The Big Three and the Tehran Conference (2024)

The Fall of Italy

In the Mediterranean theatre, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s vainglorious dreams of a modern Roman Empire had been shattered by the Allied assaults on Sicily in July and on the Italian mainland in September, leading to the collapse of the Fascist regime and desperate German attempts to salvage her southern defenses by an occupation of northern Italy.

The men behind the Tehran Conference

The Tehran Conference, code-named 'Eureka' by the official planners, was significant not least for the fact that Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill were meeting together for the first time. They were very different personalities and came from very different backgrounds. Stalin, the son of a small-town cobbler with a liking for domestic violence, spent a colourful youth as a street urchin, trainee priest, dandy, poet, bandit and revolutionary terrorist before rising to the top of the Soviet regime and becoming one of the most ruthless and murderous despots in history.

Problems between the Big Three

Although Churchill had initially agreed to this rather unusual arrangement, he soon came to regret it as British suspicions that Stalin was using the situation to win Roosevelt over to his own way of thinking grew. The British Prime Minister recalled, in his own memoirs, how he felt obliged to seek a private interview with Stalin to complain that Roosevelt now seemed to be avoiding him, and to counteract what he saw as the Soviet leader’s attempts to split the Anglo-US alliance by exploiting Roosevelt’s goodwill and what many regarded as a naïve idealism in his approach to world affairs.

Roosevelt sided with Stalin in this proposal, but Churchill was adamant in his unwillingness to put the Turkey – Mediterranean plan on the back burner, arguing that it complemented 'Overlord' rather than detracted from it.

Stalin was having none of it – his only concern was to fix the May 1944 date for 'Overlord', appoint a Commander-in-Chief to execute it, and secure a commitment to a supporting landing in the south of France. After intensive staff discussions and debates, the first and last points were agreed upon, leaving the appointment of a C-in-C to be decided the following month in Cairo (Roosevelt, on this occasion, successfully promoting his favoured candidate for the job, General Dwight D Eisenhower).

This was reinforced by the theatrical highlight of the Tehran conference, the presentation to Stalin by Churchill of the Sword of Stalingrad on the second day of proceedings. This magnificent ceremonial longsword, specially made by command of the British monarch, was inscribed 'To the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad, the gift of King George VI, in token of the homage of the British people'.

It was handed to Stalin, the 'Man of Steel', who received it with studied modesty and passed it to Roosevelt for inspection; it was the latter who supplied the drama by holding it aloft with the words “Truly they had hearts of steel!”. Stalin could have been forgiven for seeing in this episode an act of homage by his fellow leaders to his ascendancy as the man who had had Hitler on the run since early 1943.

Some commentators on the proceedings at Tehran have seen in Stalin’s insistence on the primacy of 'Overlord' in Allied strategy a foreshadowing (intentional or not) of Soviet policy after 1945. By fixing the Western Allies’ attention on North West Europe as the focus of operations, he was diverting it away from areas at the opposite end of the continent, and more specifically from the Balkans, the Soviet Union’s own backyard in which she had expansionist ambitions. The Soviet leader’s pronouncements on other items on the agenda at Tehran seemed to underpin this view.

Stalin declared a special interest in “good relations” with Poland, who should be reconstructed and expanded at the expense of Germany – but without the help of the current Polish government-in-exile, tainted by “slanderous propaganda against Russia” and by the very fact that it was based in the West. Poland too was to become a Soviet 'client state'. Important discussions took place about the future of Germany after the war.

Alongside his more light-handed approach to a post-war Germany, Roosevelt hoped for his fellow-leaders’ support with regard to his proposal to extend into the post-war period the formal alliance of the main signatories to the 'United Nations Declaration’ of January 1942 (the USA, Soviet Union, Great Britain and China), as a global peacekeeping organisation. Stalin was less than enthusiastic about the plan, voicing his doubts as to China’s importance in a post-war order, but all three leaders eventually put their names to it.

The Tehran Conference closed on 1st December 1943, with outward displays of the mutual friendship and unity of purpose of the Big Three in the common undertaking to deliver the final fatal blows to the Nazi regime and then to Japan.