This Day in World War II: The Speech That Named the Cold War

March 5, 1946: “An iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

Stalin, Truman, and Churchill at Potsdam

On March 5, 1946, in the gym of a small Missouri college, Winston Churchill stood before 1,500 people and announced that the world had split in two.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

With that single phrase, Churchill named the Cold War before most people realized it had begun. World War II had ended only recently, the alliance with the Soviet Union was still officially in place, and Churchill had been summarily dismissed as Prime Minister in an election that followed V-E day by only two months.

The setting was improbable. Westminster College in Fulton, population 7,000, seemed an unlikely venue for a speech of global importance. But President Harry Truman had personally invited Churchill and promised to introduce him. Truman’s handwritten note on the invitation read: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. If you come, I will introduce you.”

Churchill, who’d been voted out as British Prime Minister in July 1945 — just two months after winning the war in Europe — accepted eagerly. He spent the winter of 1945-46 in the United States, ostensibly on vacation but in reality preparing what would become one of the most consequential speeches of the 20th century.

On the train ride from Washington to Fulton on March 4, Churchill edited and finalized his 50-page manuscript while Truman looked on. The speech’s official title was “The Sinews of Peace,” but nobody remembers that. History knows it as the Iron Curtain speech.

Churchill's Clear Vision

Less than a year after Allied victory in Europe, Soviet troops occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. Communist parties were gaining power in France and Italy. Stalin had installed puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe.

Less then a month before Churchill's appearance in Fulton, Stalin gave a speech declaring war between communism and capitalism inevitable. Two weeks later, American diplomat George Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, warning that the Soviet Union viewed the West with perpetual hostility.

Churchill saw it clearly. The wartime alliance was dead. A new ideological, political, and potentially existential conflict was beginning.

No Punches Pulled

The speech pulled no punches. Behind the Iron Curtain, he said, lay “all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.” All were now under Soviet control, “subject not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

The Cold War shaped the Paris at the heart of my Eddie Grant thriller series — a city caught between East and West, where espionage, betrayal, and loyalty played out against a backdrop of cafés, cobblestones, and carefully coded messages. If you enjoy stories where history intersects with suspense, start with The Treasure of Saint-Lazare.

Churchill warned of “Communist fifth columns” operating throughout Western Europe. He drew explicit parallels to the 1930s, when Western appeasement of Hitler had made World War II inevitable. “There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action,” he said of that conflict.

The solution? A “special relationship” between the United States and Britain, backed by military strength. “There is nothing they admire so much as strength,” Churchill said of the Soviets, “and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.”

In other words, he believed the Soviet Union should be treated after the war as Germany should have been treated before the war, in the days of appeasement.

The Reaction

Stalin’s response was swift and brutal. In an interview with Pravda on March 13, he compared Churchill to Hitler and accused him of racism and warmongering. The Soviet press unleashed a propaganda barrage. Russian historians would later date the beginning of the Cold War to this speech.

In the West, reaction was mixed. Many American officials welcomed Churchill’s clarity — they’d already concluded the Soviets were bent on expansion. But others thought Churchill was needlessly provocative, still too attached to British imperial interests, and dragging America into conflicts that weren’t its concern.

Public opinion was divided. Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as a wartime ally. The shift from “Uncle Joe” Stalin as friend to Stalin as enemy hadn’t fully registered yet.

But Churchill’s phrase — “iron curtain” — immediately entered the vocabulary. It gave people a way to understand what was happening. Europe wasn’t just divided politically. A barrier had descended. Information didn’t cross it. People didn’t cross it. Two worlds, increasingly hostile, facing each other across an invisible but very real line.

The evidence of Stalin's internal brutality was out in public but in the West there was a reluctance to believe it of “Uncle Joe,” and there was an active pro-Communist movement in both Europe and the United States. It was not until Khrushchev pulled back the curtain in his 1956 speech that the full extent of Stalin's outrages became common talk. Suddenly, all the show trials that had been covered as justice for traitors began to take on a different gloss. It took more than 30 years for the Berlin Wall to come down and the Soviet Union to dissolve and for the newly named leader, an ex-KGB agent named Putin, to begin work toward his goal of reconstituting the Russian
Empire.

The Paris Connection

For Parisians in 1946, Churchill’s warning resonated differently than it did in America or Britain. Paris had just emerged from four years of German occupation. The war was recent, brutal, and personal. Now Churchill was saying another conflict loomed — one that could last decades.

France found itself in an awkward position. Officially aligned with the West, it nonetheless had Europe’s largest Communist Party. The French Communist Party had earned legitimacy through its role in the Resistance. Now it was being painted as a Soviet fifth column. De Gaulle, leading France’s provisional government at the time, resigned three weeks after Churchill’s speech — frustrated with exactly the kind of political maneuvering Churchill had warned about.

The tension would define French politics for decades. Communist influence in government. Soviet sympathies among intellectuals. American military presence. The pull between independence and alliance. All of it traceable back to the moment Churchill identified: the Iron Curtain had descended, and France was on the western side of it.

The Legacy

Churchill’s speech became a blueprint. The “special relationship” he called for materialized in NATO. The military strength he advocated shaped Western policy through five decades of Cold War. The Iron Curtain he named became a physical reality — barbed wire, minefields, guard towers, and ultimately the Berlin Wall.

The metaphor lasted until 1989, when the real Iron Curtain began to fall. East Germans crossed into West Berlin. The Wall came down. The Soviet empire collapsed. The Cold War ended.

But on this day in 1946, none of that was imaginable. Churchill stood in a Missouri gymnasium and told an audience of 1,500 people — and through radio, millions more — that the world had split in two.

He was right. The world would spend the next 45 years proving it, and now is forced to learn it again, in Ukraine.

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