Posted on 04/27/2006 6:26:15 PM PDT by spanalot
"Yalta is generally considered a tragedy for the West, and a betrayal of Eastern Europe, but more than anything, it is was a reflection of the overall strategic realities of the time.
The biggest victim, in my opinion, was Winston Churchill. "
Hominahomina Whaaaaa?
The looting of Europe by Russia because we held back Patton financed the Genocide of 60 million in Asia!
Do you realize what the Cold War cost the US - to contain this Genocide because Paton was not allowed to finish the job?
I am very certain that you have a masters and going for a PhD - Academia is the last refuge for this self delusion.
While deeply suspicious of communism and the Soviet Union, Churchill believed that a similar personal relationship could work with Stalin — in getting the Soviet leader to work with him in determining the political settlement that would rule the world at the end of the war. He traveled to Moscow in August 1942, wanting to establish such a relationship with the "old Bear," as Churchill called Stalin.
The first two sessions in the Kremlin went badly, with Stalin insulting the British as cowards unwilling to fight with the same aggressiveness as the Red Army. Rather than remind Stalin that the British had fought alone against Hitler for the year between the fall of France in June 1940 and the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R. in June 1941 — a year during which the Soviet Union was informally allied with Hitler under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 — Churchill confided to one of his aids, "I still feel I could work with that man [Stalin] if I could only break down the language barrier." He was convinced that he and Stalin were not getting along because something was being lost in the translation. Stalin played up to Churchill at their next session, inviting the British leader to his country house outside Moscow for a late-night supper. Churchill said afterwards, "I was taken into the family, we ended friends."
Churchill again traveled to Moscow in October 1944 for a personal one-on-one meeting with Stalin. After the meeting, Churchill wrote to his wife: "I have had a very nice talk with the old Bear. I like him the more I see him." And to Clement Attlee, he wrote, "Stalin had made several expressions of personal regard which I feel were all sincere."
At the center of this meeting was a proposal of Churchill's to carve up southeastern Europe into joint British-Soviet spheres of influence. According to the British ambassador, who was present at the meeting, Churchill "produced what he called a 'Naughty document,' showing a list of Balkan countries and the proportion of interest in them of the Great Powers. He said the Americans would be shocked if they saw how crudely he put it. Marshal Stalin was a realist. He himself was not sentimental."
Churchill proposed that Romania be ninety percent under Soviet influence and ten percent under British influence; Bulgaria would be seventy-five percent under Soviet influence and twenty-five percent under British influence; Greece would be ten percent under Soviet influence and ninety percent under British influence; and in Yugoslavia and Hungary, the Soviets and Britain would split their influence, fifty-fifty. Stalin changed Bulgaria to ninety percent Soviet influence and signed his approval. When Churchill suggested burning the document, Stalin told him to keep it.
Churchill, who had expressed anger and voiced condemnation over Stalin's division of Eastern Europe with Hitler in 1939, now proposed to do the same. And Churchill abided by the agreement. When, at the beginning of 1945, Stalin began forcibly deporting Germans out of Soviet-occupied Romania, Churchill said: "Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Romania of [Germans]?. . . It is understood that the Russians were to work their will in this sphere." And when members of the British Foreign Office then complained that Romanians were being sent to the Soviet Union for forced labor, Churchill said: "We must bear in mind what we promised about leaving Romania's fate to a large extent in Russia's hands. I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Romanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-mines." In Churchill's mind, he had gotten what he wanted: a dominant British influence in Greece and Stalin's acceptance of British naval dominance in the Mediterranean.
Churchill took the same attitude towards the fate of Poland. In September 1939, Churchill had strongly advocated Britain's going to war against Nazi Germany on behalf of Poland's independence and territorial integrity. But now in the face of Soviet designs on Poland, Churchill's tune changed. From the first meetings with British diplomatic representatives after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin had insisted that the British government accept as legitimate the Soviet conquests under the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. The Soviet leader demanded the acceptance of Soviet control of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, eastern Poland, the Romanian province of Bessarabia, and the border territories annexed as a result of the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940.
At first, Churchill tried to resist, saying that these matters should be settled at a peace conference at the end of the war. But in the end, he conceded everything Stalin wanted. Indeed, it then became Churchill's job to serve as Stalin's diplomatic agent to get the Polish government-in-exile in London to accept the Soviet demands. Churchill told Polish Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk that Stalin's demands for permanent annexation of eastern Poland and a coalition Polish government with a strong contingent of communists hand-picked by Moscow were ones he agreed with "not because Soviet Russia is strong but because she is right." If the Poles resisted, Britain would just leave Poland to its fate under Stalin. After all, he said, Poland would be compensated with large portions of German territory to the west.
At his meeting with Stalin in 1944, he had told the Soviet dictator that giving Poland these areas of Germany would involve expelling millions of Germans from their homes. "The population might be moved from Silesia and east Prussia to Germany," Churchill said to Stalin. "If seven million [Germans] had been killed in the war there would be plenty of room for them." (Churchill had already made an agreement with the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile to expel over three million Germans from the Czech Sudetenland at the end of the war.) - LINK
Listen , Spannie, I've been charitable, I've even used small words to explain complicated concepts so that you might have a chance at understanding. It's evident that you never will.
You don't know anything about politics, and you know even less about warfare.
It's also obvious that you're a literalist who doesn't understand the implication sof what you read. When I say "Churchill is the victim" I do not refer to the man himself, but his vision of Post-War Europe. I'm sure you aren't THAT dumb and understood the implication, but because you have a vested interest in making sure you're logical and historical errors are taken as something resembling reasonable argument, you're quite willing to feign ignorance, ironically, in defense of a greater ignorance.
Get this through your skull: Patton c. 1945 is NOT the commander the press has made him out to be. He has, by this time, been trapped by both "the System" (the combination of the Infantry School control of the US Army, and the internal politics of the Western Alliance), and by his own hubris: he's simply too loudmouthed, flamboyant, arrogant, and ultimately, selfish a commander for his own good.
He has, by this time, been put on notice for slapping soldiers (one later found to have been suffering from malaria), for covering up the massacres of German prisoners and Italian civilians in Sicily, for consistently undermining Eisenhower and Bradley by taking advantage of his personal relationship with Marshall. There is also the egregious (and mostly unknown) matter of security leaks that originated in his 7th Army HQ during the Sicilian campaign.
But, he was the only "fighting" general (besides MacArthur)that inspired any confidence in the American public, or who scared the Germans. These are his only saving graces.
The heavy lifting in France after the breakout is done by his subordinates Abrahms, Wood and Weyland, but he gets credit as Army commander and darling of the American press. Middleton and Eddy (Corps commanders) get the blame when things go wrong. He is tactically brilliant on occasion, but has a propensity to throw it away with stubborness when his intial plans fail.His men hated his guts.
But he was willing to do anything to get command of 3rd Army, and if that meant knuckling under to bradley and Eisnehower, even if he knew it meant greater American casualties and the wrong strategy for fighting the war, then so be it.
He is in no position to carry the fight to the "Damned Bolsheviks" in 1945, despite his assertion that he can. The American Army simply has no infantry left, and it's tanks are vastly inferior to the Russian models. The logistics are a nightmare, but true to form, Patton will insist that drive, dash, initiative and spirit will carry the day. In this way, he is like the Japanese commanders who sent their men on Banzai charges, hoping a display of sheer guts would decide the issue.
The Allies are in no position militarily or politically to stop Stalin, except to act as speed bumps on the way tot h English Channel. The Atomic bomb might give the Russians pause, but when the true extent of the American atomic project (and it's weakness)is known to them, the Russians sabre rattle and yank chains with alacrity, knowing thatthey have ocnventional military superiority and physical possession of Eastern Europe. Quite frankly, the way the war ended in 1945 is about the best the West could have hoped for.
Unfortunately, that ws not a happy circumstance for the people of Eastern Europe, but realistically, the situation could not be changed by force of arms.
You have an axe to grind, and that's fine. However you are quite short on facts, and realistic, intelligent assesments of just what is and isn't possible. Console yourself with this: Communism is dead, the West won, and like any other war, Cold or Hot, someone always gets hurt.
And by the way, I'm not part of the "academic refuge of self-delusion"; I do not teach (although I hope to one day), and I do not write books or articles for academic review and publication. I study history because I love to, and from the comfort of my own home (the information revolution has been a Godsend in this regard). I do not blindly follow the dictates of a professor because, just like you, they are more often wrong in their assumptions than right.
Perhaps if you stopped spouting and spreading propaganda for a few minutes and actually studying politics, warfare and culture, you might be able to argue intelligently with me. Unfortunately, there will probably be a very frigid day in the Netherworld before that happens.
I will no longer respond to your idiocy because it has gotten tiresome.
Go do something useful, like play in traffic, perhaps.
"Listen , Spannie, I've been charitable, I've even used small words to explain complicated concepts "
I trust you are well read but have you ever really CREATED anything - perhaps in the arts, commerce, industry?
Are you published - best seller?
Perhaps a patent or two?
Any multimillion dollar, brownfield new process startups?
Have you ever managed any type of significant venture involving 100 or 1000 with bottom line accountability?
Do you really know how the material world works?
Right, I didn't think so.
And then there was the mental cripple Roosevelt whose lackeys drafted a complete surrender to the communists.
Here is what another hero had to say:
"Joe McCarthy on Communist Infiltration in the State Dept."
(The author having died of hepatitis and not psorhosis as widely misbelieved).
"I trust you are well read but have you ever really CREATED anything - perhaps in the arts, commerce, industry?"
As a matter of fact, yes. I enjoyed a 20 year career on Wall Street (at Smith-Barney), as a system's programmer, where I helped design, build and program many of the automated trading systems that are an industry standard (by the way, I do not hold a dgegree in either computer science or programming. This stuff is NOT rocket science). I left the firm three years ago to start my own Automation consulting business. I work only on those projects that interest me, and I spend the vast majority of my time at home, with the lovely Mrs. Wombat, here at stately Wombat Manor, and completing my studies via correspondance (internet) at Stanford.
"Are you published - best seller?"
No, I am not. If you wish to imply my opinions are not valid because I haven't been, then that makes even less sense than everything else you've posted here.
"Do you really know how the material world works?"
Whole lot better than you, my friend. Whole lot better than you. Now, are you done embarrasing yourself?
Whoops! My bad: Mixed up Yalta and Potsdam. Which is understandable as I was just having an argument over Potsdam not last week.
FDR was at Yalta, not Truman.I should be taken out and shot for that...
Occam's Razor would seem to corroborate your observation.
What is the two years? there were only four months between V-E day and V-J Day.
"Additionally, the US did continue to fight, explicitly in the Pacific theater for another 2 years after Germany collapsed and was torn asunder."
I ignored this because:
a) it wasn't germaine to the original argument
b) there was a study done that concluded that the war against Japan would continue into late 1946, sans an invasion of the Home Islands (the Study, by the US Navy, was commissioned in 1944).
I think that in light of this, we can cut Cvengr some slack. I can at least kinda-sorta know what he was talking about, unlike spanalot.
"Whoops! My bad: Mixed up Yalta and Potsdam"
"Now, are you done embarrasing yourself?"
It just keeps getting better and better.
At least I ADMIT my mistakes, not insist that others ignore them.
Nice attempt to paint me as "just another useless academic", too.
I worked and accumulated a personal fortune before I set out to master my life's interest. I don't sit on my backside and claim ignorance as a badge of courage, and then persist in it because I apparently have nothing better to do.
Jackass. I guess anyone who doesn't agree with you, is part of the KGB conspiracy that's been in motion since 1945. Anyone who can shoot holes in your agrument with logic and reason, is a "useful idiot of the left", probably still on Stalin's payroll. Finally, anyone who can point out your errors, factual and logical, in a way that most people agree with, must be a useless intellectual, and we all KNOW they're all closet communists, right? (/sarcasm tag on -- just in case you can't see it coming).
Get a life.
You're entire worldview (if that's what you want to call it) depends on two things which do not exist in this or any other parallel universe:
a) a belief in Patton as God. To the point where you pump up the fact that the man selected suitable terrain to build a bridge and beat up a defeated, retreating army and attempt to pass these off as "tactical genius". I'd shoot a General who DIDN'T seek out favorable terain for his operations. I'd similarly treat one who fails to persue a defeated foe. In any world other than yours, this would be considered "a General doing his job". Hardly great.
b) a belief that the Soviet Union was the worst oppressor in the history of mankind. Well, trust me pal, I've studied history and the Soviets (or Nazi Germany, even)don't even crack the top five. While it certainly was one of the worst of the 20th Century, it doesn't even come close to the Imperial regimes of ancient China, the Persian Kings of Antiquity, Egypt's Pharohs, the Byzantine Romans and the Aztec Kings in terms of absolute power wielded by so few individuals for such bloody-minded and evil purposes.
Got news for you: the Soviet Union lasted 70 years. How long did all those evil empires last? Get some perspective, then go get some learning, boy. Leave the serious discussion to the adults.
Yes of course your brilliant - and the Genocide of 60 million in China in the last 60 years is not the pinnacle of civilized depravity.
But humor us, please elucidate on the left's opinion of Sen Joe McCarthy given the relevations of the last 15 years.
Anybody home (whether New York or Charlotte?)?
Any response to last inquiry?
I can't argue with your assumptions but if Stalin had a hit on John Wayne, he certainly would have wanted Patton out of the way.
And how long have you considered Nestor Ivanovich Makhno a hero of the Ukrainian people?
And while we're at it, could you enlighten us to the biographies of the following Ukrainians:
Skrypnyk, Chubar, Petrovsky, Kosior, Strohanov, Terekhov, and Mayorov?
"Now, are you done embarrasing yourself?"
It just keeps getting better and better. "
That's rich coming from you.
Spanalot,
You claimed to have been interrogated by the KGB. And you also claimed that you were born in the United States and have never left.
How is it you found your way into the hands of the KGB on American soil? Who was the KGB agent that interrogated you?
Did you do your duty and report the illegal activities of the KGB vis-a-vis the violation of your rights by making you submit to an interrogation, on American soil, to the proper authorities?
Did you provide descriptive information about the KGB interrogator to the proper authorities so they could make the appropriate response?
Can you explain your frequent use on FR of the website maidanua.org to make your arguments when the people of maidanua.org have made it clear they consider Bush and Republicans to be morons and a threat to Ukraine?
Can you explain your frequent use on FR of the website maidanua.org to make your arguments when the people of maidanua.org have slammed the US for our response to Katrina and have stated that Americans don't care about minorities and force them to live in oppression?
How long have you been a member of the US branch of MaidanUa.Org?
Can you explain to us how a Ukrainian nationalist allegedly had information that Stalin wanted Patton killed, and did nothing to prevent it? Remember this nationalist claimed to have been a member of Patton's security detail. If he had knowledge of a plot and didn't physically stop it he wasn't doing his job.
Can you explain why the Soviets would want to risk killing Patton, especially after he had been shoved aside by Truman, when his death and blaming his death on Stalin would have benefited the Nazi collaborators in the Ukrainian nationalist movement - the very organization that allegedly "warned" this guy about the plot (which is interesting - how would these guys who were hiding in the Carpathian hills be getting information on such highly sensitive NKVD/MGB wet works operations? Hmmm. Interesting.
How long have you idolized Nestor Ivanovich Makhno?
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