Abstract
The 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. From then on, the war is no more only European but officially global. The next day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States, declared war on Japan. With the coming into play of the American giant, the conflict acquired a new dimension, and it's Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, who got first the extent of it, declaring "We are all in the same boat now" . The "Special Relationship" is birth, and the Churchill-Roosevelt story will influence the History. Yet, at the beginning, the two protagonists really seemed to be poles apart. The relation they'll develop will mix different feelings in a specific context: the one of Second World War.
Associates, partners, friends? The particular link that united the two men seems to be difficult to get and to understand, all the more because it developed and changed between 1941 (date of the end of the American isolationism) and 1945 (a full of events' year: Yalta conference, German capitulation, Roosevelt's death). To what extent did the privileged link which united the two politicians reveal its complexity, at the same time as it decided on the end of the war and the reconstruction of the world? Roosevelt and Churchill developed throughout these years a relation based on confidence and solidarity. But it seemed to hide rifts, which tended to reveal themselves more and more. Whereas their friendship seemed to be both personal and political, differences began to emerge and the relation progressively changed.
