Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) committee

Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) committee, supreme Anglo-American military authority which comprised the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the British Chiefs of Staff (COS). It advised Churchill and Roosevelt (and their successors) on military strategy, and implemented the strategic decisions taken by them (see Grand Alliance). In its executive capacity, the committee controlled operational strategy in the battle for the Mediterranean and European theatres, and in the battle of the Atlantic, and held general jurisdiction over grand strategy policy in all other theatres where operational strategy was controlled by the COS or JCS alone. In issuing directives to its supreme commanders the committee normally acted through the chiefs of staff of the country that provided the commander, and these in turn acted through the head of the service to which the supreme commander belonged.

The decision to form the committee was made at the Washington conference in December 1941 (see ARCADIA). It sat in Washington, the British COS being represented by a Joint Staff Mission headed by General Dill and then by General Maitland Wilson. A combined office, secretariat, and planning staff ensured close co-operation in what General Brooke, an early sceptic of any joint prosecution of the war, was later to call the most efficient organization ‘that had ever been evolved for co-ordinating and correlating the war strategy and effort of the Allies’.

A number of sub-committees were constituted as the war progressed (see Chart). The most important were the Combined Intelligence Committee and the Combined Planning Staff, the British elements of these working under the Joint Staff Mission. More controversial was the decision at ARCADIA to pool the entire munitions resources of the two countries, and to form civilian Joint Boards in London and Washington, under the committee's direct control, to advise on their distribution.

Despite sharp differences, which sometimes caused heated arguments, the committee worked because its members shared common beliefs, a common language (though it was not that common) and because at first both powers were making an equal contribution. By the time this equality ceased—in the closing months of the war the US contribution to the war effort was still increasing while that of the UK was declining—the committee was working smoothly, and retained sufficient impetus to continue its work until the end of the war. In any case, during this last phase, the committee's influence diminished for the Americans, now predominant, were content to leave local strategy in the hands of the supreme commanders and discouraged any British contribution that might question this approach. A British suggestion that the committee should be retained when peace returned was never taken up.

The committee, chaired by the president's representative on the JCS, Admiral Leahy, met in Washington DC on a weekly basis with the Joint Staff Mission being in daily, sometimes hourly, contact with the COS in London. The COS and JCS also accompanied their respective heads of government to the series of conferences that took place throughout the war, and out of the total of 200 CCS meetings 89 were convened during these conferences.