Posted on 09/10/2012 10:25:03 AM PDT by dfwgator
France falling so quickly, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Stalin still needed a few more years, most say until 1943, before he would have had the capability to launch an offensive war. By then he was hoping the French, German and British armies were so depleted, so as to enable the Red Army to swoop all the way across Europe. So at least by having France fall, and saving the German and British Armies for the most part, it allowed Hitler to attack Russia, and the Allies to at least win half of Europe and keep it out of the hands of Stalin.
I’ve studied WW2 for 50 years now, which, according to your iron logic makes me more of an expert than you!
To say with such assurance as yours that Yalta and Tehran had to come out exactly as they did is to practice historical determinism backwards.
But at least the top of the Palace of Science and Culture offers the best view of Warsaw. Because you don't see the Palace of Science and Culture.
Would World War 2 have happened if Stalin had not eagerly assisted the Nazis before June 1941?
Would Hitler have attacked western Europe in 1940 with a hostile Poland and a potentially hostile Russia on Germany's eastern border?
Always important to recall Hitler's conversations with his generals in the late 1930’s.
Hitler said neutralizing Poland and Russia were absolute requirements before an attack in the West was possible.
Again and again, Hitler stressed that this was the fatal oversight by the German High Command in World War 1.
Would Hitler have backed down on World War 2 if Stalin had vowed to “defend” Poland in order to PROTECT Russia's border from Germany?
Did Stalin and the Russian High Command really not read “Mein Kampf,” where Hitler explicitly explained that the WHOLE POINT of the war was to seize Russia's farm land and destroy the Communist Leadership?
“In periods of all-out war”
It’s not as if Poland had been at the gates of Moscow. They barely put up a fight. There’s no reason for it to have been total war, except the Russians were driven mad by ideology and were bloodthirsty criminals.
“atrocities happen”
They do now, less so before wars got total, and especially less so since aerial bombardment. Part of me is with you because there’re always gonna be rogue commanders. But this was not Lt. Calley in the heat of command. It was coldblooded murder ordered from above. Also, it seems petty to gripe about thousands killed on the ground versus more than one hundred thousand from over Hiroshima.
Still, killing defenseless innocents is killing innocents. I for one don’t buy the magical distinction between shooting a man in front of you and causing one to burn to death without you directly knowing (so long as you know someone, or many, will die that way because of your actions). If I must go one way or the other I go with decrying both. Larynx was not war; it was murderer.
I wonder what Warsaw could have been had it not been for the war....I studied a lot about pre-war Warsaw, and it’s amazing just how beautiful a city it once was....before the Nazis destroyed it, and the Communists ruined it with their Socialist Realist architecture. Damn shame.
I almost said that if you wanted to thank anyone for Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, you can thank the French for surrendering to the Germans. On the other hand, it’s reasonably certain if Germany and the Allies had a Western Front stalemate into 1942, he would have felt strong enough to blackmail Hitler. His plan was to have the Red Army expanded, equipped, supplied and led by mid-1942. It might have been better led, but would still have had too many Pavlovs and not enough Rokossovskys.
In 1941, the Red Army was not ready for war and Stalin knew it. But he’d gambled on his Non-Aggression Pact and lost.
Yes, it’s an ugly city now, with only the King’s Trail (or whatever it is called) from the Castle Square to the Belvedere a pretty tract, with the notable exception of the American Embassy building.
So how do you get the Soviets out of Poland in 1945 without having to fight them?
Just recently finished reading "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers. It was 800 pages, and the library copy I ordered was published in 1952. FDR was told about Hiss and the other cadre of Communists working in the US government from the mid 1930s to the mid 1940s. He chose to do nothing, as Stalin was too important an ally in the fight against Hitler. Stalin used to be referred to as "Uncle Joe" during WW2 by us, how sick is that? The Venona Papers released in 1995 by the KGB confirmed the identity of the Soviet agents in DC in that time period, and vindicated both Chambers and McCarthy.
“They were our allied. We needed them to do the bulk of the fighting”
So? As if they’d stop fighting should we happen to embarrass them? This points to the stupidity of Chrlurchill and FDR’s Stalin strategy. Both thought they could get his cooperation through appeasement? But why? The nazi-commie war was the greatest happy accident of European power politics. Let the monsters duke it out, I say. Manhandle whomever’s left.
But no, Churchill’s gotta pretend like he’s Peter the Great and blabbermouth about spheres of influence. FDR’s gotta pretend like Stalin’s everyone else he ever met, and can be lured into defeat by sheer charm. So both give Uncle Joe whatever he wants. And what happens? Everybody knows.
There was the Pacific, and I can see before you know what the bomb can do being nice in exchange for Russian might. Turns out letting them in the fight against Japan is the only way it could’fe been worse. Also, if you want them to fight there, too, instead of saving them face in Katyn you could do what they actually wanted: abandon the “soft underbelly” for a second front in Europe.
I don’t know, but there were agreements with the Soviets, never enforced, to allow free elections in the Eastern European countries. How could they have been enforced? I don’t know, but why make agreements if you’re not going to try to enforce them? Eastern Europe, remember, wasn’t just unconditionally handed over to Stalin. And yet it was betrayed.
Much worse, it isn’t just that we never called for a reckoning. We let the Russians sit beside us at Nuremberg in judgement of Nazis. That erases always and forever any notion that the trials were about anything other than just another example of the victors lording it over the losers.
Soviet atrocities occurred and were known long before German atrocities, and what’s more, continued after 1945, as they cleansed the occupied territories of the enemies of the people. The gulags were open into the 1970s, political murders on a pretty much wholesale scale were committed until the end of Communism. Silence in the West, apologists in the media, academy, and of course the governments.
“So what should we do?...There’s enough trouble around without trying do worry about things that happened 4 wars ago.”
Yeah, what can you learn from history? We’re busy.
See, you just hit on the two biggest problems in the whole deal.
1. How do you enforce Stalin’s agreements? He never intended to keep them. They were window dressing. The only thing Stalin respected was force and power. So long as he had his army in Poland, it wasn’t going to leave without greater force being applied to it. He knew damn well the West had no stomach for it. Poland wasn’t Pearl Harbor. I don’t see how you get enough Americans fired up to fight the USSR. Stalin didn’t, either.
2. You used the one term that has bothered me the most when I see this debate: that we “handed over” Poland to Stalin. No, we didn’t. You assume Poland was “ours” to “hand over.”
It never was. Our army never occupied it for us to be in position to “betray it.”
The Cold War was as much of a PR battle than anything....there was the real possibility of the Communist Party ruling France after the war, through elections....anything we could do to blacken Stalin’s eye would have helped.
Those corpses weren’t Nazis they were Poles murdered by the Soviets when they were the Allies of Germany in the invasion of Poland, the event that started WW2.
I always said the invasion of Poland was a joint Nazi-Soviet operation. Poles remember September 17, every bit as much as September 1.
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