The conference room was ready.

77 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta to lay the

groundwork for peace in Europe.

Prime Minister Churchill arrived with his daughter.

And today, with tanks on the move, people in bomb shelters and buildings in rubble,

we're looking back to see what they might have missed.

The big three met again, holding the immediate future of the world in their hands.

I'm Anne Strange, Champs, and in this episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge,

The Tangled Roots of War and Peace.

Wisconsin Public Radio. It's to the best of our knowledge.

It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Anne Strange Champs.

In early February, 1945, an ailing Franklin Roosevelt traveled together with Winston Churchill to Yalta.

The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies, and we reject it. The journey there, I didn't appreciate how arduous it was,

and how much that shapes the tone and the rest of the conference.

Historian Catherine Gray's Katz is going to help tell the story.

Churchill and Roosevelt fly a harrowing night over enemy-occupied territory where there's still anti-aircraft units.

They're flying at low altitude and unpressurized planes.

They finally then arrive in the Crimea where the airfield that they're landing on is

dangerously short for the types of planes that they fly and it's shrouded in fog.

And then they have to drive a further six hours over Battlescarred roads, sometimes at no more than 20 miles an hour.

And it's just, it's an absolute nightmare.

When they finally arrived, it wasn't exactly what they were expecting.

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