Six Months in 1945

From the author of the best-selling One Minute to Midnight, a riveting account of the final six months of World War II, during which the promise of Yalta gave way to the open conflict that led inexorably to the Cold War. When Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler's armies were on the run, and victory was imminent. The task of the three leaders was to forge the decisions that would shape the postwar world — and to divide Europe between Soviet and Western influence. They had fought side by side for nearly four years but their alliance was beginning to fracture, and though the Berlin airlift and the Iron Curtain were three years in the future, by August 1945 it was clear that cold war was inevitable. Six Months in 1945 captures this turning point of the twentieth century, tracing the steady breakdown in relations between the three powers, brilliantly describing the personalities and geopolitics that fueled this descent, and illuminating the aims and frustrations of all three key leaders. It is a vividly rendered story of individual and national interests in fierce competition at a seminal moment in history.