Posted on 10/03/2013 7:56:56 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character— has been attacked, not from the Left but from prominent pundits who identify themselves as conservatives.
“Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?” Ronald Radosh wrote on frontpagemag.com. “It had nothing to do with the Rubik’s Cube of diplomatic and military considerations, a calculus that had to take into account the willingness of the American and British publics to continue to sacrifice and their soldiers to die. No, it was a conspiracy so immense, as West’s hero Joe McCarthy might have said, that it allowed Western policy to be dictated by a shadow army of Soviet agents. It is unfortunate that a number of conservatives who should know better have fallen for West’s fictions.”
... “In the State Department, while Alger Hiss would become the most notorious Soviet agent of the war years, he was far from going solo,” M. Stanton Evans points out in a column on CNS news entitled “In Defense of Diana West.” “According to a long concealed but now recovered report compiled by security officers of the State Department, there were at war’s end no fewer than 20 identified agents such as Hiss on the payroll, plus 13 identified Communists and 90 other suspects and sympathizers serving with him.”
“Like the FBI report saying ‘nearly every department’ of the Federal government was infiltrated by Communist apparatchiks, these staggering numbers from the State Department security force look suspiciously like the description of a de facto ‘occupation’ given in Ms. West’s supposedly unhinged essay.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
“Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?”
The goal was unconditional surrender, it was achieved.
“...Especially galling to West's critics is her contention that Washington in the war years was so riddled with Communists and Soviet agents as to be in effect an “occupied” city — an image that seems to have sparked the greatest anger and most denunciation of her thesis.
By using the “occupied” image, Ms. West is of course not saying Soviet tanks were patrolling the streets of Washington, or that Red martial law was imposed on its cowering citizens. What she is arguing instead is that Soviet agents, Communists and fellow travelers held official posts, or served at chokepoints of intelligence data, and from these positions were able to exert pro-Soviet leverage on U.S. and other allied policy. Though ignored in many conventional histories, the evidence to support this view is overwhelming.
It is for instance abundantly plain, from multiple sources of Cold War intel, that Communist/pro-Soviet penetration of the government under FDR was massive, numbering in the many hundreds.”
http://cnsnews.com/commentary/m-stanton-evans/defense-diana-west#sthash.99rhTIop.dpuf
Morale would have been the #1 issue.
I think our bombers would have done fine. Russian fighters were optimized for lower altitudes and with P-51 escorts, they would have been able to make it.
The real question would have been range. I don’t know if we could have reached the Urals from German bases...
And, as someone else pointed out, morale would be a major issue.
From sources I have read, FDR sprang unconditional surrender at the Casablanca conference. Stalin termed it a policy designed to maximize the already horrendous Soviet losses. Churchill was said to be privately furious but went along so as not to cause a rift. Some historians estimate FDR’s unconditional surrender posture, based as FDR claimed on the tradition set in the terms offered by Grant to Lee at Appomattox, cost 100,000 lives, and many of those American GI.
From the joint press conference at the Casablanca conference:
“...we had a General called US Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant.”
“Appomattox Court-House, Virginia April 9, 1865.
“GENERAL: In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th instant, I propose to receive the surrender of the army of Northern Virginia on the following terms, to wit: Rolls of all the officers and men to be made in duplicate, one copy to be given to an officer to be designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the government of the United States until properly exchanged; and each company or regimental commander to sign a like parole for the men of their commands. The arms, artillery, and public property to be parked and stacked, and turned over to the officers appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.
“U. S. Grant, Lieutenant-General.”
And Grant was not contemplating the surrender of the Confederacy, just that of the Army of Northern Virginia. The above looks like terms of surrender to me.
The NappyOne
Stalin ran circles around FDR, but he also had the advantage of having the Red Army occupying much of the area that later became the Soviet bloc. FDR made an attempt at Yalta to get better borders for Poland, but that seems to have been mainly because the Polish-American vote was concentrated in states with large electoral votes. Anyway, FDR and the establishment was almost entirely WASP (with a few Irish-Catholics like Joseph Kennedy). What did they care about Eastern Europeans?
bfl
It was a long hard war and EVERYONE was tired and tired of war. We can look back with a different perspective but if we were there and then, we would think the same.... The goal was unconditional surrender, it was achieved.
Not speak of the fact most had no idea what a communist was... or cared.. let alone a socialist.. or that communists ARE socialists..... as well as Nazi’s and Fascists.. who were also socialists.. AND democrats..
Pretty much like NOW!!...
Diana West is brilliant.
“What we do know is that the post WW-II actions of our gubmit allowed the soviets to roll over eastern Europe...”
Point of historical fact. The Soviets “rolled over” almost all of Eastern Europe during the war, not afterwards. Maybe you should have done a “bit of history lookup” before posting this.
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