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Категория: Английский язык
In the year following the collapse of France in June 1940 President Roosevelt's advisers, from November 1940, based their strategic plans on the "Europe first" principle: that is to say, if the United States became engaged in war simultaneously against Germany
, Italy, and Japan, merely defensive operations should be conducted in the Pacific (to protect at least the Alaska-Hawaii-Panama triangle) while an offensive was being mounted in Europe.
Japan's entry into the war terminated the nonbelligerency of the United States. The first American-British conference concerning the war, named Arcadia, opened in Washington, D.C., on December 22, 1941. The USA reassured the British about their maintenance of the "Europe first" principle. They also produced two plans: a tentative one, code-named "Sledgehammer", for the buildup of an offensive force in Great Britain, in case it should be decided to invade France; and another, code-named "Super-Gymnast", for combining a British landing behind the German forces in Libya (already planned under the code name "Gymnast") with a U.S. landing near Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The same conference furthermore formed the Combined Chiefs of Staff, where the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was to be linked, through delegates in Washington, D.C., with the newly established U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization, so that all aspects of the war could be studied together. It was on January 1, 1942, during the Arcadia Conference, that the Declaration of the United Nations was signed in Washington, D.C., as a collective statement of the Allies' war aims in sequel to the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt realized the fact that the Soviet Union was bearing the greatest burden of the war against Germany; and this inclined him to listen to the arguments of his Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization for a change of plan. After some hesitation, he sent his confidant Harry Hopkins and his army chief of staff General George C. Marshall to London in April 1942 to suggest the scrapping of "Super-Gymnast" in favor of "Bolero", namely the concentration of forces in Great Britain for a landing in Europe (perhaps at Brest or at Cherbourg) in the autumn: then "Roundup", an invasion of France by 30 U.S. and 18 British divisions, could follow in April 1943. The British agreed but soon began to doubt the practicability of attempt to invade France at such an early date.
Visiting Roosevelt again in the latter part of June 1942, Churchill pressed for a revised and enlarged joint operation in North Africa before the end of the year, instead of a buildup for the invasion of France. In July it was decided that "Torch", a combined Anglo-U.S. operation of invading North Africa, should begin the following autumn.
