Posted on 09/10/2012 10:25:03 AM PDT by dfwgator
The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.
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Huh? I wrote: “Eastern Europe, remember, wasn’t just unconditionally handed over to Stalin”
How is that saying or assuming that Poland was handed over to the Soviets?
That might have been the effect, though. At least that, correct or not, is how many people think. Poland was our ally, no?
“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.”
And that’s also part of the post-war problem. GI’s walked through the German death camps and came home to tell mom, dad & sis about them. They never walked through the gulag.
Every American knew the brutality of the Nazi regime, and as far as Americans knew, the Soviets fought the same evil we did. They were never confronted with the scope of Soviet evil in the same visceral, gut-wrenching way.
“There was no way for us to keep that from happening”
If from the jump in Dec. 41 we had made it our goal to get to Berlin and beyond as quickly as possible, I think there was. Instead we dithered around in North Africa and Italy, botched if in Holland, and kept as wide a front as possible marching east so, I don’t know really, Eisenhower would look like a swell guy? Point is, we fought as if it were our expressed goal to give Stalin as much territory as possible. Then suddenly Churchill’s all “Oops, I forgot they’re evil.”
Too late. Revealing Katyn wouldn’t have amounted to jack. But there was a way, earlier. If we had timed it after the breakout at Sralingrad and took whatever route was quickest, we could’be done much better, anyway.
FDR probably made the right choice at the time, Defeating the Nazi’s had to be first priority, the lack of action after the war, when it was blindingly obvious what had happened however, is inexcusable.
Here is an example of one of the men we “Sold Out” to Stalin
Witold Pilecki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
And then there was the little matter of General Sikorski
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/Sikorski/Times040703.html
I wouldn’t say vast majority, or even majority. Those Nazis were good at war. Unless you are including Stalin’s prewar incompetence and cruelty, then yes. Purging his officers and terrorizing the entire population but especially certain minorities who ended up abetting the Germans (cruelty), also not seeing the invasion coming even after all the intelligence was in (incompetencin, did add to the death toll considerably.
It is quite disgusting to see that there are still apologists for the West's tolerance and silent approval of the Stalinist terror among us.
True.
Communists and socialists hate educated people from ANYWHERE, including their own people. An educated person is a threat to their fragile narcissistic ego. They prefer to think they are always “the smartest person in the room.”
Remind you of anyone?
I still don’t get it. Why would exposing Katyn hurt the fight against the Nazis? There’s just no way Stalin would make a seperate peace. That leaves Churchill and FDR’s delusions of sweet talking Russia into doing their bidding, which was ridiculous. Then there was the Pacific, which does lend an excuse, and the only excuse.
I don’t want to nitpick, but you said that Poland wasn’t “unconditionally handed over to the Soviets,” from which one could conclude you believed that Poland was “conditionally handed over to the Soviets.” But you may not have meant that.
On the other hand, there are many people who contend that we “handed Poland over to the Soviets.” Again, Poland was never in our hand to give to them.
The other issue regards Poland’s status as our ally. I’ve come to the conclusion that by breaking off diplomatic relations with the London Poles, the internationally recognized government of Poland, and not installing it when the Red Army ejected the Germans from Poland, Stalin committed an act of war against Poland. Thus, one of our allies, the USSR, committed an act of war against another, Poland.
The only way to redress this hostile act was to go to war with the USSR. That simply was not going to happen. And Stalin knew it.
So I go back to my original position. The USSR was going to turn Red Army-occupied Poland into a Soviet vassal state. We could not to stop it from happening.
You have an Ally at war, one you NEED to aid you in defeating a common enemy.. are you really going to accuse them of this sort of thing in the middle of that war?
I really don’t think so. Yes, you have a common enemy, but you aren’t exactly buddy buddy to begin with.
This is oen of those things where in the realities of war, the truth and exposing what you know takes a back seat to what needs to be done.
No different than Churchill knowing bombings would happen in certain towns because the allies had cracked the enigma code, but chose NOT to warn folks living there they were coming, because to do so would tip off the germans their code had been cracked.
War is UGLY my friend, and as the saying go, its first casualty is the truth.
You must also remember that for much of Eastern Europe, Russians and their hordes were regarded as savages and barbarians, mongols, and that for good historical reasons going back thousands of years, while the Germans whatever their faults and crimes represented civilization and culture, which is why they were greeted as liberators in lands previously occupied by the Soviets, something we to this day fail to understand and acknowledge despite all the evidence of the savagery of Communism, 120 million murdered, starved.
Note that the ever wandering Gypies (or Romas in today’s parlance) tend to nowadays wander West and not East toward the enlightened and so beloved by so many Americans Mother Russia. Note also that Russian billionaires like to take residence in Western Europe. (I’m offering these bits of Russophobia in support of the anti-Soviet views of WWII.)
General Anders told Patton, “With the Nazis, we lose our lives, with the Russians, we lose our souls.”
“Handed over” is a shorthand. But when you agree to represent your ally and defend his interests at some negotiations, and then betray and abandon him then I think the shorthand expression is entirely correct. You don’t have to have boots on the ground, as you asserted earlier, to hand over a territory. Didn’t we hand over East Germany to the Soviets? And we did have boots on the ground in parts of it! Didn’t we almost hand over Austria?
The Poles and other Eastern Europeans believe that they were abandoned and betrayed by their Western Allies. Are we to tell them that they were not, that in all those negotiations of the four powers their interests were represented and protected?
Our war machine wasn’t ready for large-scale ground combat until 1944, and even then we had to project our power a long way. We were also fighting a two-front war against Japan and Germany. Even though our declared strategy was “Germany first,” we committed a lot of resources against Japan.
Our lack of success in North Africa in late 1943 showed the American army was not ready for large-scale operations. We were well behind the Germans on the learning curve. An attempted invasion of the Continent in 1943 had every prospect of failure, mostly because in 1943 the Luftwaffe was still a potent force and we could not guarantee air superiority over the invasion beaches.
In reality, we are lucky we got as much of Europe as we did, coming late to the fight. In late 1943, when it was apparent there would be no “Second Front” that year, Stalin told his generals “we don’t need it, we can do it alone.” By then, he was probably right. It might have taken longer and cost more lives, but that didn’t matter to Stalin.
1. Not surprised.
2. I think it’s easy to point fingers 70 years after the fact.
3. Why is this coming out now? There is more to this story than meets the eye. We can’t dig into Zippy’s past, but we can dredge up war crimes from 70 years ago when all the perps are dead?
The “What If” question I had was, What if Pilsudski survived and stayed in power until 1939?
A little-known fact was that one of Hitler’s first orders after invading Poland was to place an honor guard at Pilsudski’s grave. Of course, Pilsudski hated the Russians, would he have made a deal with Hitler to spite Russia? He did sign an non-aggression treaty with Hitler in 1934, even though earlier he had urged France to attack Germany after Hitler took power. One wonders if he would have made Poland a puppet state along the lines of what Slovakia was during the war? Certainly Pilsudski mistrusted the Germans, but he might have made deals that his successors didn’t, and in effect make Poland a part of the Axis Powers.
On the other hand, Pilsudski was considered much more supportive of Poland’s Jews then the Endecja was. So he would have faced pressure from Germany, and would that have stopped him from making such a deal with Hitler?
Yes, I am. Because us being allies has nothing to do with our relationship with eachother, as did the Anglo-American alliance. We were allies because we both happened to gave the same enemy. And there was no way suddenly Stalin would gave jumped to the other side, no way whatsoever. We were allies of circumstance, and aside from lend-lease basically were fighting two different wars.
“Yes, you gave a common enemy, but you aren’t exactly buddy buddy to begin with”
Why would we have to be buddy-buddy? What’s the difference? If we’re buddies they’ll fight harder? The only possible reason we’d need to he buddies is if we were under the Churchill/FDR delusion that hurrying up would help us control them and make for a better postwar settlement. Well, it didn’t. Appeasement worked as well for Russia as it did for Germany.
That’s how you have to look at this Katyn issue: as just another in a long line of capitulations to Uncle Joe by the Anglo-American alliance. Sons were worse, for instance physically returning POWs captured by the Nazis to whatever fate befell them in Russia. The gulag, most likely. That’s not to say taking a hard line could’ve extracted the red army from Eastern Europe. But I can almost guarantee you none of it helped one iota against Germany. Unless you think Russia on the security council of the UN was worth abetting mass murderer.
As for the Pacific, like I said, that’s another matter. Diplomacy was necessary to get them in on our terms. But not against Germany. They were in whole hog.
That enigma example bears no relation.
We did represent them, but only to the point of not going to war. We obtained those “agreements” you referred to regarding free elections. By getting those agreements, I don’t think you can say we abandoned them. The problem still gets back to the one sticking point both you and I recognize: the enforcement of those agreements. There was, short of war with the USSR, no way to enforce those agreements when Stalin broke them.
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