The White House Map Room was established in January 1942, under the supervision of the Naval Aide, as a military information center and communication office for the President. The files of the Map Room grew very rapidly from the start and on the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945 there were seven filing cabinets in the Map Room filled to capacity.
President Roosevelt's Map Room papers consist of two series: first, messages sent or received by the President and by his immediate family and advisors; and, second, documents sent to the White House by the War or Navy Departments for the President's information. There are fewer papers in the first group, which records the actions taken personally by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, Marshal Stalin, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and much of the President's correspondence with the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was the President's wish to have in the Map Room the only complete file of the personal messages he exchanged with Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek and for this reason messages from the Map Room were sent through Navy Department communications facilities and replies were sent through the War Department. Thus neither Department has a complete file.
The first series also includes a complete record of the President's messages sent or received during his trips from September 1942 to April 1945. The Map Room was the link between the President and the White House when he was away from Washington. Messages for the President were encoded in the Map Room and sent to him by Army or Navy circuits. The President's replies, returning through the same military channels, were decoded in the Map Room. These message files for the periods when President Roosevelt was in Casablanca, Quebec, Cairo, Teheran and Yalta constitute a very valuable addition to the sparse records of the President's participation in international conferences with Churchill, Chiang and Stalin.
Within the Messages series there are also a number of "Special Subject" folders on military and diplomatic topics in which the President was vitally interested and about which he sent a great many messages. All available Army, Navy, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and State Department documents on these topics, whether directly related to the President's messages or not, were placed in the "Special Subject" folders. This type of file was begun in early August 1943 in preparation for the President's conference with Prime Minister Churchill in Quebec, and two of the first "Special Subject" folders related to the bombing of Rome and Anglo-American relations with the French National Committee. These folders were found so useful that the practice of filing the President's personal messages with military and diplomatic papers on selected topics in special folders continued until President Roosevelt's death.
The second series of Map Room papers is much larger. It comprises messages, reports, maps and official publications of the War and Navy Departments. These were sent to the White House where they were studied by the officers of the Map Room, who posted the information contained in them on maps and charts and summarized them in writing or orally for the President, Mr. Hopkins, Admiral Leahy and the Military and Naval aides. Since there was a great deal of duplication in the documents submitted by the War and Navy Departments and since much of the military information in them was of no interest to the White House, many dispatches and reports were destroyed shortly after their receipt. The papers now in this group represent only a small part of the total number received in the White House during the war, but even so they constitute about 90% of the Map Room files.
