Saturday August 9, 1941. The Atlantic Charter Conference commences.

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt commenced a secrete meeting at Placentia Bay at the U.S. Naval Station at Little Placentia Sound. The Navy's presence on the Newfoundland coast was already established even though this was prior to the American entry into the war.

HMS Prince of Wales, on which Winston Churchill had crossed the Atlantic for the meeting, and the USS McDougal which served to ferry the dignitaries to their respective ships.

This meeting would come to be known as the Atlantic Charter Meeting.

Permanently inhabited since 1671, the town of Placentia, founded as Plaisance, had a population of about 8,000 people in 1941, down from a high of 16,000 in 1900. The population at that time, 1941, was approximately the same as it had been in 1921, but it's since declined to less than half of that.  The decline in the cod fishing industry and the closure of the American base in 1970 provides the explanation for that.

Newfoundland was a British administered dominion at the time, not yet part of Canada.

On the same day, Charles Lindbergh gave a speech in Cleveland in which he accused those in favor of entering the war of plotting to create incidents that would draw the US into it.