Franklin D. Roosevelt
Roosevelt moved the US from neutrality to Lend-Lease and full belligerency, then died on 12 April 1945 before the final surrenders. His Four Freedoms and UN design shaped the postwar script.
Office
3
Key act
3
Died
3
The photogenic "Big Three" did not exhaust the war's political cast. Chiang, de Gaulle, Tito and colonial soldiers sit in a wider iconography.
Historians still argue about strategic bombing, the second-front delay, and the decision to use nuclear weapons -- arguments, not verdicts for a scoreboard.
People
Winston Churchill
Churchill's May 1940 premiership kept Britain in the war after France fell. He was a coalition broker and memoirist whose "finest hour" prose still sets English memory -- and hides imperial contradictions.
PM
3
Symbol
3
Later
3
Joseph Stalin
Stalin's regime absorbed the German invasion after 1941, relocated industry, and drove to Berlin. The same state ran the Gulag and imposed a postwar order on Eastern Europe.
Rule
3
War shock
3
Endgame
3
Adolf Hitler
Hitler's racial war and strategic gambles -- especially Barbarossa -- destroyed the German state he claimed to exalt. He died in Berlin on 30 April 1945.
Power
3
War start
3
Death
3
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang's Nationalist government held a formal great-power seat while fighting Japan and preparing to resume civil war with the Communists. US aid never matched the China theatre's scale.
Role
3
Theatre
3
After
3
Hideki Tojo
Tojo presided over the 1941 decision for war with the US, Britain and the Netherlands. He was tried and executed in 1948 after the Tokyo tribunal.
PM
3
Trial
3
Death
3
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eisenhower coordinated Overlord and the Western European campaign, then became a postwar US president who managed the early nuclear alliance.
SACEUR role
3
Rank
3
Later
3
Georgy Zhukov
Zhukov was associated with Moscow, Stalingrad's relief architecture, and the 1945 Berlin operation. His fame was later trimmed by Stalin's jealousy, then restored.
Peak
3
Symbol
3
After
3
Debate
The bomb and surrender
Historians still weigh the atomic bombings against the Soviet Manchurian offensive and Japan's internal politics as causes of surrender in August 1945.
Second-front timing
Whether 1944 was the earliest feasible cross-Channel attack, or a delay that left the USSR to pay more of the land bill, remains a live argument.
Biography is not a substitute for logistics. A famous general still needed ships, oil and a working railway.
Postwar memoirs (Churchill, Eisenhower, German generals) shaped early English-language history and later needed correction from archives.