The Polish troops who contributed to the Allied defeat of the Germans in North Africa and Italy, had expected to be able to return at war's end to their "Kresy" (eastern Polish) homeland in an independent and democratic Poland. But at Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill acquiesced in Stalin's Soviet Union annexation of the "Kresy" lands (roughly half of pre-war Poland's landmass), in accordance with the provisions of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. This entailed massive postwar Polish population deportations to western so-called "Recovered Territories" assigned from Germany to Poland. The great majority of Polish soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the West would never return to their homeland. In apparent reaction to British acquiescence in Poland's postwar future, thirty officers and men of the Polish II Corps committed suicide.