ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Winston Churchill's role in the creation and development of the Anglo–American special relationship. The famous 'Iron Curtain' – 'Sinews of Peace' – speech made by Winton Churchill on 5 March 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, cannot be understood without a firm grounding in the alliance politics of the Second World War, and Winston Churchill's differing assessments regarding the Soviet Union since 1917. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the wartime leaders of the United States and Great Britain, quickly recognized that the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 offered a far better chance to defeat rather than just contain Hitler's Germany. Churchill's condemnation of Soviet behaviour in Eastern Europe garnered greater attention from his American audience than he expected. Yet this was the same Winston Churchill who had just finished five years in a political alliance with the USSR that defeated Hitler's Germany and Imperial Japan.
