yalta and potsdam

• The Big Three - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - met again at Yalta in the Crimea region of the USSR

  February 1945
• The next meeting of the Big Three took place at Potsdam, just outside Berlin


  July 1945
• Changes since Yalta Conference


  • A new US President - Franklin D Roosevelt had died and been replaced by his Vice-President, Harry S Truman
  • Nuclear threat - the USA had successfully exploded an atomic bomb
  • Expansion of communism - the Red Army was in control of Poland and the USSR was in the process of setting up a communist government
• Truman's attitude to communism


  Truman made little secret of his dislike for communism and for Stalin personally
• Truman remarked that he was tired of babying the Soviets and that the only language Stalin understood was how many army divisions do you have?
• When first told about the success of the atomic bomb experiment, Truman is said to have remarked: if it works... I'll sure have a hammer on those boys
• At Potsdam, Truman chose to inform Stalin that the US possessed a new weapon of unusual destructive force
• Despite agreeing at Yalta that free elections would be held in Eastern Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was little evidence at Potsdam that Stalin intended to allow them
• Truman had automatically succeeded to the Presidency as he was Vice President when Franklin D Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945, just weeks before the end of World War Two
• Truman had served in France during the last five months of World War One and had been a successful officer
• Truman was a Baptist and, although he did not often speak of religion, this guided his morality and ethics
• As a politician in the inter-war period, Truman had been a committed 'Wilsonian' and had admired Woodrow Wilson's hopes for American intervention in Europe
• During the early 1940s, Truman had led committees on fraud and corruption within the military and had emerged a respected political figure
• Truman had not been particularly close to Roosevelt and had even been unaware of the Manhattan Project (the scheme developing the USA's nuclear weapons)
• Truman remained adamant that choosing to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 had ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides
• Since the 1960s, it has been widely accepted that Truman's attitude to communism was in part responsible for how the Cold War proceeded at the end of 1945