The Big Three Meet at Last: The Tehran Conference Opens
On November 28, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin sat down together for the first time, inside the Soviet embassy in Tehran, to decide how to win World War II.
For two years the leaders of the three great Allied powers had fought a common enemy without ever sitting in the same room. Roosevelt and Churchill had conferred at Casablanca and, just days earlier, at Cairo; Churchill had flown to Moscow to meet Stalin. But on November 28, 1943, the "Big Three" met all together for the first time, gathering under heavy guard at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran, for the conference codenamed Eureka.
Roosevelt had crossed the Atlantic aboard the battleship USS Iowa and, at Stalin's invitation, took up residence inside the Soviet embassy compound itself — the conference venue — so the three leaders could talk at almost any hour. Roosevelt hoped his personal charm could win Stalin over; the results were mixed. The three leaders arrived with differing objectives — Churchill wary of a cross-Channel gamble, Stalin impatient for relief, Roosevelt eager to lock in Soviet cooperation for the war against Japan — and they had come straight from the Cairo Conference of November 22–26, where Roosevelt and Churchill had first thrashed out a common position with China's Chiang Kai-shek.
The main business was how to finish Germany. Stalin had long demanded a second front in Western Europe to relieve the pressure on the Red Army; at Tehran, Roosevelt and Churchill committed to it — the cross-Channel invasion of France that would become D-Day. Stalin, in turn, pledged that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. Beyond the battlefield, they discussed Turkey, Yugoslavia, and the shape of the postwar world, and in a separate protocol the three powers pledged to respect Iran's independence after the war.
There was ceremony too. On November 29, Churchill presented Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad, a jeweled ceremonial blade commissioned by King George VI for "the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad" after their victory over the German army. The next evening the leaders dined to celebrate Churchill's 69th birthday, where he received a Persian lamb's-wool hat.
Four days of talks ended on December 1. It was the first of the great wartime summits to bring all three leaders together; they would not meet again until Yalta in February 1945, followed by Potsdam that summer. But Tehran had settled the war's endgame: a second front in the west, Soviet help in the east, and the outlines of the postwar world sketched on a Tehran table.
Photo: U.S. federal government, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
