FDR's Catastrophic, Horrendous, and Treasonous Handling of WW II in Europe

FDR was our greatest modern President

Turned the US into a modern Democracy and Super Power both economically and militarily
He sucked.
Saved the US and saved the world

FDR greatest President
He screwed up the world and fucked the nation.
Even Reagan voted for FDR four times, and again, as did America's best historians, and most importantly the American people. Maybe it is one of those periods in history that one must live through to appreciate the magnitude of the Great Depression and World War 2. Would the American people vote for Trump four times or even two?
No you don’t, because people back then didn’t know of FDR’s lies and deceit.

FDR prolonged the Great Depression with his dumb policies, then set up events to get us into WWII causing massive death and destruction leading to decades of Cold War. To say nothing of his treasonous actions towards the USSR.
 
If I am not mistaken, FDR was becoming more frail and sick as he entered his third term. And his running for a fourth term was just plain wrong. So maybe the gentleman was not able to think things through clearly.

Today, we are on the brink of electing a gentleman who is already mentally frail. That should be of grave concern to all Americans.
 
In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​
FDR did not start WWII



the germans did in case you have forgotten
 
Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders,

Problem is, Canaris was in no position to negotiate with the Allies.
Hitler would have had him killed just like all the others who tried. The German resistance was in no position to negotiate

Unconditional surrender is the only outcome that would have gotten Hitler and the Nazis out of power
 
Well what seems a obvious is that as a civilian president he was more concern with how the history books would right the story of the victor and his role in securing that victory. Having no first hand knowledge other than the military briefings. A political outcome ???

whereas generals and people who had to fight that war with first hand knowledge of the casualties on both sides of any war would accept surrender as a sign of victory and stop the fighting. A victory is a victory?
The history books would right the story?
 
Like almost every democrat politician in the 20th (and 21st) century FDR enjoyed total support from the media and the media writes the history books. FDR was a skilled orator who could make a restaurant menu sound profound but it was almost total B.S. FDR and Hitler entered the political arena at roughly the same time and FDR should have been aware of the Nazi threat but according to Eric Larson's book "In the Garden of the Beasts" which chronicles FDR's ambassador to Berlin in the 30's, it appears that FDR was so focused on his "Great Depression" that there was virtually no coherent foreign policy. As a matter of fact the Brits were shocked that their was no espionage network or counter espionage network in place in the U.S. during the FDR administration.

FDR was Asst. Secretary of the Navy in WW1. Hitler was an Austrian corporal. How is that relevant?
 
How in the world can America survive if the people are allowed to vote for the president of their choice? Thank God, Republicans stopped that kind of nonsense by changing the Constitution. Now for Republicans to stop the historians from making historical evaluations of presidents and politicians. and then the biggie, remove the impeachment clause and American will roll along roll.
WTF are you yapping about?
 
In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​

I get tired of these revisionist history propaganda pieces about FDR


What makes you think FDR could have negotiated surrender terms with the Nazis without including Stalin?

In case you don’t know, Germany invaded the Soviet Union killing millions and torturing, raping and exterminating innocent civilians
In case you didn’t know, the Soviets were pretty pissed about this.
In case you didn’t know, by late 1943 the Soviets had the Nazis on the run and were headed for Germany.

by that time….Do you think Stalin would have accepted any surrender terms other than unconditional surrender?
 
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In his 600-plus-page book The New Dealers' War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, award-winning historian Thomas Fleming documents in sickening detail how FDR needlessly prolonged WW II in Europe by several months and cost hundreds of thousands of American and European lives. FDR did this by insisting on “unconditional surrender” and by refusing to even consider the substantive peace offers made by the German resistance leaders, even though those leaders included high-ranking German officers such as Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.

Fleming provided an extensive summary of the evidence of FDR’s catastrophic handling of the war in Europe in a long 2009 article titled “FDR Writes a Policy in Blood” in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The article is now available on historynet.com. Below are extracts from the article:

FDR’s blind insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged World War II and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .​

Inwardly, Churchill was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s announcement [of the policy of unconditional surrender]—and dismayed by its probable impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.​

The prime minister’s British colleagues were even more alarmed. The chief of British intelligence, Maj. Gen. Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, considered unconditional surrender disastrous, not only to certain secret operations he already had in progress, but also because it would make the Germans fight “with the despairing ferocity of cornered rats”. . . .​

That consternation was shared by not a few Americans in the ranks of VIPs standing behind the two leaders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower thought unconditional surrender was idiotic—it could do nothing but cost American lives. Later, he said: “If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”​

Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, who was the architect of the strategy for D-Day, was even more appalled. He decried the idea from the moment he heard it. Just before the war, he had spent two years in Germany attending the Berlin War College and he knew firsthand the deep divisions between Hitler and the German General Staff. An unconditional surrender policy would, he accurately predicted, “weld all the Germans together”. . . .​

Since the war began, British intelligence chief Menzies and the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, two seeming opponents in the art and science of black warfare, had been in shadowy touch with each other through emissaries who shuttled from Berlin and London to the borders of the Nazi empire. In 1940 the Abwehr leaked Hitler’s planned assault on Holland, Belgium, and France. The British and French dismissed it as a ruse and discovered, too late, that its details were excruciatingly authentic. While the admiral went briskly about the business of intelligence, running spy networks throughout Europe, evidence accumulated suggesting the astonishing possibility that the head of the Abwehr was a secret enemy of the Nazi regime.​

Around Canaris was grouped a loose confederation of Hitler opponents in the German Foreign Office, the army, and the political world. They included Ulrich von Hassel, a career diplomat whose diaries are a main source of information about the resistance; Gen. Ludwig Beck, former chief of the general staff, who resigned in protest when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia in 1939 in violation of the Munich agreement; and Count Helmuth von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the general who had defeated France in 1871 and made Germany a world power. Another important figure was Karl-Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, whom the Nazis dismissed from his post when he refused to remove a monument to the great German-Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn.​

Beck, the key figure, was still deeply admired by many generals on active duty. Through him, the conspirators hoped to persuade the army to stage a coup d’état to remove and, if necessary, kill Hitler. . . .​

Before Casablanca [where FDR announced the policy of unconditional surrender], Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Germany’s supreme commander of the West, had told Canaris that he loathed Hitler and was ready to do everything in his power to overthrow him. After Casablanca, Witzleben said: “Now, no honorable man can lead the German people into such a situation.” Gen. Hans Guderian, the inventor of panzer warfare, declined to participate in the plot for the same reason, when Col. Hans Oster, second in command to Canaris, approached him. Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, said at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that unconditional surrender had been a crucial element in his refusal to join the conspiracy. Nevertheless, Canaris redoubled his efforts to reach out to the United States. . . .​

In June 1943, Helmuth von Moltke journeyed to Istanbul to talk to the U.S. naval attaché, George Earle, a Balkans expert who wanted to rescue Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. Earle persuaded William Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to come to Istanbul. There, the Germans offered to fly a member of the German general staff to London to arrange for a peaceful surrender of the western front—if unconditional surrender were modified. Donovan rushed to the White House, only to discover FDR had no desire to negotiate with “these East German Junkers.”​

Around the same time, Canaris developed a seemingly more fruitful contact in Berne, where Allen Dulles had become the Office of Strategic Services station chief. Here the messenger was Hans Bernd Gisevius, also an Abwehr agent, disguised as the German vice consul in Zurich. To bolster his bona fides, Canaris leaked reams of secret information about the German war effort to Dulles, who forwarded it to Washington with strong recommendations to cooperate with the resistance movement, which he code-named “Breakers.” From the White House came only silence. Nothing came of a similar initiative in Stockholm, also launched by the German Foreign Office in 1943. . . .​

With mounting desperation, Canaris himself took to the field in Spain. With the help of the Spanish Foreign Office, in August 1943 he arranged a meeting between himself, Menzies, and Donovan at Santander. It was surely one of the strangest and most fateful encounters of the war. Menzies was disobeying the orders of his putative commanders, the Foreign Office bureaucrats, and Donovan was acutely aware by now that Roosevelt was equally hostile to his presence. But Canaris charmed and convinced both men of the logic of his proposal to work out an arrangement whereby the Anglo-Americans would support a coup d’état and peace on the basis of the German borders of 1939—surrendering all Hitler’s conquests. One of Canaris’s deputies, who was present at the meeting, said it was the most exciting experience in his secret service career.​

When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing— and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of treason, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.​

First, Oster and one of his cohorts were caught aiding escaping Jews. Next Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try to contact the American ambassador to Cairo, who was an old friend, Count von Moltke, too, was arrested. Investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus threatened Canaris and his grip on the Abwehr.​

While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943 Churchill came to Washington for a conference, code-named “Trident.” Probably reacting to the attempts by Canaris to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it. . . .​

Shortly after Sicily fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio premier. Badoglio immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa. But Roosevelt insisted that he would accept only unconditional surrender—and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and for over six weeks the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.​

By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and the marshal to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy, and the Italians had no country to surrender.​

Unbeknownst to the German conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of at- tacking the 1.5 million–man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either Allied government supported the policy except Roosevelt and those in his White House circle.​

On March 25, 1944, Gen. George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president, urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made…at a very early date.” The chiefs proposed a proclamation that would assure the Germans the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”​

On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before the extent of his disdain for Germany.​

Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had proposed installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said they should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also added the suggestion that after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the West to surrender.​

From the White House, in response to this extraordinary message, came another bout of silence. . . .​

While this charade played out in Washington, some 500 leaders of the German resistance were being tortured by the Gestapo and tried before a so-called People’s Court, packed with Nazi party members who jeered and hooted at them. Field marshals and generals, colonels and former officials of the Foreign Office and the Abwehr were forced to wear clothes that were either ridiculously large or small, to make them look as much like buffoons as possible. Yet they managed to defend themselves with calm dignity, boldly testifying that they had tried to overthrow Hitler because Nazism filled them with moral and spiritual revulsion.​

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, nor any of their spokesmen, uttered a public word of sympathy or regret for these men. Instead, the Anglo-Americans showered Germany with mocking leaflets, sneering that the conspiracy was a sure sign of imminent collapse.​



Some claims are highly debatable, to say the least, among them the sweeping assertion that Roosevelt “tricked” his nation into war by using Asia as the “backdoor” (p. 4). Fleming goes so far as to write that FDR “had seduced America into the war with clever tricks, one- step-forward one-step-back double-talk, and the last resort provoca- tion of Japan” (p. 257). Indeed, the president “covertly goaded Japan into attacking the United States” (p. 426). Hardly a contemporary historian accepts this reasoning, and several leading ones, among them Warren F. Kimball and Robert Dallek, find Roosevelt envi- sioning American participation limited to air and sea conflict against Germany while avoiding hostilities with Japan.






Real historians say your author is poop.
 
Patton wouldn't be rolling the Russians back too far--they had better/bigger tanks/etc ..the OstFront made the Western Front look very tiny
..yes, you never would've be able to get all the Aliies to agree to certain-different-etc terms
The Soviets were overextended. They never had to fight against a combined force army like the allies fielded. The RAF and USAAF would have driven the Red Air Force from the skies. WAllied air power would have isolated the Red Army from supplies and the WAllies would have pushed the starving, out of supply Red Army as Far East as it desired. The Germans never had the logistical ability the WAllies did

As for Soviet tanks, they had a few heavies, JS IIs and the like. The rest of their tanks were T-34s of various marks that were inferior to the Shermans, Cromwells and Churchills of the WAllies. The myth of the invincible T-34 was just that, a myth. The T-34 was the most destroyed tank of the war.
 
I gave you a "thank you" because I appreciate hearing alternative views.

What conditions would the German generals have demanded in exchange for peace?
That they wouldn't be shot, hung, harassed...............
Well worth it to save thousands of americans and allies lives.
 
He was good sized, but i don't think a whale is a good description!

The correct word is "wailing", unless you are a dumbass Yankee!
Nope, I'm right as usual.
Whale is also a verb for the action of hitting something (such as that gambling table, or a punching bag) forcefully and repeatedly. This might be surprising to those people who misuse the identically (or, in some dialects) similarly pronounced verbs wail or wale with the meaning of "to hit." The verb whale can also imply attacking vigorously or repeatedly, as in "the team whaled on their opponent 20 to 2"; a person might also "whale away" during a debate (meaning they are verbally attacking their opponent and showing no mercy) or "whale into/at" that person with whom they are debating.

 
The Soviets were only in the war because the Brits saved them from certain defeat, and Churchill convinced FDR they were necessary to defeat Germany. Hitler sealed his fate by convincing dumbass Japanese vermin to attack the U.S. and thereby the Axis declaring war on the U.S. Thomas Fleming's book is garbage and innuendo, which is why I threw it away after reading about third of it. Patton was making big noises and posturing for the media; at the end of the day he was just a competent division commander, nothing special as a strategist or logistician. He was always playing to reporters, most of whom had no idea who was a good military planner or who wasn't, being pretty much morons themselves about such things, same as they are today. Given how Slavs fawned over Hitler and their treatment of Jews trying to return home after the war, I'm glad we didn't shed one drop of blood saving them from the Soviets; they deserved each other.
 
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The Soviets were overextended. They never had to fight against a combined force army like the allies fielded. The RAF and USAAF would have driven the Red Air Force from the skies. WAllied air power would have isolated the Red Army from supplies and the WAllies would have pushed the starving, out of supply Red Army as Far East as it desired. The Germans never had the logistical ability the WAllies did

As for Soviet tanks, they had a few heavies, JS IIs and the like. The rest of their tanks were T-34s of various marks that were inferior to the Shermans, Cromwells and Churchills of the WAllies. The myth of the invincible T-34 was just that, a myth. The T-34 was the most destroyed tank of the war.

We even had to supply them with the fuel boosters needed for them to even field an air force, they couldn't make their own av gas, and Hitler had to strip the eastern front of AA and aircraft to use against the Allied bombing campaign over Germany, leaving the Soviets with air superiority over most of the eastern front, to the extent they could even use WW I biplanes to bomb German troops with.
 
In that case the hostages would have been used as shields

Carter negotiated behind the scenes and got all hostages out alive
In that case the hostages would have been used as shields

Carter negotiated behind the scenes and got all hostages out alive
No, the only reason the hostages were released was that the Iranians were afraid of what Reagan would do to them. They spent most of Carter’s presidency humiliating him in front of the entire world. The mullah snookered Carter into forcing the Shah to allow Khomeini back into Iran from exile, they got Carter to force the Shah to stop his secret police from controlling the mullahs and other Muslim extremists, and they finally forced Carter to make the Shah abdicate. Khomeini and the Mullahs had Carter’s number and first fooled him, then intimidated him. Carter is directly responsible for the growth of Islamic terrorism in modern times.
 
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Yes...........France would have felt betrayed.............and yes our supply lines would have been stretched.

But the Strategy was to gain more of Germany in the end to be in a better position with Poland..........

In a nut shell, our Generals were Grant..........lets just lower our heads and get it on.........massive front and drive to Germany.........while the British wanted to wear them down and thin them out..........

In the end............we are all here talking about it from the Cheap Seats.............we weren't there and they were..............Easy to discuss it from the Nose Bleed section of the stadium as always.
What Churchill wanted was the typical historic British strategy, sit behind its moat defended by its navy and get the continental powers to do most of the dying. Britain created an empire by playing one country or group off against another for Britain’s ultimate benefit. Churchill could see the writing on the wall that the US was going to come out of the war as the great power, so he wanted to regain as much of the Empire as he could with his waning political and military power,
 
No, the only reason the hostages were released was that the Iranians were afraid of what Reagan would do to them. They spent most of Carter’s presidency humiliating him in front of the entire world. The mullah snookered Carter into forcing the Shah to allow Khomeini back into Iran from exile, they got Carter to force the Shah to stop his secret police from controlling the mullah sand other Muslim extremists, and they finally forced Carter to make the Shah abdicate. Khomeini and the Mullahs had Carter’s number and first fooled him, then intimidated him. Carter is directly responsible for the growth of Islamic terrorism in modern times.
:laughing0301:
 
If the Iranians weren’t playing Carter, they wouldn't have waited until just before Reagan was inaugurated to release the hostages. They would have released then before the election when it might have saved the Carter presidency. I lived through it, Reagan had everyone convinced he was a mad dog war monger who would immediately jump to military force.
 

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