I am afraid that the top side is not completely satisfied with my work… They are naturally disappointed that I failed to chase the Hun out of Italy but there was no military reason why I should have been able to do so. In fact there is no military reason for “Shingle”. – Major General John P. Lucas
The Royal Fusiliers Company C were not the only men sacrificed for the imbibing hereditary duke beyond the Cliffs of Dover. The Battle of Monte Cassino and its sub theaters were a great multicultural event.
The last time so many nations had uplifted and hurled themselves at an object was before black powder had been harnessed, and the destination was Jerusalem.
Marocchinate, used against Italian women, was not simply an Arab disease. The greatest amount of rape was yet to come, and if Hitler was correct to place over 90% of his forces to the East, we should have a good reason why after reading this article.
When discussing World War Two, Americans generally know very little. First of all, we think that we defeated Germany and that the French gave up and let gallant SS officers parade their finest Parisian women through the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Blitzkrieg shot down the nations of the continent like dominoes. The Brits had a sea between them and the Panzers. We had an ocean.
It was the Eastern Front where National Socialism and International Communism were waging a war of absolute annihilation where it was impossible that both were to be left standing, and it was here were 95% of German soldier casualties would transpire.
Japanese surrender in the Pacific Theater was also contingent on the Soviets halting their expansion beyond Manchuria.
What was so bad about the Russians? They were, after all, our allies.
Well lets take a look at the perception of some of their victims. The Ukraine had been starved to death without remorse during the 30’s. Was this the fate that awaited any resistor to Stalin?
It wasn’t only Americans that had gasped in horror about life under the Hammer and Sickles. There were already millions of people who had experienced it first hand.
After the War, Eisenhower marched German children through Belsen to make then feel bad, collectively. In order to feel bad about war crimes, you need to have a conscious to begin with. No one has wasted their time with this method in Russia.
Back to Monte Cassino, the soldiers who raised the flag over the monastery there were Polish. Remember that country? It had been provocative with Germany before the war, but thought the good men on the Thames had their back, and how did that work out for them? It was cut in half by the two most powerful armies in the world, and decapitated of its intellectual elite in the frozen tundra of Katyn.
Churchill saw Poland as a pawn, but who didn’t he see this way? When we view him cajoling others to thrust themselves into machine gun fire, it is not only Roger Water’s father at Ansio.
But a cemetery of the victims of this man could rival that of any other tyrant in history. Yet his side won, so we won’t be able to topple his bronze statues for quite some time, if ever. Churchill built his empire shooting men with spears, and lost it to men with guns. Now lets return to the East.
Last month, an art student in Gdansk erected a statue memorializing the rape victims of the Red Army. But he is Polish, weren’t the victims German women? No, hundreds of thousands were Polish women from 8 to 80.
This was the liberation that Poland received by the allies of Churchill, not to mention another 45 years of Soviet occupation.
Churchill gave Poland to Stalin on a silver platter. Trusting this man proved as fatal to a nation as any other time in history. His peers disabused him of power almost immediately after the war. Unfortunately the rest of Europe couldn’t undo his errors so easily.