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Most People Picture History Wrong, These Facts Will Set them Straight

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2020 34 min

Franklin D. Roosevelt - Joseph Stalin — The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

24. Winston Churchill Wanted to Fight the USSR Soon as Germany Surrendered in WWII

The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

The Big Three allied leaders of WWII, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, were anything but a harmonious bunch. However, they stuck together long enough to beat their common enemies, before the pretense of amity finally collapsed, and things went from wartime friendship and warmth to Cold War wariness and hostility.

In 1945, as WWII drew to a close in Europe, Churchill was exasperated by Soviet intransigence regarding Eastern Europe, which Stalin sought to transform into a Soviet empire. Britain had gone to war to defend Polish independence, but at the war’s end, Stalin was riding roughshod over the Poles. He kept the third of Poland he had annexed in 1939 in cooperation with Hitler, and reduced what was left to a Soviet client state, lacking freedom and independence. Churchill saw it as a matter touching British honor, so he ordered his generals to draw up plans for an attack on the Soviets soon as Germany surrendered. The goal was to push them back to the USSR’s borders, or at least force them to treat Poland fairly.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.