The Atlantic Charter is signed off Newfoundland
Roosevelt and Churchill draft the Allies' war aims four months before Pearl Harbor
Quick facts
- Location
- Placentia Bay, Newfoundland
- Date
- August 9-14, 1941
- Key people
- Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill
- Ships
- USS Augusta, HMS Prince of Wales
- Result
- Eight-point joint declaration of war aims
What happened
From August 9 to 12, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for the first time as wartime leaders aboard naval vessels anchored in Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland. Roosevelt arrived on the heavy cruiser USS Augusta; Churchill sailed over on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. The United States was still technically neutral, but the two men and their aides, including Harry Hopkins, Averell Harriman, Admiral Ernest King, and General George Marshall, worked out a joint statement of war aims. Released on August 14, the document became known as the Atlantic Charter. It was not a treaty or a binding agreement, just a joint declaration, but it set out eight common principles: no territorial gains sought by either country, no territorial changes without the consent of the people concerned, the right of all peoples to choose their own government, and eventual disarmament of aggressor nations among them.
Why it matters
The Charter gave the wartime alliance a public statement of purpose before America had even entered the war, and its language on self-determination and disarmament later shaped the founding principles of the United Nations. Churchill got no formal US commitment to enter the war, but he got something almost as valuable: a public alignment of American and British aims that made continued US neutrality harder to sustain.
How we know
The Charter's text survives as a primary document at Yale Law School's Avalon Project archive, and the FDR Presidential Library holds the ship photographs and captions documenting the conference itself.
Sources
- FDR Presidential Library and Museum. Atlantic Charter · Reputable sourcefdrlibrary.org · The domain "fdrlibrary.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. The Atlantic Charter · Primary source (author-declared)avalon.law.yale.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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