Similarly, Charles de Gaulle attempted to occupy Stuttgart with liberated French forces (as he rejected the zones that had been agreed to at a conference which he had not been present at) but was pressured to withdraw. I have seen alternate history speculation on what would have happened if the Americans made it as far east as Prague, for example-but the anticlimactic answer is that they would simply have withdrawn after the German surrender, as they did from parts of Saxony in our timeline. However, the Second World War is actually a rather poor example of this, because much of the postwar situation had already been settled the European Advisory Commission, drawn up by the Allies at the Tehran Conference of 1943, had already defined what the postwar occupation zones of Germany would be, for example. It is natural to focus on the grand matters of nations and governments, of borders on the map that would stand for decades and rewrite the future. The end of any war, it should be reasonably obvious, is a fertile place for Alternate History speculation. Nonetheless, VE Day was an important and cathartic moment in both British and world history.
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