News: "The Big Three," Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, have met in Tehran

December 6, 1943

1:55

[title]

On November 28, 1943, the first conference between the leaders of the three major Allied powers--U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin--began in Tehran, Iran. The "Big Three," as they were known, chiefly discussed Anglo-American plans to open a second front in Europe. At the time, German forces were concentrated in the USSR, fighting a bloody war against Stalin's Red Army. Receiving assurances from Roosevelt and Churchill that an Anglo-American invasion of German-occupied France would begin in 1944, Stalin promised to launch an eastern offensive to coincide with D-Day. He also renewed the Soviet promise of eventual military intervention against Japan. In the political sphere, Stalin let it be known that he planned to annex a portion of eastern Poland into the USSR. The Big Three leaders did not meet together again until February 1945 in Yalta, where they agreed to divide Germany and much of the rest of world into zones of influence and hammered out details about the postwar United Nations organization.