Churchill is nothing to be proud of. He sold out Eastern Europe to the Communists just to make sure Stalin would follow the Nazi to Berlin after they had evicted them from Russia proper.
The enrite East block was offered to the Soviets to keep them in game.
“Churchill is nothing to be proud of. He sold out Eastern Europe to the Communists”
There’s a lot wrong with that statement including the fact that FDR had more to do with where the armies halted than did Churchill.
Russia was fighting 80 German divisions which would have been free to turn on us if Stalin had come to a separate peace and stopped fighting once they drove Germany out of Russia. A very real worry at the time.
Stalin had been been fighting Germany since Hitler double crossed him in June 1941. We didn’t invade France until June 1944. Stalin had been bitching for years that we weren’t opening a second front and taking pressure off of the Red Army. We wanted them to stay in the fight.
Eastern Europe is Russia’s border. They had internal lines of supply and short ones at that. Had we intended to occupy Eastern Europe we would have first had to conquer all of Germany and build a very long logistical tail to keep going east.
And we wanted the USSR to help us defeat Japan if an invasion of the Home Islands was required. Operation Olympic was projected to cost us one million casualties. No one knew that the atomic bombs would get Japan to surrender.
“Selling out” eastern Europe was a matter of accepting reality. It wasn’t some misguided political decision.