I've seen nothing suggesting direct contact between Roosevelt and Stalin at this point in the war. As of late 1939, Roosevelt is just trying to keep the US officially neutral, while at the same time doing everything he can to help out the Brits & French.Really?In two years it will be a much different story. By then Hitler had turned on his ally Stalin, and Roosevelt knew the only way to win the war without many millions of US casualties was to help Stalin defeat Hitler's armies in the east.
It turned out to be a pretty simple equation: approximately five Soviet soldiers killed for every two German soldiers, which saved the life of one US & British soldier. Around 70% of all German soldiers killed died fighting the Soviets.
So what Roosevelt Beloved was not Stalin, but the lives of young American "boys." Thank God.
Is that the way you really see it?
Here's a site chosen at random: THE FORGIVEN HOLOCAUST. There are thousands on this subject.
Here's a few excerpts from that site:
Soon after taking office in 1933, Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition and international legitimacy to a regime that had already committed mass murder on a scale Hitler himself would never match.Soviet communism eventually killed tens of millions of people - nearly 62 million, according to Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, a specialist in the study of "democide" (his term for government mass murder). In 1933 its record was already so bloody that Central Europe was terrified of the communist threat that so many Westerner intellectuals preferred to see as the Great Progressive Hope.
The communist-forced famine of Ukraine is sometimes called "the Forgotten Holocaust." A better name would be the Forgiven Holocaust.
Anyone who had provided as much aid and comfort to Hitler as Roosevelt gave Stalin would now be in total disgrace. Even those who opposed war with Hitler are tainted today. But we venerate the man who gave the murderous Stalin crucial acceptance, material aid and a benign image as "Uncle Joe."
Roosevelt's ambassador to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Joseph Davies, became a great enthusiast of Stalin. His memoir "Mission to Moscow" glorified the Soviet regime and even defended the purges and show trials of the period. Roosevelt prevailed upon Warner Brothers to turn the book into a major motion picture (starring the great Walter Huston as Davies), in which Stalin was shown as a gentle, grandfatherly figure who had only the welfare of the Russian people at heart.
Do you not know of these things? Do you not believe them?
In 1939... and long before 1939... Stalin was a "Socialist Hero" to every "Progressive" in America. You don't think Roosevelt was one of those "Progressives"? You think he was completely untainted by all his "progressive" associations?
Yes, it's true what you write that by the mid-40's the military calculus of battle and casualties was such that it would have been insane for us not to have been allied with the Soviet Union.
But 1939 was not the mid-40s. In 1939 the Soviet Union was as much on the march as Hitler. But Stalin had something Hitler never had: the undying love and devotion of all true American Liberals, the Dear Leader of them all being, of course, FDR.
Don't be ridiculous. I've used Professor Rummel's site as a reference for going on ten years now. You are not telling me anything new.
I'll say again: in 1939 Hitler and Stalin were allies, and the US officially neutral -- while Roosevelt did everything he could to help out Britain & France.
In those years, Roosevelt made personal friends with Winston Churchill, but there was then no direct contact I know of between FDR and Stalin.
In 1941, having defeated nearly all of western Europe and threatened Britain with invasion, Hitler next turned on his own ally Stalin, and did invade the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt immediately came to Stalin's aid, for perfectly obvious strategic reasons.
So, "undying love and devotion" had little or nothing to do with it. The simple fact was: Hitler could not be defeated without Stalin's full participation.
Naturally, Roosevelt treated Stalin with the same charming personality that he had used over a lifetime, and for which he was elected the American President.
Of course, Nazis have always insisted that FDR should have joined forces with Germany to defeat Stalin.
But that was not ever even a remote possibility -- it's a fantasy on the same order of magnitude as the Nazis' racial ideology.