When FDR Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin gathered outside the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945 they had Hitler's armies on the run and victory was just a matter of time. Their mission was to forge the decisions that would shape the postwar world and above all to divide up Europe between Soviet and Western influence. These men had been fighting side by side for nearly four years but the cracks in their alliance were emerging; even before the Second World War ended another conflict was beginning. While the Berlin airlift and the Iron Curtain would not arrive for three years by August 1945 the West and the Soviet Union were firmly on the path to a Cold War.