I’ve often wondered what the post-war would would have looked like if Patton had been around long enough to play a real part.
He certainly had his failings, but he did clearly see the communist threat for what it was. The western world’s blindness, and the willful action of traitors and fifth-columnists in western civilizations, both contributed greatly to the length and the overall bloodiness of the cold war.
Without such a high degree of acquiescence from the west, not to mention the aid and comfort of communist agents and ideologues in western nations, how many millions of lives could have been saved across the world during those years? The fact of the matter is the west was very good at throwing small nations under the communist bus in the decades following the second world war. There are plenty of mass graves out there that attest to the power of western blindness, so I wonder what would have happened if we’d had a few powerful, insightful, respected public figures take up the banner and press the fight against communism while most of the world was busy handing countries over to the Red leviathan.
The real issue was, at best, blindness on the part of FDR toward the reality of communism. Churchill was the better informed of the two. There was no way that Patton would be unleashed with FDR as commander in chief.
Untold millions died because of FDR’s socialist tendencies and accommodations.