February 25, 1956: Khrushchev's "De-Stalinization" Speech

February 25, 1956, 70 years ago: Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, addresses the 20th Party Congress in Moscow. It had been less than 3 years since the death of Joseph Stalin, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years.

Khrushchev gives what became known as the "Secret Speech," laying out some of Stalin's crimes, and the "conditions of insecurity, fear, and even desperation" created by Stalin. He shocked his listeners by denouncing Stalin's dictatorial rule and his cult of personality, as inconsistent with Communism and with Party ideology. Among other points, he condemned the treatment of the Old Bolsheviks, people who had supported Communism before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, many of whom Stalin had executed as traitors.

The speech was shocking. There were reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks, and others later took their own lives, due to shock at the revelations of Stalin's use of terror. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on March 9.

In the West, the speech politically devastated organized Communists. The Communist Party USA lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of the speech's revelation to the West. The speech was also later cited as a cause of the Sino-Soviet split, as China's dictator Mao Zedong had been a committed supporter of Stalin.

Khrushchev did stay popular among the Soviet people, and without using cult-of-personality tactics. It could be argued that the country peaked in 1961, with the start of the space program, the building of the Berlin Wall, and their success in international sports. But by 1964, enough Politburo members had had enough of Khrushchev that he was removed from power. He lived in exile until 1971.

 

May 8, 1945: V-E Day

I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. It was quite a week:

April 28, 1945: Former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was executed.

April 29, 1945: Mussolini's corpse is hanged in Milan. Seeing this, Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany, knows he doesn't want the advancing Soviet Red Army to get their hands on him.

And U.S. troops liberate the Dachau concentration camp, outside Munich. It is believed that 32,000 people died there. Among those imprisoned were psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and the Rev. Martin Niemoller ("First they came for... ").

April 30, 1945: Hitler kills himself in his bunker in Berlin.

May 1, 1945: Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels follows with his own suicide in the bunker.

May 2, 1945: Nazi Generals Hans Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf commit suicide in the bunker. Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, tries to escape, but doesn't get far, and also kills himself.

It's all over. Berlin has fallen. The Soviet Red Army raises the Red Flag over the Reichstag, the home of the German national legislature. It's just a matter of what remains of the Nazi government surrendering. What Hitler called "The Thousand-Year Reich" was dead after 12 years.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had seen the photograph of the U.S. Marines raising the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, and wanted a similar picture of the Soviet red banner with the yellow hammer and sickle over Berlin. He got it. The photographer was Yevgeny Khaldei. The soldier was 18-year-old Aleksei Kovalov -- no relation to the later hockey player of the same name. He later became a fireman in Kiev. Both men were Ukrainians, and both lived until 1997.

In late 1941, the Soviets were, perhaps, a mile away from losing the Eastern Front of the European Theater of World War II. Now, they had won what they called The Great Patriotic War.

May 3, 1945: The Nazis had their own version of the Titanic. And guess what: It sank. Unlike the original, it wasn't just due to incompetence. It had "help."

The SS Cap Arcona was launched in 1927. It was named after Cape Arkona on Rügen, Germany's largest island, on the Baltic Sea. It weighed 27,561 tons, compared to the 46,329 of the original RMS Titanic. It was 679 feet long, compared to the original's 889 feet. Cruising speed was close, 23 miles per hour to Titanic's 24. In other words, it was big, but not as big as the Titanic, the world's largest cruise liner when it first and last sailed in 1912.

Cap Arcona was the flagship of the Hamburg-South America line, and sailed between Hamburg, Germany's 2nd-largest city and largest port, and the east coast of South America. In 1940, the Kriegsmarine, the Nazi navy, took it over. In 1943, it was "cast" in the title role in Titanic, a Nazi propaganda film, designed to show that the British were incompetent because they built the "unsinkable," ill-fated Titanic. It had 3 smokestacks, instead of the 4 that Titanic had. But it was still big enough to be plausible.

In 1945, Cap Arcona became a prison ship, as the Nazis, aware that they were losing the war, and that the Allies had begun to liberate the concentration camps, began to evacuate their camps in occupied Norway and Denmark. On May 3, Cap Arcona was sunk off the coast of Neustadt -- fittingly, by Britain's Air Force -- and over 5,000 prisoners were killed. Compare that to the 1,500 who died on the real Titanic.

Same day: Ezra Pound, often called one of America's greatest poets, was arrested for treason. He was born in 1885 in Idaho. By 1908, he was already living in Italy, teaching there, and a published poet. He moved to London, and worked as foreign editor of American literary magazines. He introduced the world to Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."

He blamed the horrors of World War I on international bankers, and moved to Italy, where he became a supporter of Mussolini, and later of Hitler and the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley.

During World War II, Pound recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the Italian government, allied with the Nazis in the Axis. In these broadcasts, he attacked the U.S. government, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in particular; the British government; international finance, Jews in general, and the Jewish influence on international finance; and munitions makers and arms dealers, accusing them of prolonging the war. Keeping with the Fascist theme, he used his broadcast to support the Holocaust, and to support eugenics, and urged U.S. soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender.

On May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested by the Italian Resistance, and was handed over to the U.S. Army. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, he was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a famed psychiatric facility in Washington, where he was diagnosed as a narcissist and a psychopath.

Despite being held there, his poetry collection The Pisan Cantos was published in 1948. He would continue work on the project, published in full in 1962 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Norman Mailer, a leftist author who despised Fascism, once said that he would rather read Pound than any of the Communist screenwriters known as the Hollywood Ten, because, he said, Pound was a better writer.

He was released in 1958, and, knowing he was not particularly welcome in America, returned to Italy, called America "an insane asylum," and gave a Fascist salute for the press. He died in Venice in 1972.

And another thing that happened on May 3, 1945: German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and his brother Magnus surrender to American troops at Oberammergau, Bavaria.

Wernher von Braun had been a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS, and he designed the V-2 rocket that had killed thousands in raids on London. And yet, without him, America would not have gotten to the Moon – had the Soviets gotten him, the entire history of the world could have been changed.

Few have been so villainous and so heroic -- on the few occasions when one has been both, it has tended to go in the other direction. He died in 1977.

In 1960, Curd Jürgens, later to play a James Bond villain in The Spy Who Loved Me, played von Braun in I Aim at the Stars. Satirists Mort Sahl said the title should be extended to "...But Sometimes I Hit London."

In 1965, another satirist, Tom Lehrer, wrong a song titled "Wernher von Braun":

"Once the rockets go up

who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!"

says Wernher von Braun.

May 4, 1945: British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepts the unconditional surrender of German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, northwest Germany including all islands and all naval ships in those areas, at Lüneburg Heath, outside Hamburg.

May 5, 1945: The Mauthausen concentration camp, outside Linz, Austria, is liberated by the U.S. 11th Armored Division. Over 320,000 people were killed there. Among the survivors is Simon Wiesenthal, who goes on to become the world's foremost Nazi-hunter.

Canadian troops liberate Amsterdam. Today, the Dutch capital is home to 935,000 people, with a metropolitan area of 2.5 million, and is renowned as a center of art, culture, stylish soccer, and, well, naughtiness.

Also on this day: For all that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did to their various enemies in World War II, they could only hurt America from afar. Their respective saboteurs in America had a rather pathetic record. But there was one attack on the U.S. mainland that had, by any definition, some success.

"Balloon bombs" had been postulated as early as 1792 in France, but had never been considered practical until 1849, when the Austrian Empire used them on Venice, with some success, in the First War of Italian Independence.

Britain had used them on Nazi Germany in World War II. Japan had also tried them, as the only thing they could launch that could reach the U.S. mainland without getting shot down. On May 5, 1945, 6  civilians were killed near Bly, Oregon, when they discovered one of the balloon bombs (in Japanese, "Fu-Go") in Fremont National Forest, becoming the only fatalities from Axis action in the continental U.S. during the war.

A Fu-Go "balloon bomb"

Reverend Archie Mitchell (then age 27) and his pregnant wife Elsie (age 26) drove up Gearhart Mountain that day with 5 of their Sunday school students for a picnic. While Archie was parking the car, Elsie and the children discovered a balloon and carriage, loaded with an anti-personnel bomb, on the ground. A large explosion occurred, and the 4 boys -- Edward Engen (13), Jay Gifford (13), Dick Patzke (14) and Sherman Shoemaker (11) were killed instantly; while Elsie and Joan Patzke (13) died from their wounds shortly afterwards.

An Army investigation concluded that the bomb had likely been kicked or dropped, and that it had lain undisturbed for about 1 month before the incident. The U.S. press blackout was lifted on May 22 so the public could be warned of the balloon threat.

This would not be Rev. Mitchell's last experience in war. He served as a missionary to South Vietnam, and, along with 2 others, was taken captive by the Vietcong on May 30, 1962. None of them have been seen since.

A memorial, the Mitchell Monument, was built in 1950 at the site of the explosion. In 1987, a group of Japanese women involved in Fu-Go production as schoolgirls delivered 1,000 paper cranes to the victims' families as a symbol of peace and healing, and 6 cherry trees were planted at the site on the incident's 50th Anniversary in 1995.

May 7, 1945: Nazi Germany's surrender was authorized by Adolf Hitler's appointed successor as head of state, Reichspräsident Karl Dönitz, an Admiral. His administration was known as the Flensburg Government.

The act of military surrender was first signed at 2:41 AM on May 7 in SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) headquarters in Reims, France. A slightly modified document, considered the definitive German Instrument of Surrender, was signed on May 8 in Karlshorst, Berlin, at 10:43 PM local time. It read as follows:

The German High Command will at once issue orders to all German military, naval and air authorities and to all forces under German control to cease active operations at 23.01 hours Central European time on 8 May 1945.

In other words, 6:01 PM, U.S. East Coast time.

May 8, 1945: President Harry S Truman makes the announcement: It is Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day.

Russia and some countries formerly in the Soviet Union celebrate V-E Day on May 9, as Germany's unconditional surrender entered into force at 11:01 PM on May 8, Central European Summer Time (6:01 PM, U.S. Eastern Time), and this corresponded with 12:01 AM on May 9, Moscow Time.

In Britain, though Winston Churchill ran the government as Prime Minister, crowds in London rushed to Buckingham Palace, chanting "We want the King!" Hearing it, King George VI, exhausted and aged by the war well beyond his 49 years, said, "The King wants his dinner." But he soon appeared on the balcony, in his Royal Navy uniform, with his wife Queen Elizabeth, and their daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Churchill soon appeared with them, with Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin leading the crowd in a singing of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

(In Britain, the refrain to that chant is, "And so say all of us!" In America, it's "Which nobody can deny!")

In the United States, the event coincided with Truman's 61st birthday. He dedicated the victory to the memory of his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died 26 days earlier. American flags remained at half-staff for the remainder of the 30-day mourning period. Great celebrations took place in many American cities, especially in New York's Times Square.

World War II would continue for another 3 months, until the Empire of Japan surrendered on August 14, which became known as V-J Day.

February 11, 1945: The Yalta Conference

February 11, 1945, 80 years ago: The Yalta Conference concludes, after 7 days of meetings between American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, at Yalta, in the Crimea, on the Black Sea -- part of the territory of Ukraine that Vladimir Putin would later annex to Russia. They discussed how to finish off World War II, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. They also discussed how to conduct the postwar world.

Ever since, conservatives have claimed that FDR "betrayed" Eastern Europe by leaving it to Stalin at Yalta. Well, what was FDR supposed to do? Send American troops into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, et al.? In other words, provoke Stalin, and start World War III before World War II was won?

The war was not over. Germany was still fighting, even if the end, there, was in sight. Japan was still fighting, with no end in sight. The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were yet to come. FDR needed the Soviet Union in that fight. He also knew that the United Nations would be stronger after the war if the Soviets were in it. Roosevelt agreed to some concessions at Yalta, for the same reason he cut his social programs short, telling a reporter, "Dr. New Deal had to give way to Dr. Win the War."

My father, of Polish descent, was a Kennedy Democrat, but he never forgave Roosevelt, the President when he was born, for how he handled the Polish situation at Yalta. But David Reynolds, a professor of history at Cambridge University, has written:

The so-called "Yalta myths" have been a great part of Republican mythology ever since the 1940s. They were a way of attacking Roosevelt and the Democratic party and it’s been brought up at various times since. The assumption behind it is that Roosevelt "sold out" Poland and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. It’s hard really to square that with the realities of 1945. The Red Army is in control of most of Poland by the time they meet at Yalta. So unless you embarked, say, on a war to evict the Red Army from Poland, there really is nothing you can do about that.

In other words, Poland and Eastern Europe were not Roosevelt's to "sell." Stalin already had them.

If FDR "sold out to Stalin at Yalta," then so did Churchill. Because of Stalin's promises, Churchill believed that he would keep his word regarding Poland and remarked, "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I am wrong about Stalin." 

Top 10 Myths About World War II

May 8, 1945: Nazi Germany surrenders, ending the European Theater of World War II. It becomes known as V-E Day: Victory in Europe. V-J Day, Victory over Japan, came on August 14.

Top 10 Myths About World War II

1. It Began On September 1, 1939. That's the date on which Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning what became known as "the European Theater" of the war. But "the Pacific Theater" had begun earlier. Japan had been attacking China since 1931, when they invaded and annexed the province of Manchuria.

2. It never would have happened without Hitler. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. He wanted revenge on Britain, France, Russia, and their client states Poland and Czechoslovakia. And he wanted revenge on the Jews, whom he blamed for a "stab in the back" that caused Germany to lose World War I.

He wasn't the only one who thought so. Had he never become Chancellor, there were others willing to step into the breach of chaos Germany was in during the early 1930s. Another such figure might not have been as eager to go to war. But it would have happened. And such a figure might have been a more competent commander-in-chief, allowing Germany to hold out longer, and maybe even to negotiate a peace that would have allowed it to continue as a fascist nation.

3. The French were cowards who surrendered too early. They were overwhelmed by the Nazis, unaware that their defenses, such as the Maginot Line, would be terribly ineffective. What were they supposed to do? Surrendering allowed them to stay alive as a country.

And they had a Resistance, and it kept fighting for 4 years, until the Allies came in and turned the tide. That sounds like "surrender" was a half-truth.

French Resistance flag, with the Cross of Lorraine

4. FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked, and let it happen. This charge has been leveled at Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the greatest President ever produced by the Democratic Party, by Republicans who don't want to give a Democrat credit for winning the war.

They want the credit for winning the war to go to Republicans like Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower (who was elected President in 1952 and 1956, solely on the basis of his wartime command, as he'd never held elective or even civilian appointive office) and Douglas MacArthur (whom the hard right really wanted in the elections of 1948 and 1952).

The argument is that FDR couldn't convince Congress to declare war on Nazi Germany, because so many of them were either big-city Democrats, with large Irish constituencies that didn't want to go to war on behalf of Great Britain, and Italian constituencies that didn't want to go to war against Italy; or Midwesterners, of both parties, in America's largest ethnic group, which, then as now, was German, and didn't want to go to war against Germany.

Therefore, the only way to get America into a war against Germany was to get it into a war with Germany's ally, Imperial Japan. So, in their theory, FDR provoked Japan by instituting an embargo on exports to them, including oil; freezing Japanese assets in U.S. banks; and supplying Japan's enemy, China, through Britain.

Every surviving document that discussed the possibility of Japanese retaliation for these measures suggests a direct countermeasure, such as economic sanctions; or an attack on a considerably closer U.S. military base, such as one in the Philippines. Which did happen: On December 7 and 8, 1941, one or the other, Japan attacked pretty much every base America had in the Pacific Ocean, and some British targets, too. As he said in his address to Congress on December 8, asking for a Declaration of War:

Yesterday, the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And, this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Malaya (Malaysia) and Hong Kong were then under British control. Congress granted the Declaration of War. America was at war with Japan. But it still was not at war with Germany. Three days later, on December 11, to aid its ally, Germany declared war on America. Only then did Congress declare war on Germany.

But the surviving documents that suggest that the Japanese would attack a U.S. military base directly mentioned the Philippines -- not the Hawaiian Islands, still a U.S. Territory. (Hawaii gained Statehood in 1959.) The idea that the Japanese were even capable of an attack on Hawaii appears not to have been considered by the U.S. Department of War. It was a complete surprise. It wasn't just that FDR didn't know: Nobody on our side knew.

5. Churchill was an incorruptible good guy. Using the term "corrupt" suggests that the subject was willing to be bribed with something -- money, power, or something else -- to achieve his goals. In that regard, calling Winston Churchill "corrupt" is ridiculous. He was always filthy rich, and could not be bought.

"You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?'

Well, do you, you old sod?"

But... "Good guy"? He hated Nazis, which was a plus, especially when few others were willing to oppose them publicly. He hated Communists, which was a plus. But he was also an Englishman of the Victorian era: He was first elected to Parliament in 1900, the last full year of Queen Victoria's life. He was a big believer in the British Empire, and no fan of the natives of its colonies.

In 1919, as Secretary of State for Air, he agreed to the Royal Air Force's request to use mustard gas in Iraq: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gases against uncivilised tribes." The Versailles Conference was going on at the time, and Churchill said, "The democratic principles of Europe are by no means suited to the development of Asiatic and African people."

This was while the Irish War of Independence was going on. As in opposition to Margaret Thatcher and the paramilitary terrorists she supported in the early 1980s, there were hunger strikers in Ireland then, too. Of them, Churchill said, "Hunger strikers will be allowed to die in jail, the more the merrier. Some of them have died already, and a damn bad job they were not all allowed to die." And this was a man who had spent part of his childhood in Ireland: His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, served as the island's Lord Lieutenant, and his brother, Jack, was born there.

Winston also wanted to maintain control of the Indian subcontinent, saying in 1942, "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." That same year, he wrote, "Eventually, the Moslems will become master, because they are warriors, while the Hindus are windbags. Yes, windbags! Oh, of course, when it comes to fine speeches, skilfully balanced resolutions and legalistic castles in the air, the Hindus are real experts! They're in their element! When it comes to business, when something must be decided on quickly, implemented, executed -- here the Hindus say 'pass.' Here they immediately reveal their internal flabbiness."

It got worse. Of Hindus, Churchill once said, "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." Famine struck the Bengal province, including present-day Bangladesh, in 1943, and over 3 million people starved to death, more than in the Irish potato famine of 100 years earlier. Churchill didn't lift a finger to send them food. For this reason, Indians, especially Bengalis, accuse Churchill of genocide, the very thing he was trying to stop the Nazis from committing.

In 1931, he said this of Mohandas Gandhi, who became world-famous with his Salt March the previous year: "It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir... striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace."

Not that Gandhi was a saint. His activities with, and feelings toward, women were unacceptable to present-day sensibilities. And on July 23, 1939, he wrote this letter to Hitler. I have not changed a word, or corrected a misspelling (as with "deliberately"):

Dear friend,

Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.

It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay the price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has seliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.

That's right: Gandhi called Hitler "friend." At best, this was incredibly naive. Forty days later, Hitler invaded Poland.

6. The Western Democracies won it. If it wasn't for the 27 million deaths, military and civilian combined, of citizens of the Soviet Union, the Nazis wouldn't have lost nearly as many men as they did.

In the years to come, America and Britain didn't want to admit anything good about the Communist nations, so they came to believe that they won the war, without Soviet help. The British like to take it a step further: They like to claim that they stood alone for 2 years until America came in, and that America has hogged the glory ever since.

It gets taken even further than that. When England play Germany in soccer, England fans sing this, to the tune of "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain":

There were ten German bombers in the air. (In the air!)

There were ten German bombers in the air. (In the air!)

There were ten German bombers

Ten German bombers

Ten German bombers in the air. (In the air!)

And the RAF of England shot one down. (Shot one down!)

And the RAF of England shot one down. (Shot one down!)

And the RAF of England

RAF of England

RAF of England shot one down. (Shot one down!)

There were nine German bombers in the air...

And so on, until there's no German bombers in the air, 'cause "the RAF of England shot them down." This overlooks the fact that, during the Battle of Britain in 1940 and '41, before America got into The War, in addition to Englishmen, the Royal Air Force had Welshmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, Africans, expatriate Americans, and exiles from all over the Nazi-controlled lands of Europe, but especially France and Poland. The French and the Polish actually exceeded those from elsewhere in the British Empire. If it had only been Englishmen in the RAF, those German bombers would have won. And the English footie fans can't even bring themselves to admit that.

7. If Hitler had only (pick your move that he could have made), he would have won the war. Unless you mean "If he hadn't invaded the Soviet Union," or "If he hadn't declared war on America." If he had never opposed the 2 strongest nations on Earth other than his own, he might have lasted long enough to get a stalemate with the 3rd of the 3 strongest other than his own, Britain, and the Third Reich might have lasted a lot longer. It wouldn't have been "The Thousand-Year Reich" that he proclaimed, but it would have lasted longer than the 12 years that it did.

But once he invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, he was doomed. Even if America hadn't gotten into the "European Theater" of the war, it would have been a matter of time before the Soviets got to Berlin. And then, Britain and France would have been faced with a Red Europe, as Stalin would have been more than happy to add the formerly Nazi-controlled countries, including France, to his Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

8. Roosevelt "sold out to Stalin" at Yalta. The last meeting between FDR, Stalin and Churchill was at Yalta, in the Crimea, on the Black Sea -- part of the territory of Ukraine that Vladimir Putin annexed to Russia -- from February 4 to 11, 1945. 

Ever since, conservatives have claimed that FDR "betrayed" Eastern Europe by leaving it to Stalin. Well, what was FDR supposed to do? Send American troops into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, et al.? In other words, provoke Stalin?

The war was not over. Germany was still fighting, even if the end, there, was in sight. Japan was still fighting, with no end in sight. The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were yet to come. FDR needed the Soviet Union in that fight. He also knew that the United Nations would be stronger after the war if the Soviets were in it. Roosevelt agreed to some concessions at Yalta, for the same reason he cut his social programs short, telling a reporter, "Dr. New Deal had to give way to Dr. Win the War."

My father, of Polish descent, was a Kennedy Democrat, but he never forgave Roosevelt, the President when he was born, for how he handled the Polish situation at Yalta. But David Reynolds, a professor of history at Cambridge University, has written:

The so-called "Yalta myths" have been a great part of Republican mythology ever since the 1940s. They were a way of attacking Roosevelt and the Democratic party and it’s been brought up at various times since. The assumption behind it is that Roosevelt "sold out" Poland and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. It’s hard really to square that with the realities of 1945. The Red Army is in control of most of Poland by the time they meet at Yalta. So unless you embarked, say, on a war to evict the Red Army from Poland, there really is nothing you can do about that.

In other words, Poland and Eastern Europe were not Roosevelt's to "sell." Stalin already had them.

If FDR "sold out to Stalin at Yalta," then so did Churchill. Because of Stalin's promises, Churchill believed that he would keep his word regarding Poland and remarked, "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I am wrong about Stalin." He was.

9. Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary to end the war. The closer the U.S. got to the Japanese home islands, the harder the Japanese army fought. With victory at Okinawa on June 22, 1945, the U.S. got as close to the home islands as could be gotten without building new, closer islands. But that battle took 12 weeks. There were 12,500 Americans killed.

Compare that total with the 4,500 killed in 8 years in Iraq. Those 12,500 were more men, in 12 weeks, than America lost in Vietnam in any single year except 1968. The Japanese lost 110,000 men, and even more civilians on the island may have been killed.

President Harry S Truman, who didn't even know about the atomic bomb project until his 2nd day in office -- that's right: FDR did not tell his own Vice President about it -- was given these figures. He asked for figures of how many soldiers would die in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, and how long it would take. He was told over 1 million Japanese, half as many Americans, and it would take at least 6 months of fighting to get Japan to surrender. Given that "X-Day," the day the invasion was set to begin, would have been November 1, 1945, that meant that the "Pacific Theater" of the war would still have been in progress by May 1, 1946.

Truman asked when the atomic bomb would be ready. He was told that the 1st test would be on July 16, and that, if successful, more would be ready to go at a moment's notice. He knew that, if the invasion happened, and the predictions for it came true (and he believed that they would), and then it came out that America had the bombs that would have ended the war before the invasion, and Truman didn't use them, the American people would blow their stacks. He knew it would destroy his reputation as a strong leader who cared about the country. He cared more about that than he did about the Democratic Party losing the 1946 Congressional elections or the 1948 Presidential election.

He gave the order to proceed. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6. On August 9, Nagasaki was bombed, and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. The Japanese knew it was only going to get worse, much worse, and surrendered on August 14, which became known as V-J Day.

10. Black men serving in the war made the desegregation of baseball possible. The line was, "If we can stop bullets, why not balls?" In 1945, Albert "Happy" Chandler, a former Governor of Kentucky and U.S. Senator, was appointed Commissioner of Baseball. (He said he took the job because he loved baseball, and because it paid better than serving in the Senate.) He cited black men serving in the war as a reason to allow them in the professional ranks of baseball.

But there was a reason Chandler was appointed to the post: It was vacant. It was vacant because the 1st and only man, to that point, to hold it, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had died in 1944. And he was a racist. While he publicly denied that there was any reason why black men couldn't play in the major leagues, there was no way he was ever going to allow it. And he loved being Commissioner, so he was never going to resign, even though he was 78 years old when he died.

And he looked old when he was

considerably younger than that.

Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Jackie Robinson to a contract on October 23, 1945. Had Landis still been alive and on the job on that date, there is no way in hell that he would have allowed that contract to stand. Not even if a black American soldier had shot Hitler, or if a black American pilot had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, or even if a black man had, by whatever means, saved Landis' own life.

Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson, U.S. Army.

Don't bother looking for a picture of Kenesaw Mountain Landis

in a military uniform: He never served, and so it doesn't exist.

If Landis were still alive in 1945, then, today, Jackie Robinson would be remembered, if at all, as a good running back for UCLA in 1940. And God only knows when a black man would have played in Major League Baseball. But it wouldn't have been while Landis was still alive.

Of course, Rickey was a lawyer. And a brilliant man. He could have sued, and argued the case very well. But Landis had been a federal Judge, meaning he was also a lawyer. He could have tied the case up for years.

If Landis had still been alive and Commissioner in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, he still would have held firm, until the Supreme Court got the case of Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. v. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and Chief Justice Earl Warren would have done what he did in Brown v. Board, and gotten a unanimous ruling in favor of the plaintiff, granting great joy to black Americans, and giving the elderly Landis a terrible public humiliation.

But it still would have been, at the minimum, the Summer of 1954, before that ruling was issued. Which means the debuts of Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks and Hank Aaron all would have been delayed -- and, given the ages of some of them, possibly prevented entirely.