harmonized into a combined war-making apparatus—and what would be the coalition’s strategy?
Enter Winston Churchill. Since becoming prime minister he’d believed that American support and eventual participation would be critical to victory. In spring 1941, British staff planners had declared American entry into the war vital. But while American support would slowly increase in 1940-41, U.S. entry had seemed as far away as ever in autumn 1941—to Churchill’s frustration, and that of many in Britain.
Then the Japanese, in a stroke that combined tactical brilliance and strategic madness, solved Churchill’s problem. His relief was enormous: “We had won the war…Britain would live.” A new anxiety now arose. Under the impact of Pearl Harbor, would the United States focus its efforts on the Pacific? Would Americans forget the tentative agreement of “Germany First” in Anglo-American staff conversations the preceding spring? Churchill needed that to remain central to alliance strategy. The already unfolding disaster in Malaya made no difference—the focus must remain on Germany. And so he insisted on an early visit to Roosevelt and his military chiefs.
Internal conflicts
While Churchill had a smoothly functioning planning machine, American organization for coalition war was in a state of flux. A talented British staff officer, after a visit to Washington, had observed that as bad as inter-service relations were in London, they paled next to the poisonous Army-Navy rivalry in Washington. The U.S. Navy wanted to concentrate on Japan, which it had seen as a potential enemy for decades. (Indeed, the Pacific war would always remain the focus of the U.S. Navy and its own army, the Marine Corps). George Marshall’s U.S. Army backed “Germany First.” Only in Europe could the huge army he was planning be deployed, and dominant.
American service chiefs had little experience of or, initially, aptitude for joint endeavor. Facing the much more experienced British team that supported the British chiefs of staff and the well-staffed advocacy of the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, it is not surprising that “Germany First” was reaffirmed. (The fact that Germany was obviously more dangerous helped.) At Arcadia began the process of creating an effective U.S. counterpart to the British organization for formulating and executing strategy. This was a crucial step toward America’s emergence as the globally dominant military power it became by 1945.
Arcadia as model
Arcadia marked the birth of the American defense machinery that by 1943 dominated the formulation of coalition strategy. It also created the template for future allied theater commands. While Churchill prioritized American participation in the European war, he also hoped for help in the Far East. The defense of Malaya and Singapore was collapsing. That endangered the Pacific Dominions, Australia and New Zealand. Both were heavily committed in the Mediterranean, where three of Australia’s four divisions were serving (the fourth was in Malaya) together with New Zealand’s only division. Failure to sustain the defense of Malaya could have serious repercussions on imperial strategy and Dominion relations.
But the Americans made it clear that they had no interest in Singapore. They had already written off the Philippines. Yet both sides had to be seen doing something to confront Japan. So the Americans proposed an integrated theater command to cover everything from Sumatra to New Guinea. Marshall, who knew impending disaster when he saw it, suggested a British commander-in-chief with an American deputy and a trio of service commanders.
The favored British model was command by committee—a troika of service commanders, as in the Middle East. But the Americans prevailed and ABDA (America-British-Dutch-Australian) command was created. It lasted barely two months and accomplished nothing. How could it without resources, and facing a skillful enemy who held the initiative? But it provided the template for all future allied commands.
The grand coalition
Thus the Arcadia Conference shaped the machinery for future Anglo-American collaboration in strategy and command. From then on, these were coordinated by the combined Chiefs of Staff, the pinnacle of an elaborate bureaucracy, created by Arcadia, that ran the most successful coalition war in history. It also enabled the Americans incrementally to dominate the strategy of that coalition.
A monograph on the construction of a civil-military bureaucracy may seem, at first glance, like a rather unexciting read. But John Shortal has given us a clear account of how the machine that won the Second World War was created. It was launched at speed, under highly stressful circumstances. This is a study very much worth reading.
The author
Dr. Callahan is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware and a leading scholar of the Indian Army in the two World Wars. He taught at the University for 38 years and was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, where an annual student prize bears his name. Among his books are Churchill and His Generals (2007) and Churchill: Retreat from Empire (1997).