Book Description

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. TRIDENT (Washington, D.C., 15-25 May 1943). Principal participants were Roosevelt, Churchill, their military chiefs of staff, and Generals Wavell, Chennault, and Stilwell from the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater. The Americans secured British agreement to a cross-Channel invasion with a target date of 1 May 1944. The allies reaffirmed their commitment to the strategic air offensive as preparation for the invasion. They agreed to continue the Mediterranean offensive with the aim of knocking Italy out of the war. The Americans won support for a stepped-up offensive in the Pacific, and the allies discussed operations to assist China.