page 3&4

page 3

listen to the Christmas speech here
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/lear...ng-1941-listen

page 4

In the 1940 presidental election campaign Roosevelt promised to keep America out of the war. He stated, "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Nevertheless, FDR wanted to support Britain and believed the United States should serve as a "great arsenal of democracy." Churchill pleaded "Give us the tools and we'll finish the job." In January 1941, following up on his campaign pledge and the prime minister's appeal for arms, Roosevelt proposed to Congress a new military aid bill.
The plan was to "lend-lease or otherwise dispose of arms" and other supplies needed by any country whose security was vital to the defense of the United States. This Lend-Lease Act, proposed by FDR in January 1941 and passed by Congress in March, went a long way toward solving the concerns of both Great Britain's desperate need for supplies and America's desire to appear neutral. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the debate over lend-lease, "We are buying . . . not lending. We are buying our own security while we prepare. By our delay during the past six years, while Germany was preparing, we find ourselves unprepared and unarmed, facing a thoroughly prepared and armed potential enemy."
In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met for the first of nine face-to-face conferences during the war. The four-day meeting aboard a ship anchored off the coast of Newfoundland at Argentia Bay was devoted to an agreement on war aims and a vision for the future. The document created at this meeting was the The Atlantic Charter, an agreement on war aims between besieged Great Britain and the neutral United States. The charter set forth the concepts of self-determination, end to colonialism, freedom of the seas, and the improvement of living and working conditions for all people. Many of the ideas were similar to those proposed by Wilson's Fourteen Points, but not accepted by our allies at the Versailles Conference at the close of World War I.
From 1941 when they first met until FDR's death in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill sustained a close personal and professional relationship. Playwright Robert Sherwood later wrote, "It would be an exaggeration to say that Roosevelt and Churchill became chums at this conference. . . . They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and moratorium on pomposity and cant, -- and also a degree of frankness in intercourse which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it." Roosevelt cabled Churchill after the meeting, "It is fun to be in the same decade with you." Churchill later wrote, "I felt I was in contact with a very great man who was also a warm-hearted friend and the foremost champion of the high causes which we served."
Two of the documents featured in this lesson, the typewritten drafts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill's Christmas Eve greeting from the White House in Washington, D.C., on December 24, 1941, and the remarks of the president and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands are housed at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY.