On August 13, 1942, Soviet Premier Joseph...
Stalin drafted a memorandum to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt opposing their decision not to invade Western Europe at that time. In the memo, Stalin, whose beleaguered Russian army had been contending with a German invasion for over a year, impressed upon the Americans and British the necessity of relieving the pressure on Russia's eastern front. Stalin pressed the Allies to open a second front against Hitler in Europe. Concluding that this would be militarily unsound for them to attempt in 1942, England and the U.S. chose instead to invade North Africa.
The alliance between Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union began to unravel soon after the German threat was vanquished in 1945. Indications of the depth of the tensions between the allies had surfaced in February of that year at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, where Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany.
Also on the agenda was the question of how to deal with the defeated or liberated countries of Eastern Europe. Roosevelt was later criticized for failing to take greater measures at this meeting to prevent Stalin from seizing former German territory in Eastern Europe.
Learn more about World War II in American Memory:
- View photographs documenting the domestic U.S. experience of World War II. Browse the FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945 collection, which includes photographs issued by the Office of War Information to rally support for the war effort among the American people.
- Scroll sideways to see the presentation 10th Mountain Division in History of the American West: 1860-1920. The 10th Mountain Division trained in the Colorado Rockie Mountains in order to fight in the mountains of Northern Italy during WWII.
- Visit the Library of Congress exhibitions Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During WWII and For European Recovery: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Marshall Plan.
- Search the Today in History Archive on World War II to retrieve relevant features including the founding of the USO, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allied invasion at Normandy, and the Japanese surrender of Okinawa.
- Search across the American Memory collections on World War II to find a variety of materials, including Gen. George S. Patton's diary entries for March 1943.
