Canadian soldiers toss their hats in the air in celebration of the formal surrender of German forces in the Netherlands. The date is May 5, 1945. Starting a war is easy, the difficult part is ending it. When Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in February 1945 they knew the war against Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich was all but won even if much hard fighting remained. Their attention was therefore focused on postwar Europe and plans for the destruction of the Japanese Empire. These discussions were greatly influenced by the military situation in both theatres of war and we need to remin...