The Lead-up to Yalta
Equiptment is massed at bases in Southern England as the Allies prepare to launch their all-out assault on the shores of France.
In a famous photograph, US Marines charge headlong into the frigid Atlantic before the entrenched German Army on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The Allies have finally opened the much desired second front in NW Europe.
A map detailing the massive Soviet offensive entitled, Operation Bagration, designed to coincide with the Anglo-American attack on Normandy.
A Russian Cartoon "In a Vice" depicting the British, American and Soviet squeeze on Hitler after the establishment of the long-awaited Second Front, from a report issued by Stalin in November 1944.
A US Army jeep carrying sevral American regulars stops in front of the Eiffel Tower after Paris is liberated in late August 1944.
Allied troops pinned down in Belgium, September 1944
FDR to Stalin, November 1944, suggesting another trilateral meeting.
Letter from General Deane, US embassy in Moscow, to Genral Marshall, expressing his disillusionment over Soviet behavior, December 2, 1944
German troops advance during a massivecounter attack in the Ardennes region in what became known as The Battle of the Bulge, December, 1944.
FDR letter to Stalin expressing his concerns over divergence of views on Poland, December 30, 1944.
A wave of landing craft heading for the shores of Luzon island, and the final battle to retake the Philippines, January 9, 1945.
FDR delivering his fourth inaugural address on the south portico of the White House, January 20, 1945, two days before his departure for Yalta.
As the end of the war in Europe approached, certain issues which were formerly at the background came to the foreground. The successful invasion of France and the upper-hand it provided to the Allies brought about a new stage of planning for each of the three major Allied powers. The constitution of the post-war environment (i.e., the geopolitical map) became a central issue for the Big Three. The future of Poland remained a pressing question; Stalin wanted Poland as a buffer zone between Germany and Russia’s eastern border, while Churchill and Roosevelt were under pressure from their publics to ensure a free and democratic Poland. At the same time, Churchill, desperate to maintain Great Britain’s dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean, would send British troops into Greece at the end of 1944 to reestablish a conservative government in Athens in the face of a popular communist uprising. The United Nations moved to the top of Roosevelt’s agenda during this period, as he was concerned with post-war stability and the prevention of future global conflict. The fate of the yet-to-be defeated Germany was another question which concerned (and divided) the Allies, and on the eve of the Yalta conference, Stalin had yet to formerly agree that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan once Germany had been defeated.