Meeting at Potsdam

xiv, 370 pp. "Through logbooks, eyewitness accounts, and conference transcripts, Charles Mee vividly reconstructs this moment in history, when three men met to forge a peace and a new face for Western Europe, a tri-partite declaration of the Cold War. For two weeks in the summer of 1945, from July 17 to August 2, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin gathered to reconstruct the world out of the ruins of World War II. They met "only a few miles," as President Truman noted, "from the war-shattered seat of Nazi power" - around a baize-covered table in the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, a place they later remembered vividly for its hardy mosquitoes and muggy heat. A revisionist history of the 1945 Potsdam Conference that is easy reading for all history enthusiasts."