NRO Weekend, February 3-4, 2001
The Big Three
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin change the world at Yalta.

Compiled by Jack Walsh

n February 4th 1945, at Yalta in the Crimea, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin of the USSR met to decide the shape of post-war Europe. In earlier talks they had all agreed on the division of Germany, but by the time of Yalta Churchill had come to fear Russian control and began to oppose dismemberment. Roosevelt chose to distance himself from Churchill and deal directly with Stalin on the future of Europe. The result: Soviet control of Eastern and Central Europe set the geographic boundaries for 44 years of Cold War.

As time passed, the decisions reached at the Yalta Conference grew rather than receded in importance. Senator Joe McCarthy charged that Roosevelt had committed treason at Yalta. Less-partisan critics charged that he had been naïve. British author and historian John Keegan, in his history The Second World War, reveals another decision reached at Yalta, at the time kept secret, that drove Roosevelt's agenda:

The most important of all decisions taken at Yalta, agreed directly between Roosevelt and Stalin, concerned the future conduct of the war in the Pacific. Roosevelt's willingness to barter away the future of Poland and to finalize a division of Germany which accorded the Soviet Union an over-generous allocation of occupation territory was ultimately determined by his anxiety to engage the Red Army in the battle to defeat Japan.

At the time of Yalta, the United States had neither yet assured itself that its nuclear-research program would result in the successful test explosion of an atomic bomb, nor advanced its forces to a point from which the land invasion of Japan might be undertaken. The amphibious assault on Iwo Jima was in preparation but had not been launched; the devastating fire-bombing of Japan had not begun. The Red Army's commitment in Europe, on the other hand, was clearly almost at an end, and from western Russia the Trans-Siberian railway led directly to the border of Manchuria, where in 1904-5 Tsar Nicholas II's army had suffered a humiliating defeat. The opportunity to avenge it stood high on the list of Stalin's wartime priorities. When he might take the opportunity, however, was what pre-occupied the American President. To ensure that he did so later rather than sooner motivated almost all Roosevelt's initiatives at Yalta. The price he paid in the end was to discredit Churchill in the eyes of their joint Polish allies, to concede Russia rights over territory in sovereign China which were not America's to grant, but ultimately to assure that the repossession of Japan's conquests in the Pacific would not be bought at the cost of American lives alone.

To a nation which had watched the heroic advance of the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and MacArthur's army divisions from New Guinea to the Philippines, the diplomatic price paid at Yalta — when the cost to distant European state's territory and to Britain's good name was balanced against further American casualties — seemed a small one to pay.