Combined Chiefs and the 1945 Blueprint for a Bilateral World
By Harlan Pryce ·
Hidden for decades in the ABC File, the intimate coordination between Washington and London masked a strategic duopoly that planned the fate of nations while erasing its own allies.
Thousands of dead soldiers were shifted like cargo across borders, their final resting places decided by a ledger of convenience, while prisoners of war waited in the silence of a bureaucratic void. This is the human cost of a war managed by a committee that viewed the globe as a map to be partitioned. I am working from the archival scope-and-content description of these records rather than the records' own pages, and the shape of that description tells a story of calculated exclusion.
Decimal File 293.8
The record identifies a specific accounting for the dead: "records relating to disinterment and reinterment of bodies outside the continental limits of the United States, under decimal file number 293.8 (12 Dec 44)". These men were not just casualties; they were assets in a logistical exercise managed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), the supreme military staff for the United States and Britain during World War II. The CCS set the major policy decisions for the two nations, reporting only to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By consolidating the war's management into this single, Anglo-American engine, the CCS ensured that the trajectory of the conflict was steered by a narrow, bilingual interest. The records of this coordination, known informally as the "ABC File," include papers issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the body of the most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense, and the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, an entity the record establishes issued planning papers but about which no further biography exists on file.
The pattern suggests a deliberate narrowing of the war's intellectual scope. If this file is shaped the way it looks, the "Combined" in Combined Chiefs of Staff was not an invitation to a coalition, but a closed circuit. The desk's reading is that the ABC File archives a bilateral hegemony, intentionally isolating Anglo-American strategic synchronization from any Soviet influence, even as the Red Army was bleeding itself dry to break the Wehrmacht.
The Subordination of Intelligence
The records include "records relating to the Office of Strategic Services, under decimal file number 334.3 (5-1-42)". The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the second non-departmental civilian intelligence agency of the United States, was created as an agency of the JCS to coordinate espionage, propaganda, and subversion behind enemy lines.
There is a sharp irony in the placement of the OSS within the ABC File. While the OSS operated in the shadows of occupied Europe and Asia, its leash was held firmly by the uniformed leadership of the JCS. This is not a coincidence of administration; it is a statement of purpose. The desk's reading is that intelligence was framed here as a subordinate military tool rather than an autonomous strategic instrument of statecraft. The OSS did not provide the JCS with a window into the world; it provided the JCS with a hammer to hit the targets the generals had already chosen.
This subordination extended to the very definition of the enemy. The record lists "estimates of the German strategic position, under decimal file number 381 Germany (1-29-43)" and "estimates of Japanese capabilities, under decimal file number 381 Japan (5-7-42)". Japan, an island nation in East Asia, and Germany, the central European power, were reduced to "capabilities" and "positions"—mathematical problems to be solved by the CCS.
The Architecture of the Aftermath
When the CCS looked past the fighting, they did not see a return to sovereignty, but a transition to management. The record highlights "records relating to planning for military governments in Austria and Japan, under decimal file number 014". Austria, a landlocked Central European federation, and Japan were both earmarked for the imposition of military government.
Yet, look at what is missing. While Austria and Japan received blueprints for military governance, Germany received only "estimates of the German strategic position" and "records relating to the surrender of Germany, under decimal file number 387 Germany (18 Dec 43)".
The discrepancy is telling. The records prioritize the tactical collapse of the German state over the political architecture of its occupation. The CCS was obsessed with how Germany would stop fighting, but the record is silent on how the German people would be governed. This suggests that the destruction of the Third Reich was a military objective, but its subsequent existence was a political problem the CCS preferred to leave for the diplomats—or for the gaps in the file.
This erasure of the political in favor of the tactical is a hallmark of the ABC File. The records detail "deception planning, under decimal file number 385 Europe (23 Sep 43)" and "policies relating to the use of radio and radar signals, deception and jamming, under decimal file number 311". The war was a series of tricks and signal-jams, and the record treats the post-war world with the same clinical detachment.
The August 17 Boundary
The most jarring entry in the record is the finality of its atomic timeline: "records relating to atomic energy and the atomic bomb, under decimal file number 471.6 Atom (17 Aug 45)".
The date is a wall. August 17, 1945, comes just days after the Japanese surrender. The record stops precisely at the moment the weapon of total war became the tool of total diplomacy. The desk's reading is that the collection terminates at the point of victory, intentionally omitting the transition of wartime assets into Cold War infrastructure.
By severing the atomic records from the ongoing history of the intelligence community—noting that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Historical Files are maintained as a separate series—the government creates a vacuum. It separates the act of winning the war from the process of using that victory to intimidate the rest of the planet.
This is the final act of the Anglo-American duopoly. The ABC File presents a world where the United States and Britain are the only two actors with agency, and everyone else—the Soviet Union, the occupied peoples of Austria and Japan, the prisoners of war—are merely variables in a decimal system. The operational framework presented here erases the strategic agency of every other Allied partner, framing the liberation of the world as a private conversation between two capitals.
If a full release of the ABC File were to occur, the desk's reading is that we would find the blueprints for the Cold War not in the files of the late 1940s, but here, in 1943 and 1944. The withheld pages are protecting the fact that the "special relationship" was not a bond of friendship, but a pact of management. The pattern proves that the US and UK did not just plan to defeat the Axis; they planned to inherit the earth, and they did so by ensuring that the only records that mattered were the ones they wrote for each other.