Why didn't Churchill help Tito fight the Nazis?

[AlaCowboy]

Dec 28, 2017 22:04:06 GMT -5 oujour76 said:

Dec 28, 2017 17:16:19 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

Alexander Werth specifically mentioned the relative scarcity of American made Jeeps and other vehicles at Stalingrad. ::Sigh:: As already noted, not referring strictly to Stalingrad.

And the Red Army fought with T34 Soviet tanks, not American Sherman tanks. Primarily, yes but the U.S. provided about 2,000 Sherman Tanks to the Russians during the war. My guess is the Russians actually used them.

As for Churchill, I have always admired the man--except for his disparaging attitude toward the working class, and toward colonials and those who were not Anglo- Saxons. I'm all for looking at the totality of someone's life, but you're too one sided for my taste. You call Gandhi one of the greatest men who ever lived and totally ignore his racist past along with sleeping in the nude with 12-year old girls.

The United States dismantled two working steel mills and sent them to Russia, along with an assembly crew and American steelworkers to train the Soviets. Two major lumber mills were also sent to Russia to help their war effort.

[oujour76]

Dec 29, 2017 12:03:47 GMT -5 Walter said:

Dec 28, 2017 15:17:10 GMT -5 oujour76 said:

I'm going to lionize him. I was watching a program last night about Prohibition and all the ways it was gotten around by various methods of smuggling. One of them was a fleet of rum-runners from The Bahamas, an English colony. The US complained to England, but Churchill refused to intervene, saying that prohibition was, "an affront to the whole history of mankind."

My hero!

LOL...warts and all Churchill is still one of my favorites.

[oujour76]

Dec 29, 2017 12:21:46 GMT -5 AlaCowboy said:

Dec 28, 2017 22:04:06 GMT -5 oujour76 said:

The United States dismantled two working steel mills and sent them to Russia, along with an assembly crew and American steelworkers to train the Soviets. Two major lumber mills were also sent to Russia to help their war effort.

But, other than providing factories, planes, tanks, jeeps, transport vehicles and food what else you got?

[Deleted]

Dec 29, 2017 12:03:47 GMT -5 Walter said:

Dec 28, 2017 15:17:10 GMT -5 oujour76 said:

I'm going to lionize him. I was watching a program last night about Prohibition and all the ways it was gotten around by various methods of smuggling. One of them was a fleet of rum-runners from The Bahamas, an English colony. The US complained to England, but Churchill refused to intervene, saying that prohibition was, "an affront to the whole history of mankind."

My hero!

Churchill was always a heavy drinker-- probably partly as a self-administered medication for his bipolar disorder.

He often started his day with a scotch.

One of my favorite Churchill-isms is, "I'm not rich, but there has never been a day in my life when I couldn't afford to share a bottle of champagne with a friend."

Amen.

[vindex]

The question posed by this thread is extraordinarily ill-informed, as Churchill DID pick Tito's Partisans over the Serbian monarchist Chetniks over deciding over a two - year period from 1941 to 1943 that the Partisans were giving better value in disrupting Nazi Germany's occupation of Yugoslavia. The arrangement was formalized in a meeting between Churchill and Tito in Naples in later 1943 after Allied forces had landed in Italy and taken the city. By then the British had sent numerous airdrops of supplies to the Partisans, as well as a number of SOS forces missions which on at least one occasion included his own son, Randolph Churchill. Allied air forces also dropped a fair amount of bombs on the country, but as the Slovenian Communist and Tito aide Edvard Kardelj lamented after the war, the bombing raids inflicted far more harm on the civilian population than on the German forces which were well-equipped but not all that terribly numerous. The Nazis did, to be sure, have assistance from the Italian military (until 1943), the Bulgarian military (till 1944) and the forces of the satellite State of Croatia, ruled by the "Poglavnik" I.e. Leader Ante Pavelic and his truly vicious Ustace militia.

Early in the 1990s, Churchill's assistance to Tito was attacked by a British historian who wrote a book titled The Rape of Serbia in which the author denounced Churchill for having chosen to support the Partisans over the Chetniks, claiming that Communists inside British Intelligence - of which there were certainly a number, consider Kim Philby and his little circle - had distorted reports from behind enemy lines to credit the Partisans with actions which had been performed by the Chetniks. But it is also fair to point out that The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic (who was executed by Tito's government after the war) did refrain from initiating guerilla actions on occasions when it was clear that such activity would provoke major German reprisals against the Serbian populace. Tito and the Partisans by contrast had NO such reluctance. Nazi German retaliation was indeed overwhelming and lethal. The country did liberate itself without assistance from Allied armies, but was in a horrendous state when the war finally ended. Not being installed into power by the Red Army marked Tito as a potential rebel in Stalin's eyes, and the break between the two was not very long in coming.

The overall issue of power politics among Churchill, FDR, and Stalin with regard to a second front is worthy of a separate thread in itself. Stalin wanted a cross-channel invasion as early as 1942 which was patently ridiculous in view of the state of the American military in December 1941. I have read that it was doable before the end of 1943, but would have required total concentration of American and British military and naval strengths. We did have this "minor" issue of a Pacific War in progress against Imperial Japan, whose attack had triggered our entry into the conflict to begin with. Ceasing all activity against the Japanese would have been a political impossibility in the United States and rightfully so. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the effort against Nazi Germany would have priority over Japan, but not to the exclusion of the effort against Japan. One may question why Operation Overlord got put off to the middle of 1944 instead of its beginning but there were also serious weather issues involved in executing an amphibious invasion of that immense scale across a body of water whose normal conditions are about as different from those in the well-named Pacific as one can imagine.

It is true that Americans pay FAR too little heed to the magnitude of the Soviet effort and sacrifice which led to the fall of the Third Reich. It is ALSO true that Russians pay even LESS heed to the fact that Stalin was Hitler's Great Enabler for both setting off WW2 (via the Nazi-Soviet Pact) and his first two years' prosecution of it. In this they have been consistently lied to and misled by three generations of Communist and now Putinist hacks masquerading as historians. Yes, Putin has settled on the Soviet victory in 1945 as a distant but ultimate source of legitimacy for his own regime. Like his orange-haired stepchild in the White House, he loves the "poorly educated" and wants to keep them as close to that condition as possible. One is very unlikely to hear or read anything in today's Russia about the massive material assistance provide to Hitler's Germany from 1939 to June 1941 when Britain stood alone against a Nazi-occupied Europe. Considering the scale of it, Churchill was actually rather forgiving of the Soviets' perfidy, but he was above all a realist who assessed Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to Western civilization then in existence, and was more than willing to put his own anti-Communist past aside to make common cause with Stalin and the USSR in fighting it. As he humorously remarked in Parliament, "If Hitler were to invade hell, I should at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Then too, as he began to work in the late 1940s on his own war memoirs when he was out of office, " History will be very kind to me, for I intend to write it."
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs

[AlaCowboy]

Jan 13, 2018 16:06:19 GMT -5 vindex said:

The question posed by this thread is extraordinarily ill-informed, as Churchill DID pick Tito's Partisans over the Serbian monarchist Chetniks over deciding over a two - year period from 1941 to 1943 that the Partisans were giving better value in disrupting Nazi Germany's occupation of Yugoslavia. The arrangement was formalized in a meeting between Churchill and Tito in Naples in later 1943 after Allied forces had landed in Italy and taken the city. By then the British had sent numerous airdrops of supplies to the Partisans, as well as a number of SOS forces missions which on at least one occasion included his own son, Randolph Churchill. Allied air forces also dropped a fair amount of bombs on the country, but as the Slovenian Communist and Tito aide Edvard Kardelj lamented after the war, the bombing raids inflicted far more harm on the civilian population than on the German forces which were well-equipped but not all that terribly numerous. The Nazis did, to be sure, have assistance from the Italian military (until 1943), the Bulgarian military (till 1944) and the forces of the satellite State of Croatia, ruled by the "Poglavnik" I.e. Leader Ante Pavelic and his truly vicious Ustace militia.

Early in the 1990s, Churchill's assistance to Tito was attacked by a British historian who wrote a book titled The Rape of Serbia in which the author denounced Churchill for having chosen to support the Partisans over the Chetniks, claiming that Communists inside British Intelligence - of which there were certainly a number, consider Kim Philby and his little circle - had distorted reports from behind enemy lines to credit the Partisans with actions which had been performed by the Chetniks. But it is also fair to point out that The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic (who was executed by Tito's government after the war) did refrain from initiating guerilla actions on occasions when it was clear that such activity would provoke major German reprisals against the Serbian populace. Tito and the Partisans by contrast had NO such reluctance. Nazi German retaliation was indeed overwhelming and lethal. The country did liberate itself without assistance from Allied armies, but was in a horrendous state when the war finally ended. Not being installed into power by the Red Army marked Tito as a potential rebel in Stalin's eyes, and the break between the two was not very long in coming.

The overall issue of power politics among Churchill, FDR, and Stalin with regard to a second front is worthy of a separate thread in itself. Stalin wanted a cross-channel invasion as early as 1942 which was patently ridiculous in view of the state of the American military in December 1941. I have read that it was doable before the end of 1943, but would have required total concentration of American and British military and naval strengths. We did have this "minor" issue of a Pacific War in progress against Imperial Japan, whose attack had triggered our entry into the conflict to begin with. Ceasing all activity against the Japanese would have been a political impossibility in the United States and rightfully so. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the effort against Nazi Germany would have priority over Japan, but not to the exclusion of the effort against Japan. One may question why Operation Overlord got put off to the middle of 1944 instead of its beginning but there were also serious weather issues involved in executing an amphibious invasion of that immense scale across a body of water whose normal conditions are about as different from those in the well-named Pacific as one can imagine.

It is true that Americans pay FAR too little heed to the magnitude of the Soviet effort and sacrifice which led to the fall of the Third Reich. It is ALSO true that Russians pay even LESS heed to the fact that Stalin was Hitler's Great Enabler for both setting off WW2 (via the Nazi-Soviet Pact) and his first two years' prosecution of it. In this they have been consistently lied to and misled by three generations of Communist and now Putinist hacks masquerading as historians. Yes, Putin has settled on the Soviet victory in 1945 as a distant but ultimate source of legitimacy for his own regime. Like his orange-haired stepchild in the White House, he loves the "poorly educated" and wants to keep them as close to that condition as possible. One is very unlikely to hear or read anything in today's Russia about the massive material assistance provide to Hitler's Germany from 1939 to June 1941 when Britain stood alone against a Nazi-occupied Europe. Considering the scale of it, Churchill was actually rather forgiving of the Soviets' perfidy, but he was above all a realist who assessed Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to Western civilization then in existence, and was more than willing to put his own anti-Communist past aside to make common cause with Stalin and the USSR in fighting it. As he humorously remarked in Parliament, "If Hitler were to invade hell, I should at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Then too, as he began to work in the late 1940s on his own war memoirs when he was out of office, " History will be very kind to me, for I intend to write it."
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs

Don't you know you shouldn't confuse The Denver Idiot with facts? He'll get all aflutter and might wrinkle one of his Ivy League Diplomas. He'd then have to print another one off the internet.

[Deleted]

Jan 13, 2018 16:06:19 GMT -5 vindex said:

The question posed by this thread is extraordinarily ill-informed, as Churchill DID pick Tito's Partisans over the Serbian monarchist Chetniks over deciding over a two - year period from 1941 to 1943 that the Partisans were giving better value in disrupting Nazi Germany's occupation of Yugoslavia.Huh?  Ill-informed, Vindex?  What Yugoslav sources of WWII history have you ever read?  Any?
For example, have you read Milovan Djilas very detailed, blow-by-blow account, in Wartime, of Churchill's reluctance to substantively help the Partisans from 1941-44 during their long, bloody struggle against the Nazi Wehrmacht?But, Djilas aside, here's a scholarly American quote for you (from Knoxville) documenting the fact that Churchill didn't help the Partisans until February of 1944.*  Even Churchill admitted that he did very little to help Tito.  Yes, he did send a small group of observers to watch the Partisans fight the Nazis.* "Mihailović had the support of the Western leaders from the initiation of his operations in April of 1941 until February of 1944 when Churchill made the decision
to shift his official support to Marshal Tito. "trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2252&context=utk_chanhonoproj
The arrangement was formalized in a meeting between Churchill and Tito in Naples in later 1943 after Allied forces had landed in Italy and taken the city. By then the British had sent numerous airdrops of supplies to the Partisans, as well as a number of SOS forces missions which on at least one occasion included his own son, Randolph Churchill. Allied air forces also dropped a fair amount of bombs on the country, but as the Slovenian Communist and Tito aide Edvard Kardelj lamented after the war, the bombing raids inflicted far more harm on the civilian population than on the German forces which were well-equipped but not all that terribly numerous. The Nazis did, to be sure, have assistance from the Italian military (until 1943), the Bulgarian military (till 1944) and the forces of the satellite State of Croatia, ruled by the "Poglavnik" I.e. Leader Ante Pavelic and his truly vicious Ustace militia.

Early in the 1990s, Churchill's assistance to Tito was attacked by a British historian who wrote a book titled The Rape of Serbia in which the author denounced Churchill for having chosen to support the Partisans over the Chetniks, claiming that Communists inside British Intelligence - of which there were certainly a number, consider Kim Philby and his little circle - had distorted reports from behind enemy lines to credit the Partisans with actions which had been performed by the Chetniks. But it is also fair to point out that The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic (who was executed by Tito's government after the war) did refrain from initiating guerilla actions on occasions when it was clear that such activity would provoke major German reprisals against the Serbian populace. Tito and the Partisans by contrast had NO such reluctance. Nazi German retaliation was indeed overwhelming and lethal. The country did liberate itself without assistance from Allied armies, but was in a horrendous state when the war finally ended. Not being installed into power by the Red Army marked Tito as a potential rebel in Stalin's eyes, and the break between the two was not very long in coming.Vindex,    Have you read Milovan Djilas book, Conversations With Stalin?  The Red Army, ultimately, played a significant role in helping the Yugoslav Partisans drive the remaining Nazi forces out of Yugoslavia.  Djilas got into serious trouble with Stalin for confronting the Soviet brass about their rape of some Yugoslavian women during that phase of the war-- and was directly questioned by Stalin about the incident at the Kremlin, later.  As for the Chetniks and Mikhailovic, you conveniently forgot to mention that they were, in time, collaborating with the Nazis, Italians, and the Croatian Ustase against the Partisans.   As the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia grew increasingly vicious, the indigenous people of Yugoslavia ultimately recognized the Partisans as the principle army fighting the occupation, at least in Milovan Djilas's account of the Yugoslav war.  Of course, the denizens of the towns and villages often tried to placate whichever army was in control of their territory at a given time.
The overall issue of power politics among Churchill, FDR, and Stalin with regard to a second front is worthy of a separate thread in itself. Stalin wanted a cross-channel invasion as early as 1942 which was patently ridiculous in view of the state of the American military in December 1941. I have read that it was doable before the end of 1943, but would have required total concentration of American and British military and naval strengths. We did have this "minor" issue of a Pacific War in progress against Imperial Japan, whose attack had triggered our entry into the conflict to begin with. Ceasing all activity against the Japanese would have been a political impossibility in the United States and rightfully so. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the effort against Nazi Germany would have priority over Japan, but not to the exclusion of the effort against Japan. One may question why Operation Overlord got put off to the middle of 1944 instead of its beginning but there were also serious weather issues involved in executing an amphibious invasion of that immense scale across a body of water whose normal conditions are about as different from those in the well-named Pacific as one can imagine.

It is true that Americans pay FAR too little heed to the magnitude of the Soviet effort and sacrifice which led to the fall of the Third Reich. It is ALSO true that Russians pay even LESS heed to the fact that Stalin was Hitler's Great Enabler for both setting off WW2 (via the Nazi-Soviet Pact) and his first two years' prosecution of it. In this they have been consistently lied to and misled by three generations of Communist and now Putinist hacks masquerading as historians. Yes, Putin has settled on the Soviet victory in 1945 as a distant but ultimate source of legitimacy for his own regime. Like his orange-haired stepchild in the White House, he loves the "poorly educated" and wants to keep them as close to that condition as possible. One is very unlikely to hear or read anything in today's Russia about the massive material assistance provide to Hitler's Germany from 1939 to June 1941 when Britain stood alone against a Nazi-occupied Europe. Considering the scale of it, Churchill was actually rather forgiving of the Soviets' perfidy, but he was above all a realist who assessed Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to Western civilization then in existence, and was more than willing to put his own anti-Communist past aside to make common cause with Stalin and the USSR in fighting it. As he humorously remarked in Parliament, "If Hitler were to invade hell, I should at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Then too, as he began to work in the late 1940s on his own war memoirs when he was out of office, " History will be very kind to me, for I intend to write it."
Vindex
Georgia BulldogsAlexander Werth's Russia at War presents a detailed account of the shifting propaganda within the USSR following the notorious Soviet-Nazi Pact, then the commencement of Barbarossa.  It was a shameful mistake by Stalin and Molotov.But you also neglected to mention Churchill's reluctance to invade France until it was clear in 1944 that the Red Army had defeated the Nazi Wehrmacht.Nor did you say anything about Churchill's longstanding fascination with chemical weapons and civilian bombing raids.You have begged my serious historical question raised here about the imperialist British plutocrat, Churchill,  while presuming to answer it, rather disdainfully.  

[Deleted]

Addendum:  Churchill was, of course, a fierce anti-communist, who said as late as 1937 that, if he were forced to choose between fascism and communism in Europe, he would not pretend to prefer communism.

   He even admired Mussolini and Hitler, for awhile, as strong alternatives to communism in Italy and Germany.

    So, the essence of my argument, and question, on this thread is accurate and rather well-informed-- contrary to what Vindex has maintained.

     Churchill gave no substantial assistance to Tito and the Partisans in WWII, nor was he in a hurry to assist the Russians by opening a Second Front.

      Inside the USSR, according to Werth, Churchill was always regarded with distrust, and even bitterness, partly owing to his deployment of gas bombs against the Red Army during the Russian Revolution.

      And, according to Djilas, Churchill wanted Truman to nuke the USSR after the war!