It was a moment whose significance was immediately apparent – when, on the morning of 25 April 1945, members of a US Army forward patrol came across officers and soldiers of the Soviet 175th Rifle Regiment near the small town of Torgau, about 85 miles from Berlin. Toasts were drunk and photographs taken of jubilant comrades to celebrate the first meeting of the two Allied armies, which had been advancing from opposite directions (see MHM 145, April/May 2025), and which had now cut Germany in two as they converged on Hitler’s capital.
To the American and Russian troops shaking hands and sipping vodka on the banks of the Elbe, it was clear that the deadliest conflict in human history would soon now be over, raising hopes that a new era of brotherhood and peace between nations might finally be dawning. But, though the war in Europe would indeed be wrapped up in days – with the Fuhrer’s suicide on 30 April followed quickly by Germany’s unconditional surrender – any sense of a harmonious future would, of course, prove short-lived.
In our new four-part series to mark the 80th anniversary of the advent of the Cold War, MHM examines how the triumphs of 1945 were so rapidly replaced by mistrust and political and ideological disagreement, as the leaders of the Allied ‘Big Three’ pursued very different post-war agendas. It was a rift that within a year of VE Day would lead Winston Churchill to declare in a famous speech that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’
As we shall see, Churchill’s words would prove prophetic, framing the military and geopolitical landscape for the next 50 years. They set the tone for a new ‘bipolar’ struggle between the West, led by the USA, and the East, led by the USSR – one that would spread division around the world, and end only with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Though the conflict is remembered as the Cold War, because it never quite erupted into open hostilities between the nuclear-armed principals, it would also give rise to a range of decidedly ‘hot’ proxy conflicts – from Korea to Cuba, and from Vietnam to the Middle East – as the two sides vied for global supremacy.
In the first part of our series, Taylor Downing looks at how the end of the fighting in 1945 sowed the seeds of the conflict to come; while in the second part, we travel to Vienna to see how the defeat of the Nazis brought new division to the Austrian capital.
This is an extract from a special feature on the descent of the Iron Curtain across post-war Europe from the October/November 2025 issue of Military History Matters magazine.
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