YALTA 1945

For eight days in February 1945, with Germany all but beaten, the three men who led the alliance against Hitler met at the Livadia Palace on the Crimean coast to divide the world that would follow. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — the "Big Three" — planned the final defeat of the Reich and the shape of postwar Europe, and for a moment Yalta was hailed as the summit of Allied cooperation. The glow did not last. Stalin's promise of free elections in Eastern Europe went unkept, and the region vanished behind what Churchill would soon call the Iron Curtain. Historians still argue whether a dying Roosevelt was duped, or whether the Red Army's grip on the ground had already decided matters. K&C's new sculpt — a fresh take on their sought-after 2012 set, based on a different conference photograph — is a study in shifting power. Churchill sits in the khaki of a Colonel of the Royal Sussex Regiment under a heavy greatcoat and a Russian-style fur hat, cigar in hand; a visibly frail Roosevelt, wrapped in his cape, leans subtly toward Stalin rather than his old ally, reflecting the President's private belief that Britain was now a "spent force" and the future belonged to Washington and Moscow; and Stalin looks on with quiet amusement, trusting neither. It is the Cold War prefigured in three seated men. These are the leaders whose commanders, like Field Marshal Montgomery, and whose soldiers, like the Gold Beach infantry, actually won the war they were carving up. On a shelf or in a conference-table vignette, the Big Three anchor any WWII collection. Model: DD396 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 3 figures with chairs