It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter.
The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least across the Atlantic Ocean. Marking out the paths of convoys used to supply Britain even before this date, these carefully placed pins acquired even greater significance when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Charter in a secret meeting aboard the USS Augusta on 14 August 1941. With a document of more symbolic than tangible immediate effect, Churchill thus secured the seed of what he would later call the Special Relationship. This was several months before Pearl Harbor made America’s direct involvement in the War inevitable.
Recently published in paperback, Churchill’s Bunker, a fascinating history of the Cabinet War Rooms, is the final book of much-respected historian Richard Holmes, who died last April.
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