World War II Day by Day

Washington, D.C. • February 2, 1945

The Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) was the supreme mili­tary staff for the West­ern Allies during World War II. CCS members were drawn from the British Chiefs of Staff Com­mit­tee and the Amer­i­can Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and typ­i­cally met in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. On occa­sion Soviet mili­tary offi­cers attended. Meetings took place between Decem­ber 24, 1941, when British Prime Minister Winston Chur­chill and his mili­tary ad­vis­ers paid their first war­time visit to Wash­ing­ton, and July 26, 1945, when the vic­to­ri­ous Allied heads of state and their mili­tary staffs met in Pots­dam out­side the former Nazi capi­tal, Ber­lin. Between those two dates the full CCS some­times met during the great war­time con­fer­ences such as the one between Churchill and Pre­si­dent Franklin D. Roose­velt in Casa­blan­ca, Morocco, in Janu­ary 1943, when the doctrine of “uncon­ditional sur­render” was announced. The two leaders were deter­mined that the Axis powers would be fought to their ulti­mate defeat, and so preclude Germans from claiming in the future that their country had not been defeated, a claim raised following the November 1918 armistice that ended World War I.

On this date, February 2, 1945, the CCS turned over to the JCS a series of intel­li­gence reports titled “Esti­mate of Soviet Post-war Capa­bil­ities and Inten­tions.” The assess­ments con­cluded that the Soviet Union would seek to con­trol East­ern Europe and influ­ence Central Europe. Already Red Army units occu­pied Roma­nia, Bul­garia, Hun­gary, East Prussia, and Poland, and were within 40 miles of the Nazi capi­tal (see map below). Chillingly, the report pre­dicted that the Soviets would avoid a con­flict with their West­ern part­ners until at least 1952, but that the Soviets would go to war ear­lier if they perceived their vital interests in Europe were at stake.

That same day Roosevelt and Churchill dis­cussed the CCS report en route to the Crimean resort of Yalta for the duo’s last sum­mit with Soviet dicta­tor Joseph Stalin. (Looking gaunt and haunt-eyed at Yalta, Roose­velt would die in April.) On the final day of their Yalta Con­fer­ence, Febru­ary 11, 1945, the “Big Three” leaders and their mili­tary advi­sers an­nounced agree­ment on the occu­pa­tion of Germany and Aus­tria and the divi­sion of Poland, which the Red Army was then emptying of Germans. It would be four and one-half decades—the length of the Cold War—before the Soviet occu­pa­tion of Cen­tral and East­ern Europe ended peacefully with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“Big Three” at 1945 Conferences: Yalta and Potsdam

Above: The military situation at the end of the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The non-colored area repre­sents terri­tory under the control of the German Wehr­macht (armed forces) or the Nazi govern­ment. This map is taken from the source “Atlas of the World Battle Fronts in Semi­monthly Phases to August 15th 1945: Supple­ment to the Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army.”

Left: “Big Three” and Western military staff at the Yalta Conference in Soviet Crimea, Febru­ary 4–11, 1945. Photo taken Febru­ary 9, 1945. Seated are Winston Chur­chill (left), Franklin D. Roose­velt, and Joseph Stalin. Standing behind them are British Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cun­ning­ham, Marshal of the RAF Sir Charles Portal (standing behind Chur­chill), U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, and U.S. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (standing behind Roose­velt). The heads of state and their mili­tary advisers announced agree­ment on the military occu­pa­tion of Ger­many and Austria and the divi­sion of a terri­torially adjusted Poland, which after the war was expanded in the west at Ger­many’s expense and shrunk in the east to bene­fit the Soviet Union (the “shrink­age” was Polish ter­ri­tory seized in 1939 by agree­ment with Adolf Hitler in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact).

Right: “Big Three” with their principal advisers at Part II of the Potsdam Con­fer­ence, July 28 to August 1, 1945. Seated are British Prime Minister Clement Attlee (left), Chur­chill’s sur­prise succes­sor following British elec­tions in early July; U.S. Presi­dent Harry S. Truman, Roose­velt’s succes­sor in April; and Stalin, resplen­dent in his new uni­form to reflect his status as Marshal of the Soviet Union (equi­va­lent to a five-star general). Some deri­sively referred to the reshuffled senior states­men as the “Big Two and a Half” on account of Chur­chill’s short, bald, unpre­pos­sessing replace­ment. Standing behind the three men are Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff; new British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin; U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes; and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molo­tov. The heads of state and their staffs discussed post­war polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and terri­torial arrange­ments in Europe, the thorny issue of war repa­ra­tions, fre­quently with­out agree­ment, and future moves in the war against Japan. The neo­phyte British team of Attlee and Bevin proved themselves “excellent at the council table.”

Contemporary Newsreel Account of Yalta Conference, February 4–11, 1945