‘Catastrophe may overwhelm us all’: How Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech launched the Cold War 80 years ago

By Grey McKeviitt, 5 days ago

In 1946, less than a year after the end of World War Two, Britain’s wartime leader sounded an urgent warning about the Soviet threat to the West.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” In a single sentence, Winston Churchill defined the division between two opposing ways of life: on one side, the capitalist West, on the other side, the communist East. In his speech on 5 March 1946, urging the US to look outwards and resist returning to isolationism, Churchill drew a metaphorical dividing line through Europe, from Germany’s border with northwest Poland to Italy’s border with the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia. It captured a moment suspended between post-war euphoria and the unsettling sense that fresh dangers could lie ahead.

Not everyone realised it yet, but Churchill had identified how conditions were brewing for the Cold War, a struggle between the two new superpowers, the US and USSR, that would split the world into ideological camps for decades.

‘From the Baltic to the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent’.

Churchill was speaking merely as a private citizen, not as the world leader who led the UK through most of the war years. While the major powers were still planning what shape a post-war world would take after victory, Britons voted Churchill out of office in the 1945 general election. Depressed and bewildered about the rejection less than two months after the VE Day celebrations, the 71-year-old pondered what to do next. But he already had something on his mind.

As the end of war approached, Churchill had noted how the Soviet armies were not withdrawing from the territory they had occupied while advancing across Eastern Europe to defeat Nazi Germany. Soviet‑backed regimes were emerging in these newly liberated countries and Moscow was signalling ambitions to further extend its influence. Yet after such a devastating global conflict, few nations, especially the United States, wished to confront their former wartime ally and risk World War Three. Churchill disagreed and even considered attacking the USSR, or Soviet Union. This explosive secret plan was codenamed Operation Unthinkable. British military advisors soon realised it was unrealistic – the name may have been a clue – and it was abandoned.

US president Harry Truman calculated how a Churchill speech could benefit his government

Now no longer prime minister, Churchill’s words still carried weight internationally. In October 1945, an exciting opportunity came from an unlikely source when he received a bold invitation to speak at Westminster College, a hitherto obscure institution in the small midwestern town of Fulton, Missouri. Scrawled at the bottom of the letter was a presidential endorsement: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you. Best regards, Harry Truman.”

The US president had calculated how a Churchill speech could also benefit his government. From its earliest days, the US has wrestled with how to balance domestic priorities with ambitions overseas. With the troops arriving home, many Americans were looking inward and were focused on rebuilding. However, some felt anxious about the potential Soviet threat. Truman could use Churchill’s speech to help gauge where American opinion now stood.

The forming of the ‘special relationship’

Churchill seized the opportunity and spent weeks working on the speech, crystallizing his thoughts on the new world emerging from the wreckage of war. He travelled from Washington DC to Missouri with President Truman, who read its text on the train. Churchill described in a letter to Clement Attlee, his successor as prime minister, how Truman had given his approval: “He told me he thought it was admirable and would do nothing but good, though it would make a stir. He seemed equally pleased during and after.”

Churchill was introduced by Truman as “that great world citizen”; a stage was erected in the college gymnasium, the only place on campus large enough to host such a major event. The speech was titled Sinews of Peace – a twist on the Roman orator Cicero’s phrase “sinews of war”.

Churchill was half-American and he believed that Britain’s security depended on closer ties with the US

In the speech, he urged the US to play its part in shaping the peace, having shaped the war. Calling for protection “from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny”, he said that the recently established United Nations could not keep the peace alone. “Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”

Churchill himself was half-American and he believed that Britain’s security and prosperity depended on closer ties with the US. His newly minted phrase “special relationship” is still used widely to describe the countries’ shared historical and cultural links, although the partnership itself has often proved a decidedly rocky foreign affair.

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The speech’s most famous phrase, the “iron curtain”, entered the political lexicon as he cautioned how the “ancient capitals and states of central and eastern Europe” were falling under tightening Soviet influence. These Soviet satellite states were becoming “police governments”, he warned, with communist parties attempting to “obtain totalitarian control”.

While Churchill’s speech popularised the phrase as a vivid description of the capitalist/communist divide, it was not coined by him. Indeed, he had used it himself several times before. Historian Prof David Reynolds told the BBC’s Witness History: “The term ‘iron curtain’ had been used about the relationship between the West and Bolshevism since the Bolshevik Revolution, and he’s used it in the House of Commons, but this is the first time at Fulton that he really exposes it to the world at a point where the world is listening.”

Source: ‘Catastrophe may overwhelm us all’: How Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech launched the Cold War 80 years ago