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This month marked the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union which took place on June 22, 1941. Hitler’s witting or unwitting pre-emptive attack against the Red Army, which were massed on the borders of eastern Germany, western Poland, Hungary, and Romania poised for their own invasion, enabled the Germans to capture or destroy tens of thousands of Soviet tanks and aircraft. Some authors who have examined Soviet archives have suggested the offensive was scheduled to take place a mere two and a half weeks after Hitler’s attack.
Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had joined with Nazi Germany in invading Poland and starting World War II as co-aggressors, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded to the German invasion of its former Soviet ally by pledging their unqualified support for the Soviet war effort no matter what the consequences of their unqualified political and military support might be. U.S. and U.K government war propagandists went to work to deceive their citizens into believing that the world’s greatest mass murderer, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was, in fact, a gallant ally of democracy and freedom in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In the four years that followed, the U.S. and Britain sent 15,000 combat aircraft and nearly 23,000 tanks and armored fighting vehicles to the Soviet Union along with even more massive quantities of strategic materials. Without these, Stalin stated he could not have produced the tanks, aircraft, and other heavy weapons needed to defeat Nazi Germany. This Allied military-industrial aid put the wartime needs of U.S. and U.K. forces as well as their own citizens behind Stalin’s needs and requisitions while also providing the Soviets with atomic bomb making plans and materials according to the new book “Stalin’s War-A New History of World War II”. This critical U.S. assistance to the Soviet atomic bomb program likely enabled the Soviets to explode their first atomic and hydrogen bombs several years earlier than they otherwise would have.
Lend-Lease allowed Soviets to triumph
This massive U.S.-U.K. military aid provided the Red Army with the ability to engage in mobile counteroffensives, which succeeded many times in encircling German forces, that it otherwise would have largely lacked. The 430,000 US trucks and jeeps provided under Lend-Lease constituted the bulk of Soviet motorized capabilities of the Red Army and enabled the Red Army to overrun half of Europe and much of Asia while annexing parts or all of nine countries and conquering half a dozen more during and after the war.
While a reasonable argument could have been made for providing the Soviets with some military aid to help them halt the German advance in the east, by 1943, the rationale for this enormous U.S.-U.K. military-industrial assistance had largely evaporated. This is due to the fact that, after the Battle of Kursk, the German Army was never again able to mount an offensive in the east and began a rapid retreat culminating in the Soviet capture of the German capital of Berlin less than two years later along with the eastern half of Europe.
After the fall of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Blitzkrieg continued in the Far East in what later came to be known as Operation “August Storm” as the USSR entered the war against Imperial Japan exactly one week before it surrendered, claiming Manchuria, northern Japan and North Korea in a rapid armored advance that lasted scarcely more than two weeks. Inexplicably, the U.S. continued its Lend-Lease military-industrial assistance program to the Soviets including about sixty U.S. warships and dozens of amphibious landing ships until September 1945 — a month after Imperial Japan had surrendered.
U.S., U.K., helped create Iron Curtain
Shortly after the war, Winston Churchill feigned surprise when he announced in his famous speech at Fulton, Mo. in March 1946 that an “Iron Curtain” now divided Europe and claimed that he alone had foreseen this unfortunate event. His claim was questionable given that he and FDR had authored the Yalta Agreement and previous agreements which had ceded virtually all of eastern Europe and much of Central Europe to the Soviets, thereby creating the Iron Curtain, leading to the Cold War between the Western and Soviet blocs that lasted half a century. Of course, for any educated observer of international affairs and world history at the time, the end result of the U.S.-U.K. decision to provide massive military-industrial aid to the Soviet Union was clear from the onset.
When the war began, the Soviet Union was the largest and most heavily armed nation in the world by far -- more than 33 times larger than Nazi Germany at its greatest extent -- and it spanned two continents. The decision of the U.S. and U.K. to ally themselves with the Soviet Union along with the enormous amount of direct military and military industrial aid they provided the Soviets ensured that the Soviet Union, not the Western Powers, would be the dominant power in postwar Europe.
Rather than merely liberating it from Nazi control and rebuilding postwar Germany as an ally of freedom against totalitarian aggression, at the Yalta Conference, the Big Three — FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided to destroy and dismember Germany into six pieces and starve millions of its citizens as part of their implementation of the Soviet-inspired Morgenthau Plan. This decision proved to have devastating consequences for U.S. national security, let alone the hundreds of millions of captive peoples enslaved in the newly expanded Communist bloc.
Following Germany’s defeat, General George S. Patton was very upset with the Truman-Eisenhower continuation of FDR’s appeasement policy of the Soviet Union and their decision to unjustly hold 70 million Germans collectively responsible for the crimes of Hitler and top Nazi leaders. He resolved to resign his commission and go on a speaking tour of the United States to urge a patriotic call to support a policy designed to confront, contain and, possibly even roll back, Soviet tyrannical control of Central and Eastern Europe. Tragically, Patton was assassinated in a joint OSS-NKVD conspiracy mere days before he was able to do so, depriving the free world of one of its most visionary leaders.
European balance of power tilted
One of the main results of the war was that the balance of power in Europe was destroyed and the Soviet Union became the new hegemon of continental Europe and, for a time following the Communist takeover of mainland China, Asia as well. Visionary anti-Communist statesmen such as former President Herbert Hoover, predicted this tragic and apocalyptic outcome if the Western Powers chose to ally with the Soviet Union. The U.S. and U.K. could have won the war against Nazi Germany and liberated Europe without their Unholy Alliance with what President Ronald Reagan later rightly termed “an evil empire”, let alone without providing massive military aid to it. It would have been far better for the U.S. to have simply signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and raced them to see which of the two countries could liberate the Nazi-occupied countries first. That way, the U.S. and U.K. would not have been complicit in the many horrific Soviet war crimes including the mass murderers of millions of people who dared resist the Soviet Communist onslaught helping to extinguish the flames of freedom from nearly a dozen nations in Eastern Europe, which yearned to be liberated from their enslavement by tyrannical dictators.
During the Pacific war, the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, led by Chiang Kai Shek, fought gallantly against the Japanese. By tying down nearly 80 percent of Japan’s Army divisions in China enabled the U.S. to engage in a Pacific island-hopping campaign that defeated Japan in three and a half years. They were able to accomplish this great feat despite being provided with only about 1 percent of the military assistance that the U.S. had given to the Soviet Union.
In 1946, the year after World War II ended, America’s Chinese Nationalist allies seemed on the verge of defeating Mao’s Soviet-backed Red Army and winning the Chinese Civil War. Then, General George C. Marshall, who had been sent by President Truman to lead U.S. foreign policy with regards to China, decided to cut off all military and logistical support to Chinese Nationalist forces, depriving them of the fuel and ammunition they needed to prevent China from being taken over by murderous Communist forces.
In the end communism prevailed
In response to this unprecedented gift by the Truman Administration to Stalin and CCP leader Mao Zedong, the U.S. Congress voted to approve $1 billion in military aid to help the Nationalists avert total defeat. Sadly, President Truman and Secretary Marshall ordered the U.S. Pacific Fleet to dump all of the tanks, aircraft and other U.S. weapons that Congress had been earmarked for the Nationalist freedom fighters into the Pacific Ocean rather than allow them to fall into Chinese Nationalist hands. In the meantime, Stalin had, since August 1945, been arming and equipping Mao’s Red Army forces with the latest tanks and other weapons in the Manchurian sanctuary we granted to him to help Mao Communize all of mainland China. When Mao proclaimed victory in the Chinese Civil War on Oct. 1, 1949, the only surprising thing about it is that it took them so long to finalize their victory.
While claiming to be fighting a war for democracy against totalitarian tyranny, U.S. leaders enabled the Soviet and Chinese Communists to double the amount of territory under their control from 16 percent to 30 percent of the world’s landmass. Thanks to FDR and Truman, the number of people enslaved by godless Communism increased by nearly 430 percent from 170 million in 1939 to 730 million a mere decade later -- 30 percent of the world’s people. Communist tyrants have since mass murdered nearly a billion people including forced abortions and infanticide — lives that otherwise might have been spared.
Did U.S. really “win” cold war?
While the U.S. supposedly “won” the Cold War when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, World War II’s tragic aftermath has continued as Russia signed a military alliance agreement with Communist China two decades ago in July 2001, forming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which Russian President Putin has rightly called “a reborn version of the Warsaw Pact”. If Roosevelt and Truman had not chosen to prolong the Second World War unnecessarily for seven months after the issuance of the MacArthur Memorandum in January 1945 which documented five separate Japanese surrender attempts, Stalin would not have been able to conquer Manchuria, enabling him to provide a safe haven to Communist Chinese forces.
Had Truman not cut off all U.S. military support to Chinese Nationalist forces from 1946-49, Communist China and North Korea (with whom we remain technically in a state of war due to the fact no peace treaty ending the Korean War was ever signed) would not exist today. China and Korea would be united and free, having fought as allies in our Cold (and sometimes ‘hot’) War against the Soviet Union and its Communist vassal state allies. Meanwhile, had the U.S. not provided such vast amounts of military industrial assistance to the Soviet Union helping them conquer or annex vast territories during and after the war, Russia might be considerably weaker today and might pose a significantly lower nuclear threat.
Certainly, the decision of U.S. leaders from President George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama to unilaterally disarm America of over 94 percent of its Cold War-era nuclear arsenal, while leaving its citizens largely defenseless against the existential threats of nuclear missile and Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack in the face of a massive nuclear buildup by our Sino-Russian alliance enemies, bodes ill for America’s future prospects. However, if the U.S. ends up fighting another major war against Russia and its Communist Chinese and North Korean allies in the near future, and goes down to defeat, an outcome which is more likely than not, future generations of Americans may recall that it was the decisions of two U.S. presidents -- Roosevelt and Truman — over 75 years ago, that sowed the seeds of America’s demise and helped ensure we would lose the war for our very national existence.