The second World War against Nazi aggression was fought by the Allies on two fronts; The British and Americans pushing from the West, the Soviets, alone, fighting German troops on the East. By 1945, without aid from the US or the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union began to gradually push the Nazi forces back West, as he other Allies pushed from the beaches of Normandy. Soviet troops would eventually occupy much of Eastern Europe, to the dismay of Roosevelt and Churchill. At Yalta, Stalin assured free elections in the region following the unconditional surrender of Germany. At Yalta, also, is where the Soviets, along with the English pledged support towards the United States in the Pacific Ocean.
It was at this point in the war that the United States and the Soviet Union began competition, and possibly even earlier since the implementation of Lend Lease. Firstly, the United States, without informing Joseph Stalin, sent two atomic bombs on Japan, one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. Stalin's ignorance, perhaps, was a ploy of the United States government, which feared the presence of Soviet troops in the region, believing that the Soviet Union would want territorial concessions in Asia as they did in Europe. The Soviets responded at war's end when, while he rest of the Allies began to demilitarize, the Soviets kept their troops in Eastern Europe, looting machinery back to their desolate, and backwards homeland, and, once again, an aggravation to the West, began to preach revolution, of the coming conflict between communism and capitalism. .
The United States initiated the Marshall Plan, a policy they hped would help sway the ailing, poor European countries, those thought to be the most vulnerable and accepting to the communist ideals towards capitalism. Not long thereafter came NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), a pledge of military backing from the United States to Wester Europe.
