World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West

I loved this book, which is a page-turner from which I learned much. It is about the horrors that Stalin perpetrated during the war, such as the Katyn massacre and the relocation of the Crimean Tatars, and Churchill and Roosevelt's willingness to not notice them. Rees portrays Churchill and Roosevelt, after their meetings with Stalin, as being genuinely impressed with Stalin as a person, and as not even thinking about the fact that they have just been conversing with history's greatest mass murderer. (After all, after Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin became THEIR mass murderer.) Stalin comes across as cleverer than Churchill or Roosevelt in his ability to dupe them. Rees' overall point is to condemn Churchill and Roosevelt for allowing Stalin to take over Eastern Europe after the war. By the way, the word "Nazis" in the subtitle is misleading, because the book has little about them.

We know the criminal records of Hitler and Stalin, two of the worst evildoers in history. But we have known relatively little about the very mixed record of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, our supposed glorious heroes, when it came to the prosecution of World War II. Laurence Rees has given us a very readable account of the behind-the-scenes bargaining and machinations of allied leaders, interspersed with memories of ordinary Soviet, Polish, and other participants in the war. Churchill, despite his disastrous advocacy of the Gallipoli disaster in WWI apparently had learned nothing about how to conduct a successful incursion on enemy coastlines when he advocated the invasion of Italy by allied troops. This tied down troops in a terrain not suited for swift victorious action and postponed the Normandy landings for a long time. Churchill also had been one of the most anti-Bolshevik leaders in the early 20th Century; he had urged the allied intervention against the Bolshevik regime and mistrusted the Soviets all through his career. Yet as Prime Minister during WWII he was willing to betray the Poles who valiantly fought the Nazis and the Soviets, to rearrange their borders without their consent or participation, to yield up most of eastern Europe to Stalin without getting anything in return. He thought he could "handle" Stalin. Roosevelt had a Wilsonian vision of a world assembly of nations, the UN, and this vision -- delusion might be more accurate -- took first place in his thinking, causing him as with Churchill to betray the Poles and other peoples of eastern Europe, since he also thought he could "handle" Stalin. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were happy enough to see the war drag on as Soviet deaths reached unbelievable numbers while allied deaths were very modest in comparison. Let the Russians die for the West! Had they arrived at this conclusion earlier they might have let Stalin and Hitler fight it out from the beginning without getting into the war at all. Arrogance, chauvinism, unrealistic expectations, and sheer self-interest were characteristic of Roosevelt and Churchill as much as of Stalin. He outsmarted them because he was better at "handling" them than they were at dealing with him. He was also never weakened by sentimentality and personal feeling. The allied role in the European war was not very glorious. The Soviets won the war because they were even more ruthless than Hitler and the West could only look on with fascinated horror and incredulity. And if the allied leaders could so coldly betray the Poles little wonder, then, that they did nothing to help the Jews targeted for extermination by the Nazis. If they could pretend that the Katyn massacres of Polish officers were not a Soviet crime, they could pretend that Auschwitz was none of their business as well. As we assess our leaders since WWII in the various military struggles of our nation -- Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan -- we should remember wha

To some reviewers who appear to think that Poland was doomed right from the start, let me reveal to them a common fact that Hitler in his high risk madness left a mere 8 second rate Divisions in Germany in Sep. 1939 to defend it against any French/English attack. Meanwhile France and England combined had over 100 Divisions between them. In other words if France/England merely did what they signed to - they would have conquered Germany in a few days. 100 Divisions vs 8, hmm I see a blowout. Still because the French/English leaders were pathetically weak, Poland then had to tolerate 45 years of Commie rule after the Nazis were disposed of.