Curated playlist
United Kingdom in World War II
- Anglo-Soviet AgreementOn the 12th of July 1941, two men sat down in Moscow to sign a document that would reshape the war in Europe. Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet People's Commissar of Foreign…
- Anglo-Polish allianceThe Anglo-Polish alliance was born on the 31st of March 1939, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stood in Parliament and pledged that if Poland's independence was threatened, His Majesty's Government would lend the Polish…
- Norway DebateThe Norway Debate opened at 14:45 on Tuesday, the 7th of May 1940, with Speaker Edward FitzRoy in the Chair. Three days later, Neville Chamberlain was gone as prime minister. In his place stood Winston Churchill, leading a coalition…
- Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to GermanyOn the 1st of August 1945, the Potsdam Agreement established provisional terms for governing Germany after World War II. This accord created an Oder, Neisse line that awarded most of Germany's former eastern provinces to Poland and the…
- Yalta ConferenceThe Yalta Conference opened on the 4th of February 1945, inside three palaces overlooking the Black Sea in Soviet Crimea. Outside, the war in Europe was not yet over, but it was close enough that three of the most powerful men alive had…
- Atlantic CharterThe Atlantic Charter was born on the 14th of August 1941, in the waters of Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland, months before the United States had fired a single shot in World War II. Two men had traveled there in secret to make a…
- Lend-LeaseLend-Lease was not charity. It was not a loan in any conventional sense. When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act into law on the 11th of March 1941, he handed himself the power to "sell, transfer title to, exchange,…
- Destroyers-for-bases dealBy late June 1940, France had surrendered to Germany and Italy. The British Empire and the Commonwealth stood alone in warfare against Hitler and Mussolini. The British Chiefs of Staff Committee concluded in May that if France collapsed,…
- Admiralty (United Kingdom)The Admiralty was the single most powerful naval institution in British history, a department of government responsible for commanding the Royal Navy across centuries of war, empire, and transformation. At its head sat a figure with one of…
- Polish government-in-exileThe Polish government-in-exile began with a proclamation issued in Kuty, a small town near Poland's southern border, on the 17th of September 1939. President Ignacy Mościcki was cut off there, as German, Soviet, and Slovak forces closed in…