World War II Day by Day

Ottawa, Canada • December 30, 1941

On December 28, 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Chur­chill left Wash­ing­ton’s Union Station, the capital’s major train station, for Canada. Six days ear­lier Chur­chill and his mili­tary and civil­ian advisers had arrived in the United States aboard the Royal Navy’s newly com­mis­sioned battle­ship, HMS Duke of York, to meet with their Amer­i­can and Cana­dian counter­parts. The visit by the two heads of state and their entou­rage between Christ­mas and mid‑Janu­ary 1942 was the first stra­te­gic con­fer­ence Chur­chill and Pre­si­dent Franklin D. Roose­velt had had since the Japa­nese sur­prise attack on U.S. mili­tary instal­la­tions at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a little more than three weeks earlier.

The principal topics raised during December’s Arca­dia Con­fer­ence, also called the First Wash­ing­ton Con­fer­ence, con­cerned the for­ma­tion of a com­bined Allied com­mand (ABDA, or Amer­i­can-British-Dutch-Aus­tra­lian), the inclusion of the Soviet Union in the Lend-Lease program passed earlier in April by the U.S. Congress, assistance to U.S. forces besieged by Japa­nese forces in the Philip­pines, placing U.S. person­nel in the Danish pos­ses­sion of Ice­land in the mid‑Atlantic and in Great Britain, and the wording of the United Nations Decla­ra­tion, issued Janu­ary 1, 1942, which was a pledge by 26 Allied coun­tries to com­mit the bulk of their resources to sub­duing Nazi Germany first. The pledge fol­lowed on a deci­sion by Roose­velt, Chur­chill, and their staffs to pur­sue a “Europe first” stra­te­gy in exe­cuting the war against the Axis. (In real­ity, the U.S. con­cen­tra­ted most of its resources to halting, then reversing Japa­nese advances in the Paci­fic, deploying 70 per­cent of the U.S. Navy and all the Marine Corps in the Paci­fic. Not until 1944 was the major­ity of U.S. resources directed toward defeating Germany.)

In the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Chur­chill addressed Par­lia­ment on this date, Decem­ber 30, 1941, in a master­ful per­for­mance simi­lar to the one he gave before a joint ses­sion of the U.S. Con­gress seve­ral days ear­lier, except this time he spoke in English and French. Between passing from the Cana­dian House of Com­mons cham­ber to an ante­room, Chur­chill paused two min­utes before the cam­era of an Arme­nian-born Cana­dian. Yousuf Karsh’s iconic “bull­dog” photo of a scowling, bel­lig­erent, head-thrust-for­ward Chur­chill become one of the most memorable portrait images in history.

Winston Churchill’s Visit to the U.S. Congress and the Canadian Parliament, December 1941

Above: Yousuf Karsh’s iconic portrait of Churchill appeared on the cover of Life Magazine on May 21, 1945, several weeks after the uncon­ditional sur­render of Nazi Germany to the Allies. The image of Churchill brought Karsh inter­national promi­nence and is reputed to be the most repro­duced photo­graphic por­trait in history. Nice work for a man who claimed he was filled with dread meeting Chur­chill, whose scowl deepened when the photo­grapher dared to remove Churchill’s trademark cigar out of the great man’s mouth.

Churchill’s Address to a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, December 26, 1941: “Now We Are the Masters of Our Fate”