Tehran Conference was the first meeting of the main Allied leaders during World War II. These leaders, called the Big Three, were Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. The meeting was also the first summit conference involving the heads of the Soviet Union and the United States. It took place from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, 1943, in Tehran, Iran’s capital. The city’s name is sometimes spelled Teheran.
The two main military decisions made at the conference were that the United States and the United Kingdom would launch an invasion of France in 1944 and that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat. The leaders also discussed plans for creating a United Nations organization, for dividing and disarming Germany, and for moving Poland’s borders westward after the war. The Polish-Soviet border would be redrawn to add territory to the Soviet Union that had been part of Russia before World War I began in 1914. The cooperative spirit of the conference paved the way for later agreements among the Allied war leaders at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
