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The Nazi Scheme to Bombard New York City With Rockets and Other Unfinished Military Plans

Khalid Elhassan January 16, 2020 32 min

South Vietnam - United States — American troops in South Vietnam. USA Today

19. Churchill’s Plan to Attack the Soviets At the End of WWII

Churchill, FDR, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Encyclopedia Britannica

As the war in Europe drew to a close in the spring of 1945, Winston Churchill was growing increasingly exasperated by Soviet intransigence regarding Eastern Europe, which Stalin clearly aimed to turn into a Soviet empire. Britain had gone to war in order to defend Polish independence, but at war’s end Stalin was riding roughshod over the Poles.

The Soviet dictator insisted on keeping the third of Poland he had annexed in 1939 in cooperation with the Germans, reducing the Poles to Soviet clients, and extinguishing their freedom and independence. Churchill saw it as a matter touching British honor, so he ordered his generals to draw up plans to attack the Soviets as soon as Germany surrendered. The Prime Minister had nebulous aims of pushing the Red Army back to the USSR’s borders, or at least force Stalin 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.