Atlantic Charter (1941): Churchill and Roosevelt's War Aims

The Atlantic Charter was a joint declaration issued on 14 August 1941 by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill after a secret meeting off the coast of Newfoundland. In eight short points it set out their hopes for the world after “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”, although the United States was not yet at war. The charter became a statement of Allied war aims and a founding text of the United Nations.

Background: Britain alone and a neutral America

By the summer of 1941 Britain had been at war with Germany for nearly two years. France had fallen in 1940, Britain had survived the Battle of Britain, and in June 1941 Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. The United States remained officially neutral, although public opinion was divided between isolationists and those who wanted to help Britain.

Roosevelt had already moved far from strict neutrality. In March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed the United States to supply weapons and materials to Britain and other countries fighting the Axis. Roosevelt and Churchill had corresponded for almost two years but had not met as heads of government.

Both leaders wanted a meeting. Churchill hoped to draw the United States closer to war. Roosevelt wanted to coordinate strategy, discuss the threat from Japan, and make sure Britain did not make secret territorial bargains, as the Allies had done during the First World War.

The Atlantic Conference

The meeting, codenamed Riviera, took place in Placentia Bay, near Argentia in Newfoundland, then a British dominion where the United States was building a naval base. Roosevelt left Washington on the presidential yacht, officially on a fishing holiday, and transferred at sea to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta. Churchill crossed the Atlantic in the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales.

The leaders met on 9 August 1941 and talked over four days. They were accompanied by senior military officers and advisers, including Sumner Welles of the US State Department, Harry Hopkins, and Sir Alexander Cadogan of the British Foreign Office. On Sunday 10 August Roosevelt joined a religious service on the deck of Prince of Wales, with British and American sailors mixed together, a scene Churchill later recalled with emotion.

The idea of a joint declaration came up early. Cadogan produced a first British draft, which Welles and Roosevelt revised. The main arguments were over trade, because the Americans wanted free access to markets while Britain wished to protect the preferential tariffs of its empire. A qualifying phrase about respecting “existing obligations” settled the matter.

The eight points

The final text, released to the press on 14 August 1941, contained a short preamble and eight principles:

1. Britain and the United States sought no territorial or other gains.
2. They wanted no territorial changes that did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
3. They respected the right of all peoples to choose their form of government, and wished to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those forcibly deprived of them.
4. They would try to give all states access, on equal terms, to trade and raw materials.
5. They supported economic cooperation to secure improved labour standards, economic progress and social security.
6. After the destruction of Nazi tyranny, they hoped for a peace in which all nations could live in safety and all people could live free from fear and want.
7. Such a peace should allow everyone to travel the seas without hindrance.
8. All nations should abandon the use of force; aggressor nations should be disarmed pending a wider and permanent system of general security.

The language echoed Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of January 1941 and, in some ways, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918.

Key people

• Franklin D. Roosevelt – US President, who wanted a statement of liberal principles without committing his country to war.
• Winston Churchill – British Prime Minister, who hoped the meeting would bring the United States closer to joining the fight.
• Sumner Welles – US Under Secretary of State, who did much of the American drafting and pressed for free trade.
• Sir Alexander Cadogan – Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, who wrote the first British draft.
• Harry Hopkins – Roosevelt’s close adviser, who had already visited both London and Moscow that summer.

Reactions and the United Nations

Reactions in Britain and occupied Europe were broadly positive, though some had hoped for a firmer American commitment. In the United States isolationists were suspicious of any joint war aims. The meeting also produced a joint message to Stalin offering aid to the Soviet Union.

On 24 September 1941 an inter-Allied meeting in London, attended by the Soviet Union and the governments-in-exile of occupied European countries, endorsed the principles of the charter. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, 26 nations signed the Declaration by United Nations in Washington on 1 January 1942. It pledged them to the “common program of purposes and principles” of the Atlantic Charter and to fight together until victory.

The phrase “United Nations” was then used for the wartime alliance and, in 1945, for the new international organisation that replaced the League of Nations. Many ideas in the charter, such as collective security, self-determination and economic cooperation, reappeared in the UN Charter.

The dispute over empire

The third point caused lasting controversy. On 9 September 1941 Churchill told the House of Commons that it applied primarily to the nations of Europe under Nazi rule, and was separate from British policy towards India, Burma and other parts of the empire. Roosevelt and many Americans took a broader view.

Colonial nationalists seized on the wider reading. In 1943 the African National Congress in South Africa issued a document called “Africans’ Claims in South Africa”, which applied the Atlantic Charter to Africans. Leaders in India, Burma and elsewhere made similar arguments, and the charter became part of the language of decolonisation after 1945.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Atlantic Charter was a signed treaty. It was a statement of common principles released to the press, not a treaty ratified by parliaments. No formal document signed by both men was produced at the meeting, and Roosevelt himself later said that no official signed copy existed.

Myth: the charter was immediately applied in full after the war. In practice the Allies, including the Soviet Union, made territorial changes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere that sat uneasily with its first two points, as the Yalta Conference showed.

Timeline

• 1941, 6 January: Roosevelt gives his “Four Freedoms” speech.
• 1941, 11 March: The Lend-Lease Act becomes law.
• 1941, 9 August: Roosevelt and Churchill meet in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.
• 1941, 10 August: Joint Sunday service aboard HMS Prince of Wales.
• 1941, 14 August: The joint declaration is published.
• 1941, 24 September: The Soviet Union and governments-in-exile endorse its principles in London.
• 1942, 1 January: 26 nations sign the Declaration by United Nations.
• 1945, 26 June: The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco.

Why it matters

The Atlantic Charter turned a meeting between two leaders into a public statement of what the war was for. It tied the United States to Britain politically months before Pearl Harbor, gave the Allies a common language of war aims, and helped shape both the United Nations and the post-war arguments over self-determination and empire.