Tag: Stalin

Polish
Churchill inspecting troops of the 1st Rifle Brigade, 1st Polish Corps, with General Władysław Sikorski at Tentsmuir, Scotland, 23 October 1940. General Gustaw Paszkiewicz, CO of the Brigade, is behind General Sikorski. (Imperial War Museum, public domain)
The Polish and the Holocaust: What Churchill Knew

The Polish and the Holocaust: What Churchill Knew

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Polish firing squad of one

Mr. Paul Bonow­icz staged a one-man protest against Churchill in South Ruis­lip, Mid­dle­sex. He denounced “the lies in British books about Win­ston Churchill. I am Pol­ish and we know he betrayed Pol­ish peo­ple.” He added: Churchill “knew about the Holo­caust. He knew Jew­ish peo­ple were dying, but he didn’t help. After the war there was a deal between Churchill and Stal­in, and the price was Poland. Part of my coun­try went to the Sovi­ets. It was Churchill who decid­ed which part, not the Poles.” —Uxbridge Gazette.

Churchill did know about the Holo­caust, and alone among allied lead­ers, he tried to do some­thing about it.…

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Stalin
First Meeting, Moscow 1942: WSC’s interpreter Arthur Birse, Churchill, U.S. envoy Averell Harriman, Stalin, Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov. (Photo by Mikhail Mikhaylovich Kalashnikov, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
“Stalin never broke his word to me.” Were these Churchill’s words?

“Stalin never broke his word to me.” Were these Churchill’s words?

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A mag­a­zine fact check­er writes ask­ing if Churchill ever said, “Stal­in nev­er broke his word to me.” The short answer is yes. The long answer shows how care­ful we should be when quot­ing Churchill.

The source of this quote is the jour­nal­ist C.L. Sulzberg­er (1912-1993), in his 1970 book, The Last of the Giants, page 304. In it Sulzberg­er reports his “five hours with old Win­ston Churchill” at Chartwell on 10 July 1956.

Churchill, wrote Sulzberg­er, thought Stal­in “a great man, above all com­pared to Khr­uschev and Bul­ganin,” and quot­ed Churchill as follows:

Stal­in nev­er broke his word to me.…

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bomb
“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed….The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” —Churchill, 28 March 1945
Churchill, Arthur Harris and Decisions to Bomb Germany

Churchill, Arthur Harris and Decisions to Bomb Germany

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Did Win­ston Churchill influ­ence the deci­sion to bomb Ger­man cities so bad­ly at end of World War II? What role did he have in appoint­ing Sir Arthur “Bomber” Har­ris to lead Bomber Com­mand? Did he give a secret order to “bomb the hell out of them”? Did he exhib­it this atti­tude in his speech­es? (Updat­ed and repost­ed, 31 May 2018.)

“Bomb the hell out of them”

Gen­er­al Har­ris was a mil­i­tary appoint­ment, though sup­port­ed by Churchill.  For many months after Rus­sia was attacked, bomb­ing was the only “sec­ond front” Britain could offer. The Allies were los­ing every­where and Stal­in was clam­or­ing for the Anglo-Amer­i­cans to attack.…

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Last Try to Avoid Hell, 1914

Last Try to Avoid Hell, 1914

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“Sav­ing the Nations from Hell”: The “King­ly Con­fer­ence,” 1914 (Excerpt)

(Read more at Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project)

Churchill’s faith in per­son­al diplomacy—solving intractable prob­lems by meet­ings at the high­est level—was famous­ly expressed dur­ing World War II.

Less wide­ly known is Churchill’s 1914 pro­pos­al for a con­fer­ence of heads of state (includ­ing, it seems, French Pres­i­dent Ray­mond Poin­caré) in an effort to head-off World War I. The scheme failed, but not for Churchill’s lack of trying.

There is lit­tle on Churchill’s “king­ly con­fer­ence” in the lit­er­a­ture. There is no ref­er­ence in Churchill’s The World Cri­sis, Asquith’s mem­oirs, or biogra­phies by Man­ches­ter, Jenk­ins, Rose, Charm­ley and Birken­head, though Sir Mar­tin Gilbert includes in the offi­cial biog­ra­phy an excerpt from a cab­i­net mem­ber which records Churchill’s words in the cab­i­net of July 27th:

Churchill said we were now in a bet­ter than aver­age con­di­tion, & the fleet was at war strength….Churchill,…

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Praise for “Avoidable War”

Praise for “Avoidable War”

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Churchill and the Avoid­able War will cost you the price of a cup of cof­fee. You can read it in a cou­ple of nights.  You may then  decide if Churchill was right (or wrong) that World War II could have been pre­vent­ed. Click on “Buy Now” under the book image at right on this page.

Here is an excel­lent sur­vey of the key “what if” junc­tures where his­to­ry could have tak­en a dif­fer­ent turn. What I like about it espe­cial­ly is that it con­sci­en­tious­ly steers away from any defin­i­tive pro­nounce­ments about one zig or zag mak­ing all the dif­fer­ence in pre­vent­ing World War II.…

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Churchill’s Choice: Hitler vs. Stalin

Churchill’s Choice: Hitler vs. Stalin

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I find the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Churchill quite dis­gust­ing. It is typ­i­cal British-Amer­i­can arro­gance to ignore the out­come of WW2 for the peo­ples of East­ern Europe, not to speak of the Ger­mans. Churchill knew from the begin­ning about the ter­ri­ble fate of the Rus­sians and many oth­er East Euro­pean peo­ples under Bol­she­vist dic­ta­tor­ship. He obvi­ous­ly didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-Ger­man hatred. Know­ing that he bombed Ger­man cities, killing thou­sands of civil­ians long before the Ger­mans were retal­i­at­ing, makes him in my opin­ion even worse than Hitler. Why  did he go into alliance with Stal­in against the Ger­mans?…

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Churchill’s Brandy? Not Really….

Churchill’s Brandy? Not Really….

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Brandy Ban­ter: The Evening Stan­dard described ArArAt Armen­ian brandy, once reserved for Com­mu­nist par­ty elite. It was “the brandy that Stal­in served Churchill” accord­ing to con­sumer busi­ness edi­tor Jonathan Prynn:

The prime min­is­ter enjoyed ArArAt brandy when it was served by Stal­in at the Yal­ta con­fer­ence in Feb­ru­ary 1945. After the Sec­ond World War, the Sovi­et leader arranged for Churchill to be sent 400 bot­tles every year.

This seems high­ly doubt­ful. There is no record in the Churchill Archives Cen­tre of even a bot­tle of brandy being sent to Churchill—although he did com­pli­ment Stal­in on an Armen­ian brandy served at Yal­ta.…

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Churchill and the Baltic

Churchill and the Baltic

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Wal­ter Rus­sell Mead in The Amer­i­can Inter­est Online fine­ly describes the Muse­um of the KGB, estab­lished in the Lithuan­ian cap­i­tal of Vil­nius to doc­u­ment the vic­tims of Sovi­et occu­pa­tion of the Baltic States from 1940 through 1991:

Yet those poor Lithuan­ian par­ti­sans who fought a hope­less guer­ril­la cam­paign against the Sovi­et occu­pa­tion after 1945 kept wait­ing for us to show up,” Mead cointin­ues. “Appar­ent­ly they made the mis­take of believ­ing all those fine words that Franklin Roo­sevelt and Win­ston Churchill wrote in The Atlantic Char­ter.

I have no doubt that Roo­sevelt and Tru­man were right to avoid war with the Sovi­et Union after World War Two…But war over east­ern Europe in 1945 was unthink­able; con­tain­ment was the best we could do.…

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