Oh come on you guys; you are just piling on poor ol’ Uncle Joe. He says that if the Polish people so desire, they will be in an alliance with the USSR against the Germans, and then you get on him for supposedly not keeping his word. He did honor that; Poland was in an alliance with the USSR against Germany. The western half of it, anyway. And the Polish people did so desire. At least according to how Stalin had the votes counted. So give the guy a break.
Do I really need the sarc tag?
Moose, I liked your post. Far too many people of conservative bent have, in my opinion, unfairly attacked FDR for “betraying” or “giving away” Poland to the Soviets. I always ask them to answer one question: Tell me the date when the United States Army abaondoned Poland and turned it over the the Red Army? The answer is that it never happened. The Soviets wrested Poland from the Germans by conquest as they were on their way to Berlin. A look at the map of as of the date of this article makes it obvious that the outcome was unavoidable. And once the Red Army occupied Poland, there was nothing short of war with the USSR that was going to get it to leave. We tried what diplomatic and economic leverage we could on Stalin, but the simple fact was that he wasn’t going to give up Poland and he knew the United States and Great Britain were not going to resort to armed force to kick him out.
You look at Stalin’s photo attached to this article, and even though it is dated even in 1944, you can see his personality in those cunning feline eyes of his. He was brilliant, ruthless, cruel and with an incredible capacity to work. Once he divined a goal, he never deviated from it and would pay any price to get it. Just what the Russians revere in a leader.
He did play FDR and Churchill against each other. He knew, far better than Hitler, how to drive a wedge between them. Churchill wished to preserve the British Empire, FDR wanted it liquidated. Stalin knew of this difference and exploited that fundamental wedge issue for all it was worth. FDR was also far too trusting of Stalin. Stalin trusted nobody, except for a brief period from 1939-1941, when he trusted the one man nobody should trust, Adolph Hitler.
Same thing with Berlin? Could at least one of the American or British armies have beaten the Soviets to Berlin? Most certainly. The Germans had stacked the Eastern front because they knew (from experience in East Prussia and the Warthegau) what was going to happen when the Red Army swept over the Oder and into Berlin. Commanders were running their troops west to surrender to the Americans and British as fast as they could. But...Stalin had made it plain that he wanted Berlin and the allies had already agreed to it. Also, he flat-out lied to FDR and Ike when the Reds started their last massive offensive on the Seelow Heights. He told FDR there would be nothing more than a “reconnaissance in force.” Well, yeah, if “force” meant two million men.
}:-)4
Uncle Joe's proposal for Poland's Eastern border mostly followed the Curzon Line, proposed for the Post-WWI border by British Lord Curzon. It roughly represented the ethnic boundary between the Poles and other East Europeans, such as White Russians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians. After the Red invasion of Poland after WWI, they conquered a substantial amount of land to the east of the Line, which the Poles kept until the 1939 invasions.
The main problem wasn't the boundary, but the fact that Stalin planned to set up communist puppet states in the countries under Soviet occupation. I agree there wasn't a darn thing the Brits or Americans could do to change the Soviet position short of war.
Churchill did push hard to compensate Poland with German land to the West by eventually adopting the Oder-Neisse Line. The border changes displaced millions of Germans, but it's real hard to feel sorry for them after what they had inflicted on Eastern Europe.