ABC-1 Staff Agreement

Concluded on March 27, 1941, at Washington, D.C. between naval and military representatives of the United States and Great Britain, the ABC-1 Staff Agreement established the practical basis of Anglo- American cooperation in the event that the United States entered the war. The document consisted of three major provisions: 1. An agreement that both powers would concentrate their efforts on defeating Germany as the most dangerous of the Axis powers 2. An agreement that the chiefs of staff of the British and the American militaries would work together as a single Combined Chiefs of Staff 3. An agreement that the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet would begin assisting the Royal Navy in escorting Atlantic convoys as soon as the U.S. Navy was capable of doing so Unlike the first two provisions, which would apply only after the United States actually entered the war, the third provision went into effect immediately, and the U.S. Navy, escorting Allied convoys, began what was, in effect, an undeclared naval war against Germany months before Pearl Harbor A thrust the United States into both the Pacific and the Atlantic wars. See also Armed Neutrality; Atlantic Charter; Naval War With Germany, Undeclared (1940–1941); and Neutrality Acts, U.S. Further reading: Kemp, Peter. Decision at Sea: The Convoy Escorts. New York: Elsevier-Dutton, 1978; Matson, Robert W. Neutrality and Navicerts: Britain, the United States, and Economic Warfare, 1939–1940. London: Taylor & Francis, 1994; Rhodes, Benjamin D. United States Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1941: The Golden Age of American Diplomatic and Military Complacency. New York: Praeger, 2001.