Allied military efforts were accompanied by a series of
important international meetings on the political objectives of
the war. In January 1943 at Casablanca, Morocco, an
Anglo-American conference decided that no peace would be
concluded with the Axis and its Balkan satellites except on the
basis of "unconditional surrender." This term, insisted upon by
Roosevelt, sought to assure the people of all the fighting
nations that no separate peace negotiations would be carried on
with representatives of Fascism and Nazism and there would be no
compromise of the war’s idealistic objectives. Axis
propagandists, of course, used it to assert that the Allies were
engaged in a war of extermination.
At Cairo, in November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met with
Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek to agree on terms for
Japan, including the relinquishment of gains from past
aggression. At Tehran, shortly afterward, Roosevelt, Churchill,
and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made basic agreements on the
postwar occupation of Germany and the establishment of a new
international organization, the United Nations.
In February 1945, the three Allied leaders met again at Yalta
(now in Ukraine), with victory seemingly secure. There, the
Soviet Union secretly agreed to enter the war against Japan
three months after the surrender of Germany. In return, the USSR
would gain effective control of Manchuria and receive the
Japanese Kurile Islands as well as the southern half of Sakhalin
Island. The eastern boundary of Poland was set roughly at the
Curzon line of 1919, thus giving the USSR half its prewar
territory. Discussion of reparations to be collected from
Germany – payment demanded by Stalin and opposed by Roosevelt
and Churchill – was inconclusive. Specific arrangements were
made concerning Allied occupation in Germany and the trial and
punishment of war criminals. Also at Yalta it was agreed that
the great powers in the Security Council of the proposed United
Nations should have the right of veto in matters affecting their
security.
Two months after his return from Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt died
of a cerebral hemorrhage while vacationing in Georgia. Few
figures in U.S. history have been so deeply mourned, and for a
time the American people suffered from a numbing sense of
irreparable loss. Vice President Harry Truman, former senator
from Missouri, succeeded him.
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