Was the Cold War inevitable, and who is responsible for its outbreak? This chapter argues that, as the Second World War neared its end, Joseph Stalin was shopping for a great bargain with the Allies, in keeping with Russia's realpolitik tradition. While the details of Stalin's vision remain blurry, evidence from internal Soviet deliberations in 1944–45 points to a broadly imperial, nineteenth-century, conceptualization of the Soviet role in Europe. Stalin sought both power and legitimacy, and understood that the Americans could endorse or reject his postwar claims. He could and did measure his appetites in pursuit of legitimate gains—those that had Washington’s imprimatur. Despite his efforts to achieve legitimacy at Yalta, Stalin’s hopes for a Soviet–American agreement to divide the world soon began to run aground, largely owing to his own rapacity and bad faith.

The Crimean War was not the first time Britons made their ways to the Black Sea peninsula, but it was the decisive occasion to place the land in the national consciousness, giving rise to travel narratives in newspapers, diaries, and letters. These accounts by wartime adventurers provided ways of understanding the Crimea, cosmopolitan and foreign in British eyes, during the conflict and after. Even while showcasing far-away lands, they showed Britons, the English especially, to be reluctant travelers, glad to head homeward at war’s end. After the troops exited the peninsula and across the Victorian age, return narratives cast the Crimea as a place of memory and self-discovery. During the twentieth century, global politics made the peninsula a stage for world wars and for international diplomacy, culminating in the Yalta Conference of 1945. In the postwar era and until the 2014 Russian invasion, the peninsula became a tourist destination, giving Britons a view behind the Iron Curtain and a glimpse of a post-Soviet Age. Across these changes, Crimean War narratives provided frameworks that allowed Britons to understand history, apprehend travel, and assess themselves.

This chapter covers events in Europe from the summer of 1944 to the end of the war. Four invasions carried out on mainland Europe penetrate the outer defensive perimeter of the Third Reich: (1) the landing in Normandy in June, followed by the pursuit of the enemy to the western borders of the Reich; (2) the August 1944 invasion of southern France; (3) the offensive in Belarus in late June, Operation BAGRATION, followed by the retreat of the shattered Wehrmacht across the Baltic region and eastern Poland; (4) south of the Carpathian Mountains the Red Army advance across Hungary. The surrounded Nazi regime refuses to consider surrender and embarks on a policy of Total War. The December 1944 attempt by the Wehrmacht to mount counter-attacks, most famously the Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge). The Allies, meanwhile hold high-level conferences at Tehran and Yalta to discuss future strategy and post-war arrangements. The final defeat of Germany in five concentric campaigns: (1) western Poland and northeastern Germany; (2) the Rhineland; (3) western Germany and Bavaria; (4) Austria; and (5) the final battle for Berlin. The suicide of Hitler and the German surrender.