25. Winston Churchill Wanted to Start World War III Before World War II Had Ended
Winston Churchill was an avowed anti-communist long before anti-communism was cool. Before the dust had settled in World War I, the future World War II icon urged the British government to intervene directly in Russia’s Civil War against the communists. His recommendations went unheeded – something he regretted for the rest of his life. As he put it years later: “If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, ‘How shocking!’”
World War II created strange bedfellows, with the arch anti-communist Churchill allied with the communist USSR. However, his suspicions of communism remained. In 1945, as the war in Europe drew to an end, Churchill was exasperated by Stalin’s quest to make Eastern Europe part of a Soviet empire. Britain had gone to war to defend Polish independence, but at the war’s end, Stalin rode roughshod over Poland. He kept a third of the country that he had annexed in 1939 in cooperation with the Germans, reduced Poland to a Soviet client state, and extinguished the Poles’ independence. So Churchill contemplated war against the Soviets.
