Between August 9 and August 12, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met secretly with the British prime minister Winston Churchill on naval vessels of their respective countries. Churchill was conducted to the meeting aboard HMS Prince of Wales, a mighty battleship just added to the British fleet. The vessel was later caught in the open sea off Singapore by Japanese torpedo boats, which sank it and demonstrated dramatically the vulnerability of battleships to attack from the air.
Fortunately, no such incident occurred during the Newfoundland meetings, and FDR`s voyage on the USS Augusta was uneventful as well. With their ships anchored in a protected arm of Placentia Bay, the two leaders discussed the war and produced an understanding which, since it was not ratified by the Senate, did not have the status of a treaty but nevertheless formed the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations in January 1942. The declaration laid out a series of points of agreement between the two leaders: