The Iron Curtain Falls

The alliance that defeated Hitler lasted barely two years beyond V-E Day. At Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had papered over their fundamental disagreements about the postwar order with vague language about 'free elections' in liberated Eastern Europe.

Within months of Germany's surrender, the gap between Soviet and American visions of that order was unmistakable. Soviet troops occupied Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and eastern Germany; everywhere they went, communist governments followed — not through the ballot box but through intimidation, arrest, and rigged elections.

Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 at Harry Truman's invitation, gave the division its name: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.

The Truman administration's response took shape through 1947. In March, facing British withdrawal from Greece and Turkey — both threatened by communist insurgencies — Truman addressed Congress with a sweeping promise: the United States would 'support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

' The Truman Doctrine committed America to fighting communism anywhere in the world. Simultaneously, Secretary of State George Marshall announced a $13 billion reconstruction program for Western Europe — the Marshall Plan — that aimed to rebuild the economic foundations on which liberal democracy would have to stand.

Stalin rejected Marshall aid for the Soviet sphere and began tightening his control over Eastern Europe, culminating in the February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia that electrified Western opinion.

Berlin became the first direct confrontation between the superpowers. Trapped deep inside the Soviet occupation zone, West Berlin was sustained only by road and rail links that the Soviets controlled.

When the Western powers introduced a reformed Deutsche Mark into their zones in June 1948 — part of a broader plan to rebuild West Germany as an anchor of the Western alliance — Stalin's response was to cut all land and water routes to the city.

The Berlin Blockade was his attempt to force a choice: abandon West Berlin or abandon Germany's Western future. Truman chose neither. The Berlin Airlift — 'Operation Vittles' to the Americans, 'Operation Plainfare' to the British — delivered 2.3 million tons of supplies in 318 days. At its peak, planes landed every 63 seconds at Tempelhof Airport.

Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949, having achieved nothing except cementing Western resolve and accelerating the formation of NATO.

The year 1949 brought two events that permanently transformed the Cold War's stakes. In August, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb — 'Joe-1' — three years ahead of American intelligence estimates, ending the U.S. nuclear monopoly that Truman had relied on as the ultimate guarantor of Western security.

In October, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, adding 600 million people to the communist world.

To American policymakers, already alarmed by the discovery that Soviet espionage had stolen nuclear secrets, these shocks pointed toward a world in which the balance of power was shifting against the West.

NSC-68, a top-secret policy document completed in April 1950, concluded that the Soviet Union aimed at world domination and that the United States must quadruple its defense spending to survive. The stage was set for hot war.