“During those days he stood still for such disastrous fatuities as Franklin Roosevelt’s impetuous call for unconditional surrender, a rhetorical fillip which in the analysis of some military experts may have cost us the unnecessary death of several hundred thousand men, and which was most certainly responsible for the supine condition of much of Europe at the moment when Stalin’s legions took the nations over.” Those are the words of William F. Buckley in his obituary of Winston Churchill. Though Buckley was clear that “Churchill will be written about” for “as long as heroes are written about,” he wasn’t afraid to point out the very real warts of someone all-too-many view as blemish free.
Buckley’s remembrance of Churchill (I read it in James Rosen’s very excellent 2017 compilation of Buckley obituaries, A Torch Kept Lit, review here) came to mind over and over again while reading Giles Milton’s fascinating 2021 history of the post-WWII shaping of Berlin, Checkmate In Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World. While truly unputdownable, Milton’s book is unrelentingly sad. There’s one horrid story after another about Germany’s most prominent city in the years after the war. Churchill kept coming to mind given the directive issued by higher ups in the Soviet Union’s Red Army that “On German soil there is only one master – the Soviet solder, he is both the judge and the punisher for the torments of his fathers and mothers.” And the Soviets did a lot of punishing that staggers the mind with its cruelty. It seems they couldn’t have done all the damage they did had Europe and Germany not been so wrecked based on the desires of Roosevelt and Churchill.
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