Reference Entry
YALTA CONFERENCE
Even as troops fought through Manila’s streets, the political leaders of the major Allied powers gathered thousands of miles away to shape the end of the war and the uneasy peace to follow. On February 4th, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin opened the Yalta Conference in the Crimean resort city of the same name.
Dated Historical Context
RECORDED MOMENTS IN HISTORY
Yalta Conference Opens
Even as troops fought through Manila’s streets, the political leaders of the major Allied powers gathered thousands of miles away to shape the end of the war and the uneasy peace to follow. On February 4th, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin opened the Yalta Conference in the Crimean resort city of the same name. Surrounded by security and staff, the three leaders and their advisers spent days discussing the final offensives against Nazi Germany, the future of Poland and other liberated territories, and the conditions under which the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan. From the American military perspective, Yalta mattered because it helped coordinate timing and priorities, including agreement that Germany must surrender unconditionally and that occupation zones would be established to administer the defeated Reich. It also laid out principles, however imperfectly applied, for postwar institutions, including a new international organization that would become the United Nations. For soldiers and sailors still in combat, decisions made at Yalta would influence how long and where they fought, and under what political arrangements that sacrifice would eventually be judged.
Read the complete weekly DispatchYalta Conference Concludes
On February 11th, 1945, the wartime conference at Yalta in Crimea wrapped up after days of meetings between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the leaders of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. With German forces pushed back into their own territory and the end of the war in Europe in sight, the Allied leaders faced difficult questions about how to finish the fight and what kind of peace would follow. At Yalta they discussed the timing of a final offensive against Germany, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and the creation of a new international organization to replace the failed League of Nations. They also hammered out arrangements for occupation zones in Germany and handled sensitive issues about political futures in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Many of these decisions shaped the endgame in Europe and the contours of the early Cold War that followed. For United States military history, Yalta stands as a reminder that strategic decisions made at the conference table can echo on battlefields and alliances for decades.
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