Not only, but was reported to say (profanity excised), "We are going to have to fight them sooner or later.... Why not do it now while our army is intact and the damn Russians can have their hind end kicked back into Russia in three months? We can do it easily with the German troops we have if we just arm them and take them with us."
Not to mention that American soldiers were extremely eager to get home ASAP. They had no illusions about the romance of war by that point, they were just glad to be alive.
Indeed, The Poles would have helped, but in reality it likely was too late. FDR should have only helped the Soviets enough to keep Germany from advancing, the people from starving.
“FDR should have only helped the Soviets enough to keep Germany from advancing, the people from starving.”
The Russians were fighting over 100 German divisions before we even entered the war. And this was some of the best of the German army.
The only reason we were finally able to land on the Normandy coast three years later is because Hitler wrecked his armies on the Eastern Front. Many Americans have little idea of how big those battles were.
If Hitler had defeated Stalin then Germany would have been immensely stronger when we tried to gain a beachhead on the Continent. It was in our interest to make sure that Russia was able to keep fighting. There was no way to know what “just enough” support would have been.
Patton wasn’t the only American who knew that the USSR was trouble. But the reality is that there was little we could do about it. For one thing on VE Day we still needed Russia if the atomic bombs didn’t work and we had to invade Japan.
And moreover everyone could read the same map that Patton was pretending didn’t matter. Russia has internal lines of communication leading right to Central Europe. We are on the other side of an ocean. Wars are won with logisitics. And all of this ignores the fact that you would have had a mutiny by the American people who were tired of war and their sons coming home in boxes.