THIS DAY IN HISTORY
YALTA CONFERENCE ENDS:
February 11, 1945
On February 11, 1945, a week of intensive bargaining by the leaders of the three
major Allied powers ends in Yalta, a Soviet resort town on the Black Sea. It was
the second conference of the "Big Three" Allied leaders--U.S. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier
Joseph Stalin--and the war had progressed mightily since their last meeting,
which had taken place in Tehran in late 1943.What was then called the Crimea
conference was held at the old summer palace of Czar Nicholas II on the
outskirts of Yalta, now a city in the independent Ukraine. With victory over
Germany three months away, Churchill and Stalin were more intent on dividing
Europe into zones of political influence than in addressing military
considerations. Germany would be divided into four zones of occupation
administered by the three major powers and France and was to be thoroughly
demilitarized and its war criminals brought to trial. The Soviets were to
administer those European countries they liberated but promised to hold free
elections. The British and Americans would oversee the transition to democracy
in countries such as Italy, Austria, and Greece.Final plans were made for the
establishment of the United Nations, and a charter conference was scheduled to
begin in San Francisco in April.A frail President Roosevelt, two months from his
death, concentrated his efforts on gaining Soviet support for the U.S. war
effort against Japan. The secret U.S. atomic bomb project had not yet tested a
weapon, and it was estimated that an amphibious attack against Japan could cost
hundreds of thousands of American lives. After being assured of an occupation
zone in Korea, and possession of Sakhalin Island and other territories
historically disputed between Russia and Japan, Stalin agreed to enter the
Pacific War within two to three months of Germany's surrender.Most of the Yalta
accords remained secret until after World War II, and the items that were
revealed, such as Allied plans for Germany and the United Nations, were
generally applauded. Roosevelt returned to the United States exhausted, and when
he went to address the U.S. Congress on Yalta he was no longer strong enough to
stand with the support of braces. In that speech, he called the conference "a
turning point, I hope, in our history, and therefore in the history of the
world." He would not live long enough, however, to see the iron curtain drop
along the lines of division laid out at Yalta. In April, he traveled to his
cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest and on April 12 died of a cerebral
hemorrhage.On July 16, the United States successfully tested an atomic bomb in
the New Mexico desert. On August 6, it dropped one of these deadly weapons on
Hiroshima, Japan. Two days later, true to its pledge at Yalta, the Soviet Union
declared war against Japan. The next day, the United States dropped another
atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and the Soviets launched a massive offensive against
the Japanese in Manchuria. On August 15, the combination of the U.S. atomic
attacks and the Soviet offensive forced a Japanese surrender. At the end of the
month, U.S. troops landed in Japan unopposed.When the full text of the Yalta
agreements were released in the years following World War II, many criticized
Roosevelt and Churchill for delivering Eastern Europe and North Korea into
communist domination by conceding too much to Stalin at Yalta. The Soviets never
allowed free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, and communist North Korea was
sharply divided from its southern neighbor.Eastern Europe, liberated and
occupied by the Red Army, would have become Soviet satellites regardless of what
had happened at Yalta. Because of the atomic bomb, however, Soviet assistance
was not needed to defeat the Japanese. Without the Soviet invasion of the
Japanese Empire in the last days of World War II, North Korea and various other
Japanese-held territories that fell under Soviet control undoubtedly would have
come under the sway of the United States. At Yalta, however, Roosevelt had no
guarantee that the atomic bomb would work, and so he sought Soviet assistance in
what was predicted to be the costly task of subduing Japan. Stalin, more willing
than Roosevelt to sacrifice troops in the hope of territorial gains, happily
accommodated his American ally, and by the end of the war had considerably
increased Soviet influence in East Asia.
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