Liveblogging World War II: November 28, 1943
The Tehran Conference (codenamed Eureka) was a strategy meeting held between Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill from 28 November to 1 December 1943. It was held in the Soviet Embassy in Tehran, Iran and was the first of the World War II conferences held between all of the "Big Three" Allied leaders.... The main outcome of the Tehran Conference was the commitment to the opening of a second front against Nazi Germany by the Western Allies....
Stalin obsessively wished to control everything in Moscow and was unwilling to risk journeys by air, while Roosevelt was physically disabled and found travel grueling. Churchill was an avid traveler and had met with Roosevelt on two previous occasions in the United States and had also held two prior meetings with Stalin in Moscow. In order to engineer this urgently needed meeting, Roosevelt tried to persuade Stalin to travel to Cairo. Stalin turned down this offer and also an offer to meet in Baghdad and in Basra – finally agreeing to meet in Tehran in November 1943....
The conference was scheduled to convene at 16:00 on 28 November 1943. Stalin arrived well before the scheduled time, followed by Roosevelt who was wheeled in, in his wheelchair from his accommodation adjacent to the venue. Roosevelt, who had traveled 7,000 miles to attend and whose health had already started deteriorating, was met by Stalin; this being the first time that they had met. Churchill, walking with his General Staff from their accommodations near-by, arrived half an hour later.
The main objective of the United States and Great Britain was to ensure full cooperation and assistance from the Soviet Union for their war policies. Stalin agreed, but at a price: Roosevelt and Churchill would have to support his reign and the Yugoslav Partisans, and also agree to move the border between Poland and the Soviet Union west. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin then moved on to other matters, namely the cross-channel invasion of occupied France by the Western Allies (Operation Overlord) and general war policy. Operation Overlord was scheduled to begin in May 1944, in conjunction with a Soviet attack on Germany's eastern border. Roosevelt gave Stalin a pledge that he had been waiting for since June 1941: that the British and the Americans would open a second front in France in the spring of 1944....
Stalin dominated the conference, using the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk and military might, as well as key positions on the German front.... One of Roosevelt and Churchill's main concessions concerned post-war Poland. Stalin wished for an area in the eastern part of Poland to be added to the Soviet Union, and for the border to be lengthened elsewhere in the country. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to this demand, and Poland's borders were declared to lie along the Oder and Neisse rivers and the Curzon line, despite protests of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Churchill and Roosevelt also consented to the Soviet Union setting up puppet communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Romania, and other Eastern European countries which would result in a loss of freedom by these countries for the next fifty years and would be the genesis of the Cold War...
