They were our allies. We needed them to do the bulk of the fighting.
Look at the Battle of Kursk. Can you imagine how many GIs would have been killed if we had to defeat German armies like that?
What choice did the Russians have? We could have stood up to them, what were they going to do, stop fighting the Nazis?
The knowledge of Katyn should have given us significant bargaining leverage at Yalta and Potsdam with the Russkies.
Well, yes and no. Had we adopted the Russian "tactic" of staging a brutal, all-out slugfest - yes. But our Generals would have employed entirely different hit-and-run tactics that would have tend to minimize American casualties...and Germans would have been far more willing to surrender to Americans than to fight to the death, knowing what awaited them in Soviet captivity.
Maybe, but to keep covering for them after 1945 ? After Stalin's death ?
“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.