quote:

Originally posted by CuriousBob:

quote:

Originally posted by iperson:


Yup, so funny... You've got my attention Someone, fer ser.

Read this:

The Polish Air Force's Contribution
In July 1940, Hitler ordered his forces to invade Britain. As a prelude to the cross-Channel invasion, the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe) was to overpower Britain's air defenses. In the ensuing Air War between the German and Allied Air Forces, which lasted through the end of October 1940 and resulted in the defeat of the Luftwaffe, 1 in 8 of allied pilots was Polish, and the highest scoring squadron within the whole of Allied air forces was the Polish Air Force 303 (Kosciuszko) Squadron which accounted for 125 enemy planes. The highest scoring allied fighter pilot was also a member of that squadron. All told, the Polish pilots were responsible for 201 of the Luftwaffe's 1100 planes lost. It is said that the Battle of Britain was won by a narrow margin, and the contribution of the already combat experienced Polish pilots was decisive.

http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/web/history/WWII/britain/link.shtml

Don't you dismiss Polish pilots, buddy.

Why is it that the Polish people have that "dumb" reputation? This is a serious question by the way. Can iperson answer this one?

IPERSON, can you be so kind and answer this gentleman's question?

England never saved Poland!! i would hate to think where any of us would be today had we not had the allies that we had.... I for one am grateful for the sacrifices from so many. But it was a joint effort and i know that without each and everyones commitment were where we are today... I for one can say a big thank u to Poland included..... Watch a Bridge over Arnheim... and it just shows u what courage... so no .. not take credit.. but be accepted that it wasnt a single man and his dog alone out there....

ntfd: With all due respect, but given the fact that England doesn't have a government, how did it declare war and, as per your telling of events, go save Poland? For your information, there is no such thing as an English army...and neither does England have a navy nor an airforce.

I am pretty confident that you don't have an English passport either.

At the present time, Britain's Prime Minister isn't even English, having been born in Scotland (although he does represent an English district in the British Parliament). In a few months, as I understand it, the new British Prime Minister will not only have been born in Scotland, but will also represent a Scottish district in Parliament.

With all the Scots taking over, maybe England will simply become a region of Scotland?

Agree – in Czech language it is the same (we say like e.g. ˜Jedeme do Anglie.' – and we mean ˜We go to GB'.) . I know this might sound weird – this is just a bad habit. I always tried to say at least Britain or in shortcut GB because I am well aware that this land is composed by more than a just one nation but ... I think that because of our media the situation slightly changes towards the correct expression, e.g. GB.
This habit you probably might probably be comparable to saying ˜Easter Europe' – and you would include CR and Poland.
So, I believe, we all should be more careful because we do not want to hurt somebody else's feelings, do we?

quote:

Originally posted by Honey:
Hey, Hudson: there were many Czech pilots, you know?

The point was not which nationalities were in the RAF, but the how the RAF defended Great Britain. The organizational structure, the use of both new and old technology and the efficiency of delivering the proper amount of its extremely limited resources to counter the attack is why Great Britain won the battle. That was the point and the only point, Honey.

Honey and Iperson: Thank you for your comments. I agree that in many countries, the terms England and Britain are used interchangeably...and are generally understood to mean the same thing. It is similar to Holland being understood to refer to the Netherlands.

I would, however, expect the British and the Dutch to refer to their countries in the correct manner, regardless of the conventions in other countries.

It is my understanding that ntfd3 is BRITISH, and he has an obligation, not only to know better, but to use the correct terminology.

Iperson: Please ignore Hudson...that's the best thing for your sanity. He doesn't know what he's talking about (as you've already realized).

iperson. Great threads, loved reading them. Question for you though ur the historian obviously upon us, when i was in Germany I heard a lot of talk that a part of Germany was now Poland? Was it Poland then Germany then back to Poland, or was it Germany and Poland got a portion of it? I have no idea what portion, but I hope u can enlighten. : ) As for England, United Kingdom, Great Britian. Its all one and the same as those with any inkling of Geography and common sense knows. All perfectly correct terminologies. Thanks.

ntfd3: You are just too stupid for words. Contrary to your assertion, "England, United Kingdom, Great Britain" are NOT "all one and the same." In actual fact, each is quite different.

Anyone with anything more than a second-grade education at anything other than an English elementary school has more common sense and a better inkling of geography than you do, and knows that England is merely a constituent part of the United Kingdom. England and/or Britain and/or United Kingdom are NOT interchangeable terms, and all of your stupid statements to the contrary simply confirm that you're intellectually challenged.

quote:

Originally posted by iperson:
OMG, Honey tell me if I am seeing this correctly, or else my blood veins are going to start popping out immediately.

Are you Hudson saying that the Polish and Chech pilots in the battle of Britain were actually serving in RAF???
OMG OMG OMG!
This is this kind of ignorance I am talking about here all the time.
I hope you are going to correct this fast or else I'll put you on my ignore list from now on.

IP, this is not ignorance. It is historical fact. Let me give the squadron numbers which Polish pilots flew for the RAF during WWI:
* No. 300 "Masovia" Polish Bomber Squadron (Ziemi Mazowieckiej)
* No. 301 "Pomerania" Polish Bomber Squadron (Ziemi Pomorskiej)
* No. 302 "City of Poznań" Polish Fighter Squadron (Poznański)
* No. 303 "Kościuszko" Polish Fighter Squadron (Warszawski imienia Tadeusza Kościuszki)
* No. 304 "Silesia" Polish Bomber Squadron (Ziemi Śląskiej imienia Ksiecia Józefa Poniatowskiego)
* No. 305 "Greater Poland" Polish Bomber Squadron (Ziemi Wielkopolskiej imienia Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego)
* No. 306 "City of Toruń" Polish Fighter Squadron (Toruński)
* No. 307 "City of Lwów" Polish Fighter Squadron (Lwowskich Puchaczy)
* No. 308 "City of Kraków" Polish Fighter Squadron (Krakowski)
* No. 309 "Czerwień" Polish Fighter-Reconnaissance Squadron (Ziemi Czerwieńskiej)
* No. 315 "City of Dęblin" Polish Fighter Squadron (Dębliński)
* No. 316 "City of Warsaw" Polish Fighter Squadron (Warszawski)
* No. 317 "City of Wilno" Polish Fighter Squadron (Wileński)
* No. 318 "City of Gdańsk" Polish Fighter-Reconn aissance Squadron (Gdański)
* No. 663 Polish Artillery Observation Squadron
Source

Great pride is still honored amoung the senior Polish people who still remember and lived those days. However, your reaction shows something completely different.

quote:

Originally posted by iperson:
Ok, I feel I have to run a little history course here for you folks.
Because obviously people think Poland is not a country with its own identity.
Sadly, it is an outcome of history which tried to take our identity away but never succeeded.

Poland has its own identity, with its own distinct langauage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
Polish has NOTHING in common with the Russian language. Both langages have different roots. Its as if you were comparing German to English.

Poland was established as a state in year 966 after it took Christianity from the Chechs. Yes Honey, and thank you.
Then in the next seven centuries Poland had its own royal lines, its own Monarchs (Kings and Queens) in a few Royal Dynasties, one of the best known the Jagiellon Dynasty among others.

I mentioned previously that Poland was once a superpower in Europe and its true. Polish language back in 16th-17th century, for nearly 200 years was considered lingua franca, just like English today, one of the common official languages in the whole Europe.
In the 16th century Poland formed a Commonwealth with Lithuania. At its apogee, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth comprised some 400,000 square miles and a multi-ethnic population of 11 million, which lasted till 1791, almost two centuries.

Europe was so threatened by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that it had to invade Poland from all sides and take it apart into three parts. And thus so, over a hundred years there was no Poland on the maps of Europe.
The three occupants- Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary tried to assmiliate Polish people into their own by banishing polish language, first of all as well as culture and the government.

Poland gained its independance only in 1918 to be invaded all over again in 1939 and the rest you know, I hope.
Full indepedance was gained in 1989.
So over two hundred years of occupation, its been only 18 years since Poland is a sovereign country.

Poland battled other countries for centuries with many wonderful victories. Poland always had its own army, its own generals and officers.
So to say that Polish pilots were serving in Royal Air Force is a slap on the face.
Poland had and has its own army, its own generals, its own pilots and its own Air Force, Hudson, never surrendering.

This post and your second post has nothing to do with the Battle of Britain. But the fact was they were serving with the RAF and with great pride. This is historical fact. Why don't you talk to your Polish military about it. They will agree with me on this. I will later post some historical facts about the Yalta conference.

sun devil, thank u for ur great knowledge and ur desire to ram it down my throat. I as a british passport holder, actually states United Kingdom of Great Britian and actually born in ENGLAND, will use the terminology i am accostomed to as many of my countrymen will also do. Right or wrong, I dont think its an issue here. Rudeness must be really cheap where u come from, u seem to have stocked up well on it. Actually I can still laugh at ur remarks because contrary to Hudson and Iperson who are posting some very interesting facts, not a lot to do with immigration, and who might not agree with each other, but are still managing to keep this little debate extremely interesting reading, urs on the other hand is petty uninformative bs. If all u have to comment on is how one calls a country all acceptable by the way ... please feel free to attack my person verbally again, I really dont take it personal its actually starting to bore me. I wish you would post something informative and correct. And not misinformed and petty.

quote:

Originally posted by Hudson:

quote:

Originally posted by Honey:
Hey, Hudson: there were many Czech pilots, you know?

The point was not which nationalities were in the RAF, but the how the RAF defended Great Britain. The organizational structure, the use of both new and old technology and the efficiency of delivering the proper amount of its extremely limited resources to counter the attack is why Great Britain won the battle. That was the point and the only point, Honey.

Yes, but all different nations who fought in the RAF must not be neglected.

quote:

Originally posted by iperson:

quote:

The point was not which nationalities were in the RAF, but the how the RAF defended Great Britain.

OMG, Honey tell me if I am seeing this correctly, or else my blood veins are going to start popping out immediately.

Are you Hudson saying that the Polish and Chech pilots in the battle of Britain were actually serving in RAF???
OMG OMG OMG!
This is this kind of ignorance I am talking about here all the time.
I hope you are going to correct this fast or else I'll put you on my ignore list from now on.

Iperson, take it easy! Please, neglect some Hudsons' comments – he might be an educated guy or ... I think he graduated from Yale, right? Well, this is not a really bad school; I actually met some graduates who had a little knowledge (comparable to our High School) but still. Americans cannot put themselves in our shoes and that is one of the reasons why the rest of the World loves them so much.

iperson, why are you so happy about your country buying used fighter plaens?

They are brand new. I think it is a good trade and improves relationships between US and Polish governments. They could have gotten the MIG rubbish Russians trying to sell for a buck. It was a good defense investment on Poland's part, which is a country I think trying to adapt to the standards of the West as quick as possible after many years under Warsaw Pact.

quote:

Originally posted by iperson:
Ok, so according to you Hudson, the Polish pilots, among them the Kosciszko Squadron that took down the most enemy planes during the Battle of Britain, should be proud to have served for RAF?
Or should it be the other way? Great Britain should be proud that our Polish pilots helped to win the Air Battle? Well?

BOTH!

quote:

Honey, I'm cool. It's just irritating how people are demeaning my nation in all sorts of ways, as if Poland was a peasant country growing cabbage and didn't have literate people in it.
If only you read Polish Literature how beautiful it is and learned our history.

I have never bashed Poland. It is only when you start comparing Poland to the US or any other country that I have a big problem with. This includes blaming the West for Poland's past mistakes in history, not knowing the full extent of how the Battle of Britain was fought, stating the health care system of Poland is the best, or anything else. But it was always with that specific time period and nothing else.

If you want to know, I did have a Polish chemistry professor while in college. He was quite good and thorough.

quote:

Originally posted by iperson:
Hey Bushmaster, thanks for the picture.
Those are brand new F16s indeed.

Hudson, I have not compared the US and Poland. Quite on the contrary, I said many times you can't compare countries with each other because each and one of them bring different aspects to the table of our human kind.

About Yalta- nothing Hudson? I thought you'd start out by saying that Roosevelt was of ill health back then and Yalta was his last conference. No?
Shouldn't he have stepped down when he was ill?
Maybe if a young and healthy president went to Yalta and joined forces with Cherchil against Stalin, my country would have been in a different situation today.
If you read the Wiki's Yalta description, you will find out the elections were rigged. And you will read it was a plain betrayal.
Let's call things by the name.

What Happened at Yalta?



The invitation to give a talk at the Central European University while I am in Budapest was sprung upon me only a week ago by the American Embassy.
After a pause I thought I might as well talk of something about which there are so many legends both in the United States and in Europe, including Hungary. That is, this dreadful thing, Yalta, and the division of Europe. About this I will have a fair amount to say, necessarily briefly but, I hope, not superficially. I shall try to proceed from what it was that happened to when it happened, to how it happened, to why it happened.
The first legend that I - and you - must dismiss is that the division of Europe, particularly so far as Hungary was concerned, took place at Yalta in February 1945. At Yalta, the first item on President Roosevelt's agenda was to get the Soviet Union into the United Nations, about to be founded at a conference in San Francisco in April 1945. The idea of the United Nations, of a new and better edition of the League of Nations, which had been Woodrow Wilson's brainchild, was very high on Roosevelt's agenda. The first thing he wanted to achieve, which he thus achieved, was the entry of the Soviet Union into the United Nations. (At Stalin's request, because of the contribution of the Soviet Union to the war, the Ukraine and White Russia would also be granted individual membership to the United Nations.)
The second important matter was to convince Stalin to enter the war against Japan. Japan and the Soviet Union were not at war; they had concluded a nonaggression treaty. Roosevelt and Stalin agreed that Russia would enter the war against Japan three months after the end of the war against Germany. Stalin kept his promise to the word: he went to war with Japan three months after the German surrender. That was very important to Roosevelt, for two reasons. One: there was as yet no American atom bomb, nor was one surely in sight. Nobody knew whether an atom bomb would be perfected and contribute to the defeat of Japan. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 1945 thought that the invasion of Japan might cost as many as 600,000 American lives. In exchange for his promise Stalin got back just about everything that Tsarist Russia had lost in 1904-1905 in the Russo-Japanese war. Roosevelt, rapidly aging and ill, was satisfied with this. Of lesser priority, though occupying much time during the conference, was Churchill's desperate hope to save something for Poland. Poland occupied a large part of the British agenda. (Roosevelt was somewhat bored with the subject.) Some small compromises were made about the composition of a future Polish government. Churchill achieved one thing at the conference - understand that his powers were very limited - this was the inclusion of France as one of the five great powers. He was already looking at the balance of power in Europe at that time, in giving France an occupation zone in Germany. This he was able to achieve, despite Roosevelt's and Stalin's distaste for it.
Last on the Yalta agenda, both in sequence and in order of importance, was the so-called Declaration of Liberation of Europe. This, about which I'll have something to say a little later, is what we, Hungarians, regard as the most important matter. Unfortunately it was very far from that.
Such is a very imperfect summing up of what was discussed at Yalta. Understand that, with the exception of Poland, there was nearly nothing said about anything in Eastern Europe. There was not a word said about Hungary at Yalta.
What is more interesting is that not much was said about Germany either, in spite of the fact that the war was coming to a close. The Russian, American and British armies had already entered Germany. It was evident that the rather senseless Morgenthau Plan, which Roosevelt had accepted in August-September, 1944, was already about to be abandoned. More important: the zoning of Germany, which amounted to the division of Germany, and thus to the division of Europe, had been accepted by the three Great Powers well before Yalta.

This is what happened, and when it happened. And that when is very important. Consider that the Yalta documents were signed and the conference disbanded on the very days Buda fell, 11-13 February in 1945. Consider that not only Hungary but almost all of Eastern Europe was already overrun by the Russian armies. No matter how Churchill tried to do something about Poland, by February 1945 almost all of Poland was occupied by Russian armies. Yalta, in essence, had little to do with the division of Europe - the division of Europe was an accomplished fact by February 1945.
To this I must add that the two principal personages at the Yalta conference were Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill's reputation was still very high. He enjoyed considerable prestige; but prestige and power, though intimately related, are not the same things. There has to be a certain balance between prestige and power. By 1945 the British contribution to the war had become limited. Three-fourths of the armies involved in the war against Germany in the West were American, only one-fourth British - not to speak of the fact that Britain was weary and financially impoverished. We have seen that there was an actual division, a geographical partition of the Far East between Russia and America in which Churchill played no part. And if we can speak of a division of Europe at all, that occured mostly (though not entirely) between America and Russia, between Roosevelt and Stalin. That division of Europe was achieved not only symbolically but militarily in April 1945, five days before Hitler's suicide (and thirteen days after Roosevelt's death). Even before the surrender of Germany, in the middle of Germany, on the Elbe River near Torgau, only about 30 miles from Wittenberg, where Luther had started the Reformation, American and Russian troops met in the middle of Europe. Among these American and Russian troops that met in a friendly celebration on the 25th of April 1945, there must have been some Americans who had come from the Pacific shores of the United States; and there probably were some Russians who had come from the Russian Far East. They had come all the way across two thirds of the globe to meet in the middle of Germany, and of Europe, as the division of Europe was becoming accomplished.
At that time Churchill was the only statesman who worried about the Russians, and who attempted to correct this division of Europe after President Roosevelt had died. Churchill was aware of something of which Stalin was also aware (of which most Americans and many intellectuals are still not aware): that the question was not Communism or Democracy; that that was but a consequence of whose armies would stand where and when. Meanwhile the collapse of Germany took place so rapidly that when Germany surrendered in May 1945, British and American troops actually stood within what later became, or what was already agreed upon, as the Russian zone of Germany. Another legend is the notion that in 1944 Churchill wanted a Balkan invasion to anticipate the Russians in Eastern Europe. There is some truth in it, but not enough. He wanted to save Greece, which he was able to do. Another legend, that Churchill wanted to get into Berlin and Vienna and Prague to precede the Russians, is also only partly correct. The main opposition to that came from President Roosevelt and, later, from the American military. Churchill tried, especially for the sake of Poland, to convince the otherwise very able and brave new President Harry Truman not to withdraw the American and British troops to the zonal boundaries, unless the Russians were to make some concessions. But this was in May and June; the Americans did not agree; and perhaps it would not have been very useful even if they had.

Now I come to the main thread of my short talk - that Yalta and the division of Europe were two things. The division of Europe had already taken place before Yalta - in some cases, more than a year before Yalta. It went through two or three stages. The first was an agreement between the Americans, British and Russians, actually accomplished by a commission of relatively low rank, the European Advisory Commission in 1944 - not by prime ministers and not by foreign ministers but by commissions and diplomats beneath them. I refer to their agreement about the zoning of Germany. As early as in the Spring of 1944, the commission decided that Germany would be divided into three zones, an American zone, a British zone and a Russian zone (as noted, the French were not included at that stage). Berlin in the middle would be occupied symbolically by all three powers. There was a historic precedent to this - and the Russians accepted it. For this was how the Allied Powers had decided to occupy France after Waterloo: temporarily occupied by Prussian, Russian, British and Austrian troops. The then 18 arrondissements of Paris divided into four, with a rotating governor of the city. In 1915 the Allies planned much the same for Constantinople. Now, in 1944, they came back to this. They regarded this military division of Germany as temporary. However, as a clever Frenchman once said many hundreds of years ago, so much that is temporary tends to become permanent. One interesting thing about the European Advisory Commission in 1944 is that the Russians asked the Americans to occupy a larger portion of Germany. President Roosevelt was much worried about American isolationist sentiment, about keeping American troops in Europe for an extended time instead, only as long as was absolutely necessary. The British asked the Americans to take a larger zone in Germany; so did the Russians! Thus this zoning of Germany was agreed upon even before the invasion of Western Europe by the Western Allies in June 1944. This is very telling since well before June 1944 who could tell where the different armies would meet? It was conceivable that the Russians and the British and the Americans would meet somewhere along the Rhine. What is interesting is that (also before Yalta) the European Advisory Commission also agreed on the division of Austria. The zoning of Austria was along the same lines. There would be a Russian, an American and a British (and eventually a French) zone. Vienna would be occupied by the four powers. The Russian zone of Austria was not large, only two of the eight provinces of Austria. As you know, in Germany, unlike in Austria, these zones eventually hardened into permanence. That was the beginning and, in some ways, the completion of the division of Europe, many months before Yalta.
Another matter about which there are legends was the Percentages Agreement by Churchill and Stalin in October 1944. Again this preceded Yalta by about four months. Churchill had indeed earlier tried to convince the Americans to extend the American and British campaign in Italy so that towards the end of the war British and American troops would enter Slovenia and Croatia, and perhaps even a portion of Western Hungary, moving towards Vienna. By October 1944 he knew that this was impossible. So he wanted to save what was possible. That is why he went to Moscow. (Again it was a tragic Hungarian coincidence that this occurred when the Hungarian attempt to conclude a separate armistice collapsed in October 1944.) Churchill and Stalin agreed that Greece would be in the British, and not in the Russian zone of influence - this despite the fact that Greece and Yugoslavia were the only Balkan countries where there was a very strong Communist underground. It is telling that at Yalta Stalin congratulated Churchill on his success - that is, on the suppression of the Communists in Greece. When anything was brought up at or after Yalta about Poland, Stalin retorted that he kept his word about Greece. He understood something that Churchill understood, but, alas, many people did not, then or later! This was that the issue was not Communism, it was whose armies would be where at the end of the war. Stalin knew that. The Declaration of Liberated Europe consisted of a few words. He knew that they meant little. He was not interfering with anything that happened in the West; "they" would not interfere with anything happening in the East. Sometime later he actually said to a visiting Yugoslav politician: what is ours is ours, what is theirs is theirs. This was much in accord with traditional Russian statecraft. That was how he understood the division of Europe. He knew that the Western allies had some reason to be suspicious, especially about Poland. But Stalin was suspicious, too, soon after Yalta. He had a few reasons: in Italy the American secret services had begun to negotiate with a German SS general about a German surrender in Northern Italy, without telling the Russians much about it. I repeat, "What is ours is ours, what is theirs is theirs." This is how Stalin understood the division of Europe.

The British understood this perhaps better than the Americans; but they thought they had no power to do much, if anything about it. If there was any kind of an American idea (and there was, not among the military who were very pro-Russian at that time, but among the more intelligent people in the State Department), it was the hope that the Declaration of Liberation of Europe meant that throughout Europe, including the part of Europe occupied by the Russians, and thus Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, there would be obviously pro-Russian governments but not fully Communist ones. That this was not an impossible proposition is shown by the case of Finland. Finland fell within the Russian sphere of Europe; but Stalin, for complicated reasons into which I shall not go, permitted a Finland that was pro-Russian in its foreign policy but not Communist. If the Western powers, and especially the United States, had been more direct and precise about interpreting that vague Declaration of Liberation of Europe, this Finnish example could have perhaps been applied - not everywhere, but here and there - in Eastern Europe. This did not happen. What happened, I repeat, is that by the time of Yalta the division of Europe was an accomplished fact.
Churchill foresaw this even before Russia entered the war, before Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. He saw only two alternatives. Either all of Europe would be ruled by Germany, or the eastern part of Europe would be ruled by Russia, and to lose half of Europe - from the British point of view, the far side of Europe - was better than to lose it all. To this I would add that throughout his life Churchill had nothing but contempt for communism. This does not belong within the scope of my talk, but he also foresaw - amazingly - that communism in Eastern Europe would not last long. In November 1944, General de Gaulle said to him that the Americans are inexperienced, look what the Americans are doing, they are letting half of Europe go to the Russians. Churchill answered, yes, you are right. Russia is now like a hungry wolf amidst a flock of sheep. But after the meal comes the problem of digestion. Churchill foresaw that the Russians would not be able to digest Eastern Europe.
But this is not the principal argument of my talk, which is that the division of Europe preceded Yalta. It continued after Yalta. The Second World War was followed by the so-called Cold War, which ended in 1989. A great many people still understand the Cold War as the struggle between communism and capitalism, or totalitarianism against freedom. Not really: the Cold War was between, principally, the United States and Russia. I have often thought that the Cold War as such developed because of a mutual, a reciprocal misunderstanding. Having seen how Stalin established his power in Eastern Europe (which he thought he had to, as he knew the Communists were the only people who would serve him without reservations), many people thought that the Red tide, whatever that was, would now spread into Western Germany, Italy and France, and that after the victory of Communism in Eastern Europe, Communism would spread into Western Europe; that Stalin wanted to conquer Western Europe - which was not the case. Stalin thought: with this Declaration of Liberation of Europe the Americans let me have Eastern Europe.
Now they are beginning to make noises about politicians, democrats, cardinals, so forth; they are sending agents into Eastern Europe; the Americans, who won the war easily, who possess the atom bomb, who rule Western and Southern Europe, are now beginning to challenge Russia in Eastern Europe - which also was not the case. But such is history, such are the misunderstandings between great powers - misconceptions of reality which are essentially not very different from the misunderstandings and misconceptions that exist between people in all walks of life.
These are not speculations: what happened was very important; and so was when it happened; why it happened; how it happened. Once in a while I disappoint my fellow historians because of my conviction that history consists of words, not of facts - of words in the sense that there is no fact that can be separated from the wording of it. So if we say - and this is a question of words - that Churchill and Roosevelt handed Eastern Europe to Stalin on a platter, there is some truth in such a phrase but not enough. If we say Roosevelt and Churchill allowed Stalin to have a free hand in Eastern Europe, there is more truth in it, but still not quite enough, because "allowed" isn't quite right either. Is it true that among other things Yalta meant the division of Europe, or that it crystallised it? There is some truth there. But allow me not to amuse you but to conclude with something that is my conviction, concerning more than Yalta, but life, human nature, the world we live in. There was an old Irish woman whose neighbours gathered for tea and asked her, "Is this true about the young widow at the end of the village?" And she said, "It's not true, but it's true enough." I have often told my students that the historian should approach matters in the opposite way: there are many things in history that may be true but they are not true enough. And the claim that Yalta sealed the division of Europe.
http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no179/4.html

Know Thy AlliesWhat Bush got wrong about Yalta.
By David Greenberg
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005, at 1:23 PM ET

Click image to expand.Wartime's strange bedfellows
After World War I, the political right in Germany developed a myth called the "stab in the back" theory to explain its people's defeat. Though military leaders had helped negotiate the war's end, they fixed blame on civilian leaders"”especially Jews, socialists, and liberals"”for "betraying" the brave German fighting men. This nasty piece of propaganda was later picked up by Hitler and the Nazis to stoke the populist resentment that fueled their rise to power.

America has had its own "stab in the back" myths. Last year, George W. Bush endorsed a revanchist view of the Vietnam War: that our political leaders undermined our military and denied us victory. Now, on his Baltic tour, he has endorsed a similar view of the Yalta accords, that great bugaboo of the old right.

Bush stopped short of accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill of outright perfidy, but his words recalled those of hardcore FDR- and Truman-haters circa 1945. "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
Click Here!

Bush's cavalier invocations of history for political purposes are not surprising. But for an American president to dredge up ugly old canards about Yalta stretches the boundaries of decency and should draw reprimands (and not only from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.).

As every schoolchild should know, Roosevelt and Churchill had formed an alliance of necessity with Josef Stalin during World War II. Hardly blind to Stalin's evil, they nonetheless knew that Soviet forces were indispensable in defeating the Axis powers. "It is permitted in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge," FDR said, quoting an old Bulgarian proverb. He and Churchill understood that Stalin would be helping to set war aims and to plan for its aftermath. Victory, after all, carried a price.

In February 1945, the "Big Three" met at a czarist resort near Yalta, in the Soviet Crimea, to continue the work begun at other summits, notably in Tehran in 1943. (Many of the alleged "betrayals" of Yalta, at least in rough form, were actually first sketched out in Tehran.) By this time, Soviet troops had conquered much of Eastern Europe from the Germans, including Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, East Prussia, and Eastern Germany. The Western allies, meanwhile, remained on the far side of the Rhine River. Having made terrible military sacrifices to gain these positions, Stalin resolved to convert them into political payoffs.

Many of the agreements the Big Three reached at Yalta were relatively uncontroversial: The Allies decided to demand unconditional surrender from Germany, to carve up the country into four zones for its postwar occupation, and to proceed with plans to set up the United Nations.

But other issues were contentious. Asia was one. FDR wanted Stalin to enter the war against Japan, so as to obviate any need for an American invasion. In return, Stalin demanded that Russia regain dominion over various lands, notably Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, then under Japanese control. He forswore any designs on Manchuria, which would be returned to China.

By far the knottiest problem"”and the source of lingering rage among the far right afterwards"”was the fate of Poland and other liberated Eastern European countries. Over several months, the Allies had been divvying up Europe according to on-the-ground military realities and their own individual national interests. The United States and Britain had denied Stalin any role in postwar Italy. Churchill and Stalin had agreed (without Roosevelt's participation) that Britain would essentially control Greece, and Russia would essentially control Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

Poland was another matter. In Lublin, Poland, the Soviets had set up a government of pro-Communist Poles. Back in London, however, a pro-Western group claimed to be the true government-in-exile. Throughout the war, Stalin had acted with customary barbarity in seeking an advantage. In 1940 he ordered the slaughter of thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, fearing their potential allegiance to the London Poles. In 1944, he stalled his own army's march into Poland to let the Germans put down the Warsaw Uprising, again to strengthen the Communists' hand.

At Yalta, Stalin wanted FDR and Churchill to recognize the Lublin government. They refused. Instead, all agreed to accept a provisional government, with a pledge to hold "free and unfettered elections" soon. For other liberated European countries, the Big Three also pledged to establish "interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population" and committed to free elections.

Roosevelt knew that Stalin might renege, and it was perhaps cynical for him to trumpet elections that might never take place. But as the historian David M. Kennedy has written, he had little choice, "unless Roosevelt was prepared to order Eisenhower to fight his way across the breadth of Germany, take on the Red Army, and drive it out of Poland at gunpoint."

Stalin, of course, never allowed elections in Poland or anywhere else. "Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified," Churchill wrote. "Still, they were the only ones possible at the time." Short of starting a hot war, the West was powerless to intervene, just as it was in Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968.

Because FDR kept many details of the Yalta agreements under wraps, people in Washington began whispering conspiratorially about "secret agreements." Soon, critics, especially on the far right, were charging that FDR and Churchill had sold out the people of Eastern Europe"”charges that Bush's recent comments echo. They asserted that the ailing Roosevelt"”he would die only weeks later"”had come under the malign influence of pro-Communist advisers who gave Stalin the store.

But Yalta did not give Stalin control of the Eastern European countries. He was already there. Moreover, as Lloyd C. Gardner has argued, it's possible that postwar Europe could have turned out worse than it did. For all its evident failings, Yalta did lead to a revived Western Europe, a lessening of open warfare on the continent, and, notwithstanding Bush's remarks, relative stability. Without Yalta, Gardner notes, "the uneasy equilibrium of the Cold War might have deteriorated into something much worse"”a series of civil wars or possibly an even darker Orwellian condition of localized wars along an uncertain border." Such "what if" games are generally pointless, but they can remind us that the harmonious Europe that Yalta's critics tout as a counter-scenario wasn't the only alternative to the superpower standoff.

Along with the myth of FDR's treachery in leading America into war, the "stab in the back" interpretation of Yalta became a cudgel with which the old right and their McCarthyite heirs tried to discredit a president they had long despised. Renouncing Yalta even became a plank in the 1952 Republican platform, although Eisenhower did not support it. In time, however, these hoary myths receded into the shadows, dimly remembered except as a historical curiosity, where, alas, they should have remained undisturbed.
http://www.slate.com/id/2118394/

wo Yalta Myths

By Alger Hiss

From The Nation, Jan. 23, 1982

There are two myths about Yalta. The first, propagated by Franklin Roosevelt's early cold-warrior critics, suggested that an ailing President had "sold out" Poland and Eastern Europe by yielding to Joseph Stalin's demands. Now, in the wake of the Polish crisis, this first myth is being turned on its head. Liberal pundits, notably Robert Kleiman, a member of The New York Times editorial board, and Flora Lewis, a columnist for the same paper, have correctly observed that no agreement on spheres of influence was reached at Yalta in February 1945. But they dispel this first "myth of Yalta" in a manner that casts doubt on the de facto recognition of spheres of influence by the United States and the Soviet Union that has emerged since the war. The new myth is a very dangerous one in an age of first-strike nuclear weaponry.

On January 7, a signed piece by Kleiman appeared on the editorial page of The Times under the headline "Once More the Yalta Myth." Kleiman attacked the negative attitudes of some Europeans, especially West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, toward Western sanctions against the martial law regime in Poland. Kleiman correctly blamed Roosevelt's political enemies for starting the myth that he "sold out" Poland: "A generation ago, conservative Republicans spread it widely because they found it a useful way to discredit the Democrats among voters of East European origin." But he concluded that "East Europe's rights were indeed the issue at Yalta, but the West did not abandon them there." The implication is that Western intervention in contemporary Poland is permissible because no agreement on spheres of influence was reached at Yalta. Only in passing did Kleiman mention, "By the time of Yalta, Stalin's armies controlled most of Eastern Europe. The quarrels in the West, then and since, have turned more on what to say than what to do about that." How true.

The first myth about Yalta was concocted to denigrate Roosevelt's terms for postwar peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union (including the establishment of the United Nations, the plans for which were drawn up at the conference - one of its major achievements). The new myth, ironically put forth in the month of Roosevelt's birth 100 years ago, also tends to disparage policies of acceptance and caution. While it is true that no agreement on spheres of influence was reached at Yalta, since the war the United States and the Soviet Union have recognized a de facto line in Europe separating the East from the West. If either power should breach this line militarily, the other would regard this action as a casus belli. To cast doubt now on the validity of this tacit agreement is to ignore history. By word and deed, each superpower has repeatedly recognized the other's sphere briefly: the 1948 Berlin airlift; the U.S. decision to end deNazification policies in occupied West Germany in the early 1950s; the recognition of East Germany by Western powers in the early 1970s; and the West's nonintervention in the internal upheavals in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1967 and Poland in 1970 and 1976.

The facts about what happened at Yalta have long been available in official documents, statements of participants in the conference and books by objective scholars. Poland was not Roosevelt's to give away. By the time of the Yalta conference, Russian troops had pushed the Nazis out of most of Poland, and in a matter of weeks they had occupied the entire country. (They also occupied the Balkan nations.)

The Yalta agreements were concluded soon after the near breakthrough by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. In addition, at that time the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were in no position to take a successful completion of the atomic bomb project for granted, believed that unless the Russians agreed to declare war on Japan after Germany's defeat (as they subsequently did), the United States would suffer a million casualties or more in an invasion of Japan. In short, the Joint Chiefs opposed a diplomatic confrontation with the Soviet Union at Yalta. Agreement among the Allies was a military necessity. And when an agreement was reached, it was widely hailed by the press (including such conservative Republicans as Henry Luce) and the general public as a diplomatic triumph.

Just before the American delegation, of which I was a member, left Yalta, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was standing with Gen. George C. Marshall outside our villa. Stettinius turned to Marshall, who had rarely left his desk in Washington during the war years, and said, "General, I assume you are very eager to get back to your desk." Marshall answered, "Ed, for what we have got here, I would have stayed a month."

That was the mood of the participants at Yalta. And I have no doubt today that we got as much as circumstances permitted.

Yet the myth that Roosevelt sold out Poland, widely disseminated by many Republicans at the same time that Joe McCarthy was exploiting the Communists-in-government issue, drew support from all manner of conservatives, including rank reactionaries, who joined lustily in the anti-Yalta chorus. Mounting Cold War sentiment made it difficult for accurate accounts of the Yalta agreements to counter the myth, with the result that many, perhaps most, otherwise well-informed Americans have until quite recently regarded Yalta as a dirty word.

Now the new Yalta myth could serve a similar purpose in the hands of those seeking to revive the Cold War. Acceptance of this myth will make it all the more difficult to develop imaginative, effective policies designed to prevent a global confrontation of dangerous dimensions.
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/yalta.html

IP,
What you are stating is exactly what Pres Bush stated in October 2005 in a speech in the Baltics. And considering you have no respect for the man, I consider that irony in my book.

BTW: I stated I am busy now becase of tax season.