Western Allies

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The term Western Allies refers to a certain political and geographic grouping among the Allied Powers of the Second World War. It generally includes the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth, the United States, France and various other European and Latin American countries, but excludes China, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia due to different economic, geographic and political circumstances, some of which arose after the war. Czechoslovakia and Poland and most African and Asian allies not part of the British Commonwealth or France are often excluded from the term, though irregular Ethiopian forces, and Czechoslovak and Polish military forces in exile fought alongside the forces of the Western Allies. France is also often counted among the Western Allies, although the Vichy Regime was neutral and collaborated with the Axis Powers during the war.

After the Second World War, some of the territory of the defeated Axis Powers came under occupation by the Western Allies. Germany and Austria were divided among American, British, French and Soviet control. In 1949 the American, British and French sectors in Germany became the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany while the Soviet sector became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. All four of the Austrian occupation sectors became the Republic of Austria, or Second Austrian Republic. Austria became a neutral state but Italy, West Germany and many of the wartime Western Allies and some formerly neutral states like Denmark, Iceland, Portugal and Spain became the Western Bloc. Canada, the United States, and the European countries among this group formed a military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, to oppose the Eastern Bloc and their military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which was composed of the wartime allies of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, the ex-axis powers of Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Romania as well as Albania. The conflict between the Eastern and Western Blocs became known as the Cold War. Though initially politically close to the Soviet Union, Albania, China and Yugoslavia became nonaligned over the course of the Cold War. Cuba, another one of the allies during the World War II, became aligned with the Eastern Bloc after 1959 as did Ethiopia after 1974.

External links

• History of the Western Allies in Berlin

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