Posted on 04/11/2024 5:32:29 AM PDT by daniel1212
Our Worst Blunders in the War: Europe and the Russians
A Baltimorean who graduated from the United States Naval Academy and who subsequently saw service aboard our destroyers and battleships, HANSON W. BALDWIN has been the military editor of the New York Times since 1912, in which year his articles earned him the Pulitzer Prize. In the preparation of an extended history of the Second World War, he has added up the most costly mistakes which we made in the conflict. There are six of them; they all stem from our original misreading of the Russian mind. In prose which is absorbing if sometimes painful reading, they will be analyzed in this and the February issue.
Of course, Patton saw Stalin for what he was.
FDR ws too old to be at Yalta
I’m not so charitable to Roosevelt. I don’t think he just got “hoodwinked”. He was a radical progressive, basically a socialist himself, so he was sympathetic to the communists and probably wanted them to win, which is why he tried to hand them the world on a silver platter.
When I studied the Russian Revolution and the USSR in university, one of Kennan’s books (Russia and The West IIRC) was marked as an important reading item for the course.
Naivete. But FDR was in very poor health at Yalta and in no condition for serious negotiations. He would pass away just two months later.
Interesting history...Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin. Thanks for posting.
Roosevelt and his ilk undeniably wanted a country without our Constitution.
The totalitarian always imagines the utopia where he’s on the top of the pile rewarding those who agree with him and punishing those who don’t. They never imagine the dystopia that everyone else has to endure…
Nothing much would have changed had FDR been sterner with Stalin at Yalta. What leverage did FDR have? The Red Army of 1945 was massive, experienced, and well-led. Trying to dislodge them from Eastern Europe would have been difficult, and very bloody.
I suppose the western Allies would have won eventually due to their air power advantage. But no way would the American people have stood for it. “Your son survived fighting Nazi Germany. Now we are going to throw him into a meat grinder against a country that was our ally just yesterday.”
Typical Democrat reasoning. APPEASE AND PLEASE.
It never ever works.
A despot will sense weakness and strike while he has the advantage........................
Not to mention the both HE and his wife were socialist to the core
FDR also thought he needed Stalin’s help to finish the war with Japan. Stalin agreed to declare war on Japan 2 to 3 months after the war in Europe ended. He did keep that promise, declaring war on Japan exactly 3 months after Germany surrendered. But it turned out we didn’t need his help so much because of the atomic bomb, and that enabled Stalin to impose a communist regime in North Korea (as well as annexing a number of Japanese islands).
Thank God we didn’t need Stalin’s “help” with Japan, or else Japan would have been divided, like Korea and Germany.
He arrogantly believed he “could handle Uncle Joe.” FDR the supreme narcissist got handled instead.
What FDR and his ilk were democrats in the sense of ‘majority rule’. Stir up mob thinking on an issue get a vote Bang! a new law! Your ‘majority’ just ruled! The Founding Fathers were very suspicious of that type of political system. They knew ‘mass emotion’ was capable of overcoming any amount of ‘mass education’. They designed a system where political power was divided between ‘the mob - people’ directly and ‘the people’ corporately - the state. Almost every Constitutional Amendment since 1912 has been to upset that balance and tilt power toward mob-ocracy. The argument for doing that has always been education will make people wise and immune to demagogic appeal. You see Progressives like Wilson were far far smarter than the Founding Fathers or so they told themselves and anyone who would listen! See any evidence of that in the last 100 years that they were? Any immunity mass education has given to keep from being stampeded into a voting mob has been negated by mass advertising and made more effective by the Internet. I cringe when I see people here use the words ‘our democracy’!
Repeal the 17th Amendment!
State legislatures couldn’t do worse!
Eisenhower purposely held back "problem child" Patton who boasted he could be in Berlin in a few days. Not that impetuous Patton did not earn being disciplined, but it was Roosevelt whom Eisenhower answered to.
> Repeal the 17th Amendment! <
Totally agree. As you noted, the Founders set up the way senators were chosen as a check against mob rule. Unfortunately, that horse has left the barn. And he’s not coming back.
A hundred years from now an honest historian will identify the 17th Amendment as a top reason for the fall of the United States.
And repeal the 16th and 19th, while we’re at it.
> Patton who boasted he could be in Berlin in a few days <
Patton was certainly correct about that. By early April of 1945 the German soldiers who faced him were demoralized. Many were eager to surrender.
But what would have happened once Patton reached the outskirts of Berlin? Hitler was still alive, and he still had an iron grip on the city. The Soviets suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties taking Berlin. The Americans would have suffered much the same.
As you noted, Eisenhower held Patton back. Probably a good thing as FDR (or Truman) would have ordered a withdrawal anyway.
Germans would have been more than happy to surrender to the Americans.
By that logic, we should have simply let Germany and Hitler bash each other's brains out, and stayed out of WWII
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