Roberts Andrew. Masters And Commanders. How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945

Online edition, 2009. — 735 p. — ISBN: 9780061874499
Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Marshall and Alan Brooke met for the first time in the Oval Office of the White House at noon on Sunday 21 June 1942. Scheduled as a routine strategy session, it was to turn into one of the most significant moments of the Second World War. Roosevelt and Churchill had arrived inWashington on the presidential train from Hyde Park, FDR’s family estate in upstate New York, soon
after 9 a.m. Having breakfasted and read the newspapers and official telegrams in the White House, at 11 a.m. the Prime Minister summoned
Britain’s senior soldier, General Sir Alan Brooke, to come over from the Combined Chiefs of Staff offices on nearby Constitution Avenue.
Lieutenant-General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Military Secretary to the War Cabinet, who was as usual with the Prime Minister, warned Brooke
that Churchill was ‘very upset’ by some recent decisions taken in his absence by the Combined Chiefs – that is, by the British Chiefs of Staff
and their American counterparts the Joint Chiefs of Staff sitting in a powerful new Allied committee. But when he got to the White House
Brooke found the Prime Minister ‘a bit peevish, but not too bad and after an hour’s talk had him quiet again’. Since Brooke had not expected to visit the White House that day, he was wearing an old suit, and asked to be allowed to change into uniform before he met the President for the first time, but Churchill would not hear of it. They went to the Oval Office together and found Roosevelt, who had been afflicted with poliomyelitis since 1921, seated behind the large desk that had been given to his predecessor Herbert Hoover by the Grand Rapids Furniture Manufacturers Association.