Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

At the end of a long day full of hard bargaining, The Big Three could still relax in one another’s company. In this episode we discuss the most important dinner of the conference.  

A deal was struck between FDR and Stalin: the Soviets will join the war with Japan in exchange for territorial acquisitions at Japan’s expense and the creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China.  

The city of Dresden was the primary victim of the “zone of limitation” agreement reached at Yalta—one of the few direct outcomes of the military consultations held there. In early 1945 Dresden was one of the few major German centers to have escaped systematic Allied bombing. On the night of February 13 – only two days after the end of the Yalta conference – the Royal Air Force Bomber C...

On Feb 7, the British Chiefs of Staff decided to take the day off to visit the site of the Battle of Balaclava, infamous for the “Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854. Meanwhile, the Americans and the Soviet military commanders took the opportunity to talk about Russia’s entry into the Pacific War against Japan.    

  Conversation at Yalta turns to Poland’s borders. Stalin had a new proposal that would mean moving the southern part of the Polish-German border 200 kilometers west – into Germany, right up to the Oder & Neisse rivers. Which was actually giving Poland more of Germany than the U.S. and UK were happy with. They believed it would create 8 or 9 million German refugees.      

On Feb 8, when Stalin arrived for his lunch date with Roosevelt, FDR told him that the Foreign Ministers had met that morning and agreed to accept the two extra countries for the Soviet’s in the UN General Assembly. It was good timing for FDR, because that day they were going to be talking about getting Russia involved in the war with Japan, and he wanted him on side. THE ONLY SMALL PROBLEM &#8211...

At Yalta, Feb 7 and 8 – days 4 and 5 – are going to be about trying to get agreement on the Polish issues and the issue of the Soviets entering the war with Japan. Winnie The Pooh is getting played by Uncle Joe, who senses that the US/UK love fest is struggling.    

  Back to the question of Poland. Roosevelt suggests changing the Polish-Russian border – in the favour of the Poles. Why? It’d really help him out in the upcoming U.S. election. Churchill agreed with him. Why? It would really help him out in the upcoming British election. Stalin, as you can imagine, was not impressed with their logic.    

Despite their attempts to get the U.K. and U.S.S.R. to give up on the concept of spheres of influence, the Monroe Doctrine remained the dominant way that America built its economic empire after WWII. Russia has always longed for more warm water ports and we explain why that’s important. We do a mini bio on Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs. And we talk...

We are back talking about Poland and why it was such an important issue to the Big Three at Yalta. As Churchill himself said, Poland was so important, it was discussed at seven out of the eight plenary sessions and the official British record contained 18,000 words on Poland spoken by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. We also talk a little about Operation Paperclip, where America grabbed 1600 Nazi...

So after Sumner Welles resigned, the majority of the work on the UN charter was done by an interesting guy no-one remembers – Leo Pasvolsky. When he died in 1953, his New York Times obituary was subtitled “Wrote Charter of World Organization.” In a 1967 letter, Dean Acheson criticized American moralism in international affairs, which he saw as culminating in “that little ra...

During the rest of Day Two of Yalta they discuss how much Germany should pay in reparations and how many Germans should go to Russia as slave labour. On Day Three, the talk turns to FDR’s passion project – The United Nations. We go into some detail about the early vision for the UN, the men behind it, the concerns the Big Three had about how it would impact on their own plans for globa...

As the Yalta conference now turns to whether or not France should have a role in the occupation of Germany, the Allied Control Commission and the UN Security Council, we thought it was a good time to do a quick bio on France’s post-WWII leader, Charles de Gaulle, aka “The Big Asparagus Stalk”, aka “Chucky D”.  

On day two of the Yalta Conference Franky wanted to discuss the role of France in the German occupation. Joey hijacked the agenda to demand agreement on dismemberment. And Winny just sucked his thumb because no-one cared what he thought about anything. PS ignore the episode number I think it is when we recorded the show. I was wrong. Very, very wrong.  

Part four (!!!) of our “quick” biography on Fidel Castro, using the New York Times’ obituary, breaking it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making these Castro episodes free to guests. This is absolutely the last part, we promise!  

Part three (!!!) of our “quick” biography on Fidel Castro, using the New York Times’ obituary, breaking it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making these Castro episodes free to guests. And yes – there is a part four! But it’s the last part, we promise!  

Part two of our “quick” biography on Fidel Castro, using the New York Times’ obituary, breaking it down, line by line, to uncover the propaganda. And we’re making these Castro episodes free to guests.  

With the recent death of Fidel Castro, we decided to take a quick detour from our linear narrative to jump ahead in time and talk about one of the major figures, not only of the Cold War, but of the 20th century. A hero to many, reviled by just as many, his death brought on a new spate of Western media coverage. After reading much of it, we just had to provide our own perspective. We decided to ta...

Like he had before Tehran, FDR refused the idea of an Anglo-American bloc when he and Churchill met briefly in Malta before the conference. He’s trying hard to avoid putting Stalin on the defensive. Because he knows that in the game of wartime diplomacy, the player with the most troops on the ground had the loudest voice.    

We FINALLY start talking about day one of the Yalta conference, explaining the key cast of characters – and a lemon tree.  

Today we have another special guest – Pulitzer Prize-winning author, the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences – Prof Fredrik Logevall . He’s also the co-author of America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (co-authored with Campbell Craig, wh...

  This is the third and final of our episodes about the Cambridge Five! This week – Donald Maclean. After being recruited at Cambridge, he started working for the Foreign Office assigned to the division that looked after the League of Nations. Over the next few years, 45 boxes of documents were photographed and sent to Moscow. He rose to become the First Secretary at the British Embassy...

  This is the second of our episodes about the Cambridge Five! This week – Guy Burgess. Where the others were highly self-controlled and shunned public scrutiny, he was wildly flamboyant, openly homosexual and often embroiled in scandal because of his drunken behaviour. He had the ability to charm anyone he sought out, including Churchill, and attracted an astonishing array of contacts,...

This is the first of two episodes about the Cambridge Five! This week – Kim Philby, arguably the most effective spy in the history of spying. The man running British operations against the Russians in the early years of the Cold War was actually working for the Russians himself. And there was every possibility that had it not been for one mistake, Philby would have gone on to become CSS, Chi...

By the time the Big Three finally met again after Tehran, it was February 1945, the US had re-taken the Phillipines. But the they were still a long way from Japan. And in Europe, they were all facing fierce crystal-meth fuelled German resistance. Plus we have Pomeranian dogs, golden fleece, a Greek revolutionary, a Jew who is burned at the stake, and the introduction to the Cambridge Five!