World War 2 Inter-Allied Conferences
Abstract
During World War 2, 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 2, 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 2, 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. The Joint History Office is publishing these minutes on CD-ROM to make them readily available to present-day military planners, faculty and students at the joint and service schools, historians, and the general public.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2003
- Accession Number
- AD1211123