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calendar   Thursday - August 27, 2009

Churchill believed he could charm anyone - even Stalin.

But apparently not.

Here are some edited extracts from Max Hastings and The Daily Mail.  For you history buffs and even if you aren’t, this is interesting reading as well as an insight into the ppl and events of WW2.  I hadn’t known before, for example, that

The sick Roosevelt drifted in and out of consciousness of the proceedings,

during meetings with Churchill and Stalin in the closing years of the war.

The Mail has been running various chapters from the Max Hastings book on Churchill and the war and aftermath.

I’ve simply chosen some parts from a chapter that appeared a few days ago.  You can read all of it RIGHT HERE. From the link you can catch up on all the other chapters that have been published so far.


Churchill believed he could charm anyone - even Stalin. Yet the dictator humiliated him with insults, lies and foul-mouthed jokes

By Max Hastings

The prime minister was not to know that Stalin had an edge on him. Through spies in London - traitors such as Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby - the Kremlin had advance knowledge of the positions and policies the British would take and what they hoped to achieve.

image

Churchill after meeting with Stalin:
“They respect us here and I am sure they wish to work with us.”
The Truth:
He couldn’t have been more wrong. He was being played for a sucker.Stalin no longer had any need for him.

Stalin could always raise a laugh from his courtiers by saying, as he often did: ‘We f***ed England!’

Britain had gone to war in 1939 over Poland, after Hitler invaded it. Throughout the war there had been a Polish government in exile in London. A quarter of a million Polish soldiers and airmen fought on the Allied side. But Churchill had to concede that it was ‘Moscow’s Poles’ who would rule in Warsaw.
Hitler’s troops invade Poland, only for the country to be later taken by the Soviets - exactly what Churchill did not want

He was mortified by this outcome. It seemed to him unbearably tragic that impending Allied victory should merely offer a new servitude to the people on whose behalf Britain had declared war on Germany. Yet this was the case.

Stalin was astonishingly amiable, as well he might be, as the most conspicuous profiteer from the war. The sick Roosevelt drifted in and out of consciousness of the proceedings. When he engaged, it was to accede to Soviet views. He seemed to be trying to distance himself from Churchill whenever he could as a way of reaching out to Stalin.

Again and again, the British found themselves isolated. Churchill opposed the ‘ dismemberment’ of Germany, to which Stalin was committed, and also argued against imposing extravagant reparations on the vanquished. But the Americans and Russians had already settled on a provisional figure of $20 billion, of which the Soviet Union was to receive half.

In Churchill’s eyes, the foremost business of Yalta was the future of Poland and whether he could snatch at least a shred of democratic freedom for its people. Stalin brushed him off with his usual serpentine skill, promising elections of a sort but nothing more.

Churchill professed satisfaction. An agreement had been reached about Poland, which, if Stalin kept his word, might sustain some fig leaf of democracy.

‘The Poles will have their future in their own hands, with the single limitation that they must honestly follow a policy friendly to Russia. That is surely reasonable. I know of no government which stands to its obligations more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.’

Over a drink in the smoking room afterwards with friends, he said that he did not see what else he could have done at Yalta. He had had no choice but to accept Stalin’s assurances.

No course short of war with Russia could have saved Polish democracy in 1945, and only a compound of vanity and despair could have caused Churchill to pretend otherwise.

The Soviet Union believed that, having paid overwhelmingly the heaviest price to achieve the defeat of Hitler, it had thus purchased the right to determine the future of Eastern Europe in accordance with its own security interests. And the Western Allies lacked power to contrive any different outcome.

In the last months of Churchill’s war premiership, his satisfaction about the defeat of Germany and the Nazis’ imminent downfall was almost entirely over-shadowed by his dismay at the triumph of Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe.

Stalin flouted Yalta in both its spirit and its letter. Almost daily, news reached Downing Street of savage Soviet oppression in Poland and the deportation to labour camps of thousands of non-communists. Churchill drafted a fierce cable to Stalin, for which he invited American approval. The dying Roosevelt vetoed it.

A stream of messages followed from Churchill, emphasising the urgency and gravity of the Polish situation. Most went unanswered.

For years Churchill had danced around the Russian bear, but in the end it had caught him and cuffed him out of the ring. When it came to determining the shape of postwar Europe, he was irrelevant.

But perhaps he would have one last snap at the bear’s heels. He told Jock Colville, his private secretary, that he would refuse to be cheated over Poland, ‘even if we go to the verge of war with Russia’. And, as we will see tomorrow, that is precisely what he drew up plans to do.

Recruit German soldiers to continue the fight with soviets.  If necessary, nuke Moscow.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 08/27/2009 at 03:12 AM   
Filed Under: • History •  
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