The First Washington Conference, also known as the Arcadia Conference (ARCADIA was the code name used for the conference), was held in Washington, D.C. from December 22, 1941 to January 14, 1942. It was the first meeting on military strategy between the heads of government of the United Kingdom and the United States following the United States' entry into World War II. The major delegations were headed by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Arcadia Conference also had a wider international diplomatic and political aspect concerning the terms of the post-war world, which followed from the Atlantic Charter, agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941. On January 1, 1942, 26 governments attending the conference agreed to the Declaration by United Nations.
Although Roosevelt was under some domestic pressure to concentrate the United States war effort on Japan because of its attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, Adolf Hitler's declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941 made this decision more politically acceptable to opinion in the United States than it would otherwise have been. With these developments, the United States government agreed that to win the war, the prime objective was the defeat of Nazi Germany. This was termed the Europe first strategy. It was also agreed at the conference to combine military resources under one command in the European Theater of Operations (ETO).
Famous quotes containing the words arcadia and/or conference:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Politics is still the man’s game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then—but only occasionally—one is present at some secret conference or other. But it’s not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)