| Summary: | 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 by JCS Regrading Memo 52-73 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. POST-ARCADIA (Washington, DC, and London, 23 January 1941-19 May 1942). At twenty meetings, the Combined Chiefs of Staff worked out the details of implementing the ARCADIA decisions. They dealt with force deployments to the Pacific and Great Britain, command arrangements, and the allocation of shipping and supplies. The Combined Chiefs discussed the U.S. relief of British forces in Iceland and Northern Ireland, arrangements for the American buildup in the British Isles, and the availability of landing craft for possible invasions of the European continent in 1942 and 1943.
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