On 3 September, 1939, England and France, and as a consequence, the dominions of the Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, found themselves at war. The declaration of war followed the German invasion of Poland. The war was to preserve the independence of Poland as a free nation. Freed from the yoke of a tyrannous regime.

60 million lives lost later, including in the Pacific, the last meeting of the wartime leaders, before the fall of Nazi Germany, and before Hitler took his own life, took place at Yalta in the Crimea between 4 and 11 February 1945.

The world leaders present at that meeting, were Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (a man so sick that he would be dead just 10 weeks later) and Stalin, the Vozd, the leader of the Soviet Union.

On 6 February, 1945 the leaders discussed the future of Poland. With most of Poland overrun, and with 10 million Russian soldiers occupying most of eastern Europe, including parts of Germany, the Allies had no choice other than to let Stalin set up a puppet regime in Poland which became a slave state to the Soviet Union.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the original reason for going to war had, by that agreement, completely failed.

I’m going to look at what happened that winter on the Black Sea in Crimea. If nothing else, Stalin gave some of his best quips over those few days.

Tag words: Big Three; President Roosevelt; Edward Stettinius; Churchill; Stalin; Lord Moran; Yalta; Riviera of Hades; Tolstoy Conference; Stanislaw Mikolajczyk; Wladyslaw Sikorski; Polish Home Army; AK; Polish Committee of National Liberation; Boleslaw Bierut; Warsaw Ghetto uprising ; General Rokossovsky; Heinrich Himmler; George Kennan; Tito;