Interesting to see how America is picking up the British press’ tune on getting Soviet aid for Britain and France over Poland. And they are also missing some of finer points, as well as some major ones. The British and French want Stalin to do all the heavy lifting against Hitler, planning on defeating him by expenditure of copious amounts of Russian blood. Stalin will go to war with Hitler over Poland, but only if he can get Poland. Otherwise, it’s not worth spending copious amounts of Russian blood to defeat Hitler just for the sake of defeating Hitler. Poland will never allow Russian troops on Polish soil, knowing full well that once the Red Army is there, it will never leave. The British and French don’t want to willingly hand Poland over to Stalin. These competing interests meant that fundamentally, an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance was unworkable in 1939, and it drove Stalin into the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler.
So how did it ultimately all work out? Stalin wound up in a military alliance with Britain and the United States against Hitler. He also wound up doing the heavy lifting to beat Hitler, spending copious amounts of Russian blood in the process. In exchange, Stalin got Poland. While the British and Americans didn’t want Poland to be a Soviet satrap, once the Red Army entered Poland, it was not going to leave for a long long time. And there was little the British and Americans could or would do about that.
I believe "Augur" was a British correspondent working for the Times during this period.
There is an air of inevitability about the chain of events that resulted in the final alignment of the powers. Given the hard facts as you recite them it is hard to see how the prewar maneuvering could have resulted in a different outcome than the Soviet-German alliance followed by their falling out that came in 1941.
My theory is, Roosevelt and Churchill both understood from the beginning that Hitler could not be defeated without the Soviet Union. And this largely explains the otherwise incomprehensible pro-Soviet propaganda appearing in American organs like the New York Times.
Others were more of two minds about it -- not sure which was the more dangerous threat, Nazism or Communism -- and could not bring themselves to see reality. Among those were the British Prime Minister Chamberlain, some in the French government, and the Catholic Pope.
I doubt if FDR had any input to Chamberlain's policies in 1938-39, but it's a fact that Americans never really learned of the true horrors of Stalin's Communism, and never thought much about which would be better in control of Europe -- Hitler or Stalin.
The choices were not yet clear in 1938-39, the future still quite murky...