Jay Winik’s new book 1944is the latest attack of the steadily escalating, spontaneous, and unorganized campaign to find some albatross of historical incompetence or misfeasance to hang around the neck of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For nearly fifty years he was labored with the charge of having given away Eastern Europe to Stalin, while allowing the U.S. government to become infested with Soviet spies. The most extreme recent manifestations of this came from Diana West, replete with the exhumation of Mr. Churchill’s mad proposal to charge up the Adriatic (past hundreds of miles of German airfields on each side) and land near Ljubljana and plunge into the Alpine snows, as an alternative to the Normandy landings. It has taken until the last few years to establish that Churchill settled the spheres of influence in Europe with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, against Roosevelt’s wishes. It took just as long to settle the point that the zones of occupation in Germany were agreed against American wishes by the Great Britain–USSR majority on the European Advisory Commission in London in 1944. Roosevelt was opposed to establishing these zones at all because he rightly believed that the Western Allies, once across the Rhine, would face a collapsing front as the Germans would prefer Western to Russian occupation. But Churchill was concerned that if he did not take the Russian proposal of three equal zones (and give France part of the British zone), Great Britain would have a small zone as
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Historical battles
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 34 Number 7, on page 59
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