Posted on 05/27/2008 8:17:15 AM PDT by Ultra-Secret.info
Communists also used political subversion to shape the course of World War II. They manipulated intelligence and State Department analysis to push America toward war with Japan, relieving the threat that Japan might go to war with Moscow. They fought against a plan to invade Europe through Italy, rather than France, as this would have imperiled the eventual Soviet control of Eastern Europe. Soviet agent Alger Hiss was a top advisor to Roosevelt at the Yalta conference that confirmed Soviet control of Eastern Europe, leading to forty years of tyranny and millions murdered in those countries.
Great Book. Reading it now.
Huh? The push was the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor...
Ever heard of The Alps?
Which was a response to the oil embargo that Roosevelt imposed on Japan in July 1941. With their oil supplies cut off (the US supplied 80% of Japan's oil at the time), the Japanese had two choices: surrender or go to war and secure other supplies of oil. To do the latter, they had to take out the US Pacific Fleet
Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we were in the war on Russia's side
Surrender? No one demanded they surrender. The demand was that they back off of butchering people in China.
FDRs economic policies were crap, and his State Dept was full of Commies, but what the Japanese were doing in China was unconscionable and the Roosevelt administration was correct in shutting them down from American supplies. If anything, they should have done it much sooner.
Japan was the aggressor and their 'leadership' at the time were every bit as brutal and insane as the Islamo Nazis are today.
The fact that Japan should have been stopped in 1934, but wasn’t stopped until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union should tell you all you need to know about Roosevelt’s humanitarian concern for the Chinese.
September 1940. The U.S. placed an embargo on Japan by prohibiting exports of steel, scrap iron, and aviation fuel to Japan, due to Japan's takeover of northern French Indochina.
April 1941. The Japanese signed a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union to help prevent an attack from that direction if they were to go to war with Britain or the U.S. while taking a bigger bite out of Southeast Asia.
June 1941. Hitler invades Russia.
June 1941 through the end of July 1941. Japan occupied southern Indochina. Two days later, the U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands froze Japanese assets. This prevented Japan from buying oil, which would, in time, cripple its army and make its navy and air force completely useless.
December 1941. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
By your own admission, the oil embargo was the sine qua non to the Japanese war effort, ensuring war with Japan and not undertaken until the threat of a combined Axis attack on the Soviet Union was an immediate threat.
If this is slander, freepmail me for a street address to serve the documents. I’d love to give this suit the highest possiblity visibility.
Not to mention the Appenines. Italy turned out to be a very hard underbelly of Europe. Now if they could have gained complete control of the Adriatic and attacked from the head of that sea, things might have been different.
But fighting up the length of the Italian boot is quite obviously a much tougher nut to crack than invading via the North European plain.
Can these people read maps?
The Mediterranean/Balkan campaign in question was “Operation Accolade” designed by the British to bring Turkey into the war and prevent the complete Soviet domination of eastern Europe.
Fighting up Italy was the compromise, and even that was always the logistical stepchild to Overlord. The Greek Civil War was the consequence.
As Mark Clark said, his plan was to “turn right” into the Balkins (That’s south of the Alps).
The Soviets called it “Operation Snow.” Hitler wanted the Japanese to open a second front for the Russians on the Soviet Far East. Moscow tasked its Tokyo agents (Sorge, Ozaki, Saionji, etc.) with diverting the Imperial Council to strike eastward across the Pacific at the U.S. instead, and its Washington agents (Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Solomon Adler, Virginius Frank Coe, etc.) with sabotaging the negotiations by George Marshall, Patrick Hurley, Claire Chennault, etc. to reach a temporary “modus vivendi” with Japan to give the U.S. breathing room to build up its woefully inadequate Pacific fleet. (See Peter B. Niblo, “Influence: The Soviet Task Leading to Pearl Harbor, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War.”)
China was the “casus belli” for the U.S. to start up embargoes and economic blockades against Japan. All the more ironic that we gave it away to Stalin by allowing him to occupy Manchuria and give the captured Japanese arms to the Communist insurgents.
Great deal there. Instead of trying to take a couple million troops and equipment over the Alps, you only have to get them over the Balkans. That's like trading the Rockies for the Sierra Nevada. Thats not even taking into account the extended ocean supply lines you wound need to maintain across the Med. No thanks.
Pressuring the Nazis southern front always made sense. Trying to get to Germany from there would have been insane. The wide open plains of Northern Europe was always the way to go. In war, Geography always rules.
The payback for Nanking is going to be a real bitch. The Japanese will fall early in WW5 - right after Korea and Taiwan.
Vitally Pavlov, an NKVD (later KGB) official, was picked by his superiors in Moscow to persuade [Soviet agent and U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter] White to participate in Operation Snow, which involved Soviet efforts to worsen U.S.Japanese relations. The purpose: to encourage Japan’s war party to view the United States, not Russia, as its main enemy.
Pavlov phoned White in Washington in May 1941, made a date for lunch and then, at the restaurant, handed White an outline of themes that he wanted White to promote among key U.S. policymakers. Among them was a demand, to be wrapped in tough rhetoric, that Japan recall its armed forces from China. White then sent this proposed diplomatic demand, abrasive language and all, to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
Morgenthau didn’t act on White’s memo at the time, but the issue of how to confront Japanese aggression resurfaced immediately prior to Pearl Harbor, as many in the U.S. government began frantically searching for ways to avoid hostilities in the Pacific, at least until the United States was better prepared militarily.
White, however, had different ideas. He rewrote his hard-edged memo to Morgenthau, which was then largely incorporated into Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s famous ultimatum to the Japanese on Nov. 26, 1941. That message, many historians believe, goaded the war party in Tokyo into striking early in December at the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Years later, Pavlov boasted of his role in the success of Operation Snow in which White had played such a critical part.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_200101/ai_n8935656
bump for later
And yet the Soviets invaded Rumania in 1944 after the destruction of Army Group Center, and hooked through Bulgaria and Hungary, rather than battering directly across the Vistula.
Couldn’t the Soviets read maps?
Apparently much better than you.
In 1944, they advanced on a line across Eastern Europe from the Baltic south to Belgrade. They did not go attacking the Germans and Croat/Muslim Nazis up in the mountainous regions of Bosnia and Coratia where any invasion of Eastern Europe from Italy would have had pass through. In the process, they took over the Rumanian oil fields and took control of the Danube below Budapest shutting Germany off from much needed supplies.
Keep your sneers straight.
If the north German plain is the obvious line of advance there was no need to cross the Carpathians. Once it became clear the Russians were engaging in a land grab at the expense of advancing on Berlin, operations like Accolade needed to be reviewed.
Bludgeoning one’s way across the Gustav Line was not the only option for entree into the Balkans.
...while the primary story is obviously about the OSS's efforts to get downed allied airmen out of the Balkans, there is also a pretty well developed back story regarding the communist infiltration of US and British intelligence and their efforts to shape post war Europe as favorably as possible for the USSR.
Furthermore, the entire campaign against Army Group South Ukraine included action against battle-hardened German units. The Germans suffered nearly a quarter-million casualties in the invasion of Rumania, for instance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iassy_Kishinev_Operation
The troops going into the Balkans from Greece or Italy would have faced no greater resistance, and would have had the added benefit of partisan and chetniks operating in Yugoslavia, who themselves had tied down multiple German divisions.
My point is, why in the world would you even want to get into the Balkans? It would have been a blood bath. The idea here was to defeat the Germans, end the damn war and get as many of our guys home alive and as soon as possible. Trying to fight through mountain passes in Slovenia, Croatia or up through Greece as Churchill suggested was not the way to accomplish that. Armor is pretty much useless there. Progress is measured in yards, not miles, and it's mostly foot soldiers fighting from rock to rock. Choosing that is nuts if you have an alternative.
Letting guys like Patten run loose with mechanized units in the plains of Northern Europe was the only way to get it done and get it done quickly.
If any American leader had advocated in 1945 that we prolong the war, double our causalities and quite possible end up fighting the Red Army over the fate of Bucharest or Belgrade, we would have had to rush the Army home from Europe to put down the damn revolution that would have started here. The American people were sick and tired of war by then. They didn't give a good g-damn about geopolitics. They wanted their sons home alive.
If the north German plain is the obvious line of advance there was no need to cross the Carpathians.
Yes there was --- oil, and control of the Danube. Shutting off the food and fuel supplies that flowed up the Danube from Hungary, Bulgaria Serbia and Romania into Germany every day. And crossing the Carpathians is not analogous to the Alps or the Croatian Balkans. Those places look like the Sierra. The Carpathians are more like the Allegheny's. Lots of places to quickly cross. They are not an obstacle for a mechanized army.
A major objective of Operation Accolade would have been Ploesti.
Why was Ploesti a reasonable war objective for the Soviets, even though it put them far out of their way towards Berlin, but not a reasonable objective for the Western Allies, who had earlier been driven out of Greece and had a positive moral obligation to liberate their allies?
Why would it be a major objective for the Western allies if it took them well out of the way of Berlin, ignoring France and The Low Counties where the Nazis were launching V1 rockets hitting England every day? For the Russians, Romania was right next door to the The Ukraine. Would we have "ignored" Nazi troops siting on our southern border if it weren't on our way the Berlin? In fact, part of occupied Nazi Romania (Moldavia) was in fact Soviet territory before the war.
When Accolade was proposed, Italy hadn’t even been invaded.
The choice was to fight the Germans up the peninsula of Italy for hundreds of miles without any concrete objective, or to land in Greece, liberating an ally, linking up with over 800,000 Yugoslav partisans and placing allied forces within striking range of Ploesti.
Accolade was proposed and could have been executed with a portion of the forces in the Mediterranean dedicated to Operations Husky and Avalanche.
Italy left the war as soon as Allied forces landed in mainland Italy; it was not necessary in order to knock Italy out of the war to confine Allied operations to the Italian peninsula. Indeed history showed that the Gothic Line was not finally broken until forces were landed in southern France, threatening Kesselring’s flank.
A landing in Greece and advance to and through the Danube valley could not have been more costly than the campaign in Italy.
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