The Yalta Conference
In February 1945, Nazi armies were quickly beaten back towards Berlin by armies of the Soviet Union. British and American forces were preparing to invade Germany. Unconditional surrender could be expected from Germany in a matter of weeks. Also, in the Pacific War, American forces moved steadily from island to island towards a final invasion of the Japanese home islands. The possibility of using an atomic bomb to end the war was unknown to military experts and world leaders. With the defeat of Germany and Japan a certainty, the leaders of the Big Three Allied Powers, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Communist Party Secretary Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States, met to plan and discuss the postwar world. The meeting was held at Livadia Palace at Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula of the Black Sea from February 4 to February 11, 1945, and was called the Yalta Conference. Was the Yalta Conference a success for the United States and Great Britain? One possibility is that a wily Joseph Stalin took advantage of an ailing Roosevelt to get many concessions in return for few on his part. It may also be argued that the agreements reached were mostly harmless
Churchill and Roosevelt simply agreed that they would support this at the San Francisco meeting. He added that all, not just part of, aviation plants facilities for the production of synthetic oil and all other military enterprises and factories should also be confiscated and used as reparation payments. The correct answer to the question is actually that the Yalta Conference was a success for the United States and Great Britain because they benefited most. The fact that Poland later fell to communism was not a fault of Roosevelt or Churchill, but a fault of the fact that Stalin failed to live up to the terms of the agreement. Since the losses were so huge, Stalin proposed that countries receive reparations based on their contribution to the winning of the war and the value of their direct material losses. Churchill responded simply by saying that as he understood it, neither could sanctions be imposed on Great Britain, nor could a decision to use force be taken without the permission of Britain because Britain would be a permanent member of the Security Council, whose unanimous agreement would be required, under the terms submitted by Roosevelt, for any such actions to be taken. If a dispute might be settled by peaceful methods, the Security Council would still have to agree unanimously and vote in that manner, but if a member of the Council were involved in the dispute, it could discuss the decision, but it could not vote on it. Most of Hungary had been liberated, eastern Czechoslovakia had been captured, and Yugoslav partisans had recaptured Belgrade by November 1944. Roosevelt suggested that each member of the Council should have one vote. China would retain sovereignty in Manchuria. The fact that Roosevelt and Churchill did not give in to Stalin's reparation proposal is important because had they done so, the same mistakes that were made at the Treaty of Versailles would have been made again, and possibly with even more dire consequences. The first items discussed were Poland's borders. Churchill was first to respond to this proposal and stated that he did not believe it would be possible to get even the amount the Soviets wanted for themselves much less twenty billion dollars for all damaged countries. The British and Americans also requested that "free and unfettered elections would be held at an early date," which Stalin also agreed to. The important thing to keep in mind here is that Roosevelt had just been told that the surrender of Japan might not occur until 1947, and some predicted even later, and he was told that, without the aid of the Soviet Union, it might cost the United States one million lives to invade the home islands of Japan and conquer them.
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