Roosevelt gave the Ruskies everything they needed to repel any invasion by the “allies”.
The British cached enough captured German munitions to re-equip 250,000 Wehrmacht soldiers in case Stalin tried to move west from the Elbe.
Churchill was known for his hairbrained ideas at times.
“The Soviet Union - or USSR, the name of the communist regime in Russia between 1922 and 1991”
I have trouble believing this article has readers who didn’t already know that.
IIRC, Patton said “give me 10 days and I’ll have a war whipped up with them.”
It really means nothing. We have lots of contingency plans drawn up to do lots of these we never will. So do all major countries. It is the job of responsible people to consider unlikely possibilities and draw up plans for them that sit on a shelf somewhere just in case.
If not for Churchill, England would have surrendered to Hitler’s peace offering and in a one war front, the outcome of WW II could have been much different and at the very least prolonged by years
I don’t know. This sounds like one of his cigar butt strategies, not a serious plan.
That is beyond hare-brained....
There are modern plans to invade Canada as well.
I say we avenge the war of 1812 and take Montreal.
The wish is father to the act.
Little did Churchill know that his own country and the US were to become just like the USSR.
I wonder if he also had a plan to invade his own country ?
Going to war with the Soviets would have required a “1984” style reversal of all the people involved. Suddenly, we had always been allied with Northestalia (or whatever he called it) and had always been at war with Eastasia. After spending countless millions on pro Stalin propaganda, the Allies couldn’t suddenly reverse course and stay if office. The Allies had just won, yet Churchill was voted out of office. Not because he wasn’t popular, he was, but because the voters wanted to turn the page and put the war behind them and that’s what they did. Probably FDR wouldn’t have been reelected after the war had he lived for the same reason. Also, the US and Brittain were maritime powers and Russia had the largest land army the world had ever seen. We would have gotten our clocks cleaned on land and probably lost the rest of Europe to the Soviets. As horrible as the abandonment of what became the Warsaw Pact countries was by the West, I don’t see that they could have done anything about it. The West even turned over citizens who had escaped the Soviets along with countless captured soldiers who had surrendered to the West to escape the Soviets.
Everyone who saw the movie knows Patton had a plan to start a war with the Russians and make it look like they started it.
Hold out one end, ie VE/VJ then switch to victory in Russia? The promise of the end of psychological screw that was wwll for everyone everywhere would have precipitated a violent backlash to such a bait and switch. The unceremonious dismissal of Churchill would have been even quicker if he’d tried his unthinkable.
No big deal. We have invasion plans for Canada, Iceland and other small nations. One never knows who will turn bad.
“The Mouse that Roared.”
And Churchill did a lot to make that happen. Representatives of the Polish government in exile were not invited to the conferences at Tehran or Yalta, which determined their country's fate. Churchill agreed to setting Poland's eastern border at the Curzon Line, the territory that Hitler had given Stalin as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Many of the 200,000 Poles fighting in the British Army were from that region. And at Yalta and Potsdam, the Western Allies completed the handover of Poland to the Soviet Union.
Good leaders are always prepared for foreseeable contingencies. Poor leaders don’t even consider the foreseeable consequences of their own actions.
This was not an uncommon thought at the time; for anyone.