Tag: VE-Day

John Peck, 1945: General Eisenhower asks if the war is over….

John Peck, 1945: General Eisenhower asks if the war is over….

Col. Gault (Mil­i­tary Assis­tant to Gen­er­al Eisen­how­er, 29 April 1945): “John Peck, is that you? The Gen­er­al told me to ask you if the war is over.”

Peck: “I beg your pardon?”

Gault: “Seri­ous­ly, we’ve got a press mes­sage here which says quite clear­ly that it’s all over. If so, nobody has told the Gen­er­al and he thought you would be the most like­ly to know at your end.”

Peck: “Well, if it has end­ed, nobody has told the Prime Min­is­ter either.”

Gault: “Do you think we had bet­ter car­ry on?”

Peck: “Yes, I think so.”…

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Churchill and the Baltic

Churchill and the Baltic

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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