Big Three’s last meeting sowed seeds of Cold War

Seventy years ago the leaders of the three main Allied nations met to discuss how the post-war world would look.

Yalta Conference of Allied leaders, World War II, 4-11 February 1945. Seated left to right: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Their respective foreign ministers, Eden, Stettinius and Molotov, stand behind them. Yalta determined the shape the world geopolitical order would take after the war. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

SEVENTY years ago today the leaders of Britain, the US and ­Soviet Union met for the second time to discuss the conduct of the final phase of the war and how things would run when the Axis powers were defeated.

The setting was Yalta, in the then Soviet state of the Ukraine, and British prime minister Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were to determine how the last chapter of the war played out and sowed some of the seeds of the Cold War.

Throughout the course of the war there were several meetings to organise war strategy, but the first meeting of all three leaders of the major Allied nations had been in November and December 1943 at Tehran. That conference took place ­before the D-day landings, and Stalin threw his weight around, making demands because the Soviet Union was still bearing the brunt of the battle with Germany.

In 1944 there were plans for another conference involving all three but various issues kept pushing back the date until February 1945 was finally locked in. Different venues were discussed, including Athens, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Malta and even Moscow, but eventually Yalta was deemed suitable, although Churchill would later say: “If we had spent 10 years on research we could not have found a worse place in the world.”

Battered by the war, the city had once been a fashionable holiday destination on the Black Sea.

A favourite of the playwright Anton Chekhov, it had been the summer retreat of the Tsar Alexander II, who had commissioned architect Ippolit Monighetti to build a magnificent palace there. The Soviets gave it a hasty two-week overhaul in preparation for hosting the conference.

Before heading to Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Malta, from January 30 to February 2, where Churchill convinced Roosevelt not to let the Soviets ­advance too far into Central Europe and particularly not to let them take too much of Germany.

The two leaders then flew to Yalta to confront Stalin. At this meeting, beginning on February 4, their standings were vastly different. The Normandy landings had resulted in British and US forces liberating France and crossing the border into Germany.

But Stalin was even more confident than in Tehran, since his troops had repelled the Germans from Soviet territory and were closing rapidly on Berlin.

Discussions looked at dismantling Germany’s military industry and prosecuting war criminals, giving the job of deciding reparations to a commission.

Stalin demanded a free hand in dealing with captured territory. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed the Soviet Union should be ­allowed a buffer zone of “friendly” states in Eastern Europe, but wrested an agreement from the ­Soviet leader to set up interim governments representing all of the political spectrum of each nation and establish as soon as possible “free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people”.

Poland was in contention. Territory in eastern Poland was given to Russia but the matter of setting up a Polish government was left unresolved. Britain and the US supported the Polish government-in-exile that had been operating from London, but Stalin wanted to install a communist-dominated Committee of National Liberation.

It was the German and Soviet invasion of Poland that had drawn Britain into the war, but now Britain was not willing to guarantee Polish sovereignty. The consequences for Poland would be dire. After living under German dictatorship since 1939 it was condemned to domination by the Soviet Union.

Another major achievement was to get Stalin to agree to declare war on Japan after Germany had surrendered, in return allowing Russia to regain territory lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

The conference ended on February 11 with all leaders feeling they achieved significant aims, but there would be harsh criticism of the US and Britain over their ­appeasement of the Soviet Union.

Stalin soon reneged on his promise to hold free elections in captured eastern nations, giving his support to a communist takeover of Romania. The three leaders did not meet again. Roosevelt died in April, weeks before Germany’s surrender, and was succeeded by Harry Truman, who represented the US at Potsdam in July-August.

Churchill was voted out part way through that conference and replaced by Clement Attlee.

Originally published as Big Three’s last meeting sowed seeds of Cold War