file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/me/Desktop/Book%20shelf/Quigley,%20Carroll%20-%20Tragedy%20and%20Hope.txt
Page 772 The strategic decision of September 1943 to reject Churchill's plans for a Balkan campaign in order to concentrate on a cross-Channel offensive in 1944 were of vital importance in setting the form that postwar Europe would take. If it had been decided to postpone the cross-Channel attack and concentrate on an assault from the Aegean across Bulgaria and Romania toward Poland and Slovakia, the postwar situation would have been quite different. It has been argued that failure to reach agreement on the territorial settlement of eastern Europe while the war was still in progress meant that Soviet armies would undoubtedly dominate once Germany was defeated. This assumption implies that America should have threatened to reduce of to cut off Lend-Lease supplies going unless we could obtain Soviet agreement to the kind of eastern European settlement we wanted. Page 790 The Soviet advance became a race with the Western Powers even though Eisenhower's orders held back their advance at many points (such as Prague) to allow the Russians to occupy areas the Americans could easily have taken first. Page 791 Roosevelt's sense of the realities of power were quite as acute as Churchill's or Stalin's but he concealed that sense much more deliberately and much more completely under a screen of high-sounding moral principles. Page 795 Polish ministers rushed from London to Moscow to negotiate. While they were still talking and when the Soviet army was only six miles from Warsaw, the Polish underground forces in the city, at a Soviet invitation, rose up against the Germans. A force of 40,000 responded to the suggestion but the Russian armies stopped their advance and obstructed supplies to the rebels in spite of appeals from all parts of the world. After sixty-three days of hopeless fighting, the Polish Home Army had to surrender to the Germans. This Soviet treachery removed their chief obstacle to Communist rule in Poland and the London government in London was accordingly ignored. Page 797 When victorious armies broke into Germany, late in 1944, the Nazis were still holding the survivors of 8 million enslaved workers, 10 million Jews, 6 million Russian prisoners of war and millions of prisoners from other armies. Over half of the Jews and Russians, possibly 12 million, were killed before final victory in 1945. Page 799 The ideas that strategic air attacks must be directed at civilians in enemy cities were almost wholly ignored in the Soviet Union, largely rejected in Germany, created great controversy in France, but were accepted to a large extent among airmen in Britain and the U.S. Page 800 The contribution by strategic bombing to the defeat of Germany was relatively incidental, in spite of the terrible losses suffered in the effort. The shift to city bombing was more or less accidental. In spite of the erroneous ideas of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, the war opened and continued for months with no city bombing at all, for the simple reason that the Germans had no intentions, no planes, and no equipment for strategic bombing. The attack on cities began by accident when a group of German planes which were lost dumped their bomb loads, contrary to orders, on London on August 1940. The RAF retaliated by bombing Berlin the next night. Goring in counter-retaliation. British efforts to counterattack
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