No. 2 Franklin Roosevelt - Yalta
Dates: February 3-12, 1945 An enfeebled and frail Franklin Roosevelt arrived in Yalta, a Black Sea resort, to set the agenda for post-war Europe and end the war in the Pacific. An emboldened Josef Stalin, with his Red Army having all but vanquished the once-vaunted Wehrmacht, was confident to strike a bargain as he desired. Stalin won the day, putting Eastern Europe and China behind an Iron Curtain for the next half century and beyond. In Yalta, FDR, Stalin and Winston Churchill fought over the partition of Germany, with Stalin getting his way, ripping off the whole of eastern Poland for the Soviet Union and compensating Poland with Pomerania, Silesia and part of East Prussia. He gained all of eastern Europe as part of his sphere of influence, free to set up Communist puppet regimes. At Churchill's insistence, Stalin did agree to hold free elections in Poland - only to renege on that pledge when the time came by putting on a sham election that allowed his hand-picked Communists to seize power. Stalin was keen to take on a fatally weakened Japan and expand his influence in Asia, but he managed to get further concessions out of Roosevelt, at the expense of China, which was not present at the conference. FDR agreed to let Stalin detach Outer Mongolia from China and maintain possession of Dalian, Port Arthur and Manchurian railways. But more important, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria allowed Stalin to transfer massive amounts of arms and territories to the Chinese Communists, setting them up for their eventual victory over the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War four years later. It was to be FDR's final overseas trip. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga., exactly two months later.
