The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (5 page)

THE PATHOS OF CHURCHILL

In other words, there is in
American Betrayal
no evidence to support
this Radosh claim that I portrayed Churchill as a “dupe,” or, as he writes
elsewhere, one of “Stalin’s errand boys,” or an “unwitting tool.”
Nor does Radosh offer any
.

This baseless characterization of
Churchill, falsely attributed to me, is as disturbing as any personal false
charge hurled at me in this affair. In fact, it is the pathos of Churchill in
American Betrayal
that becomes clear as
when, in the eyewitness testimony of his physician, Lord Moran, we learn of his
desperation after Tehran, bested in the “second front” argument for good, ill,
determined to get to Italy to confer with “Alex,” Gen. Harold Alexander, top
commander of Allied forces in Italy.

From
American Betrayal
, p. 275:

“This drew a medical rebuke from his physician. “I told him
it was madness to set off on a journey when he was under the weather like
this,” Moran recalled. “At this he lost his temper. `You don’t understand. You
know nothing about these things. I am not going to see Alex for fun. He may be
our last hope. We’ve got to do something about these bloody Russians.”

That was no dupe.

Radosh’s charge is, in fact,
baseless.

ABOUT RADOSH’S STRANGE YALTA APOLOGETICS

Radosh writes:

“At Yalta
Churchill did agree to the division of Europe with a Soviet sphere of influence
in the East in exchange for a promise by Stalin to accept British hegemony in
Greece. True, the way the agreement was sold to western publics was outrageous.
Stalin was presented as a leader who wanted democratic regimes in his own
sphere.
But the Yalta agreements were
concluded in order to win the war while minimizing casualties, and, in any
case, merely registered what had already occurred on the ground. It was most
certainly not the conspiracy that West conjures.”
(Emphasis added.)

I will defer comment on how Radosh
has just underplayed the catastrophes for humanity made manifest at this final
meeting of the so-called Big Three in February 1945, to note my rejection of
Radosh’s breezy denial of conspiracy at Yalta. I will simply refer readers
to
Stalin’s
Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government
by Herbert
Romerstein and M. Stanton Evans, for a cornucopia of detail about the
“conspiracy” underway at Yalta that Radosh denies.

Stalin’s Secret Agents
is a ground-breaking book, a documented
chronicle of Soviet influence operations across the Roosevelt government.
Interestingly, Radosh has mentioned the book favorably in print, which, of
course, doesn’t mean he’s read it. In fact, it’s doubtful that he did read it.
If so, he would have that learned Yalta was, in fact, much, much more than the
“conspiracy West conjures.”

American Betrayal
doesn’t treat Yalta in a systematic way,
but I cannot let stand Radosh’s shocking distortion of the Yalta agreements as
a means “to win the war while minimizing casualties.” Yalta was about making
manifest
postwar
political
concessions to Stalin arrived at in earlier conferences, and devising new ones.

As
far as “minimizing casualties,” in an article cited in
American Betrayal
,
^[8]
war historian John Keegan raised the
possibility that it was Stalin while at Yalta, which took place in early
February 1945, who was behind the Allied decision to the firebomb Dresden later
that month, killing at least 35,000 people, mainly civilians, just three months
before war’s end. Keegan wrote:

“The raid was
intended to disrupt the German defence and to lend support to the Russians,
who, it was alleged, had specifically requested it. In the days before the
raid, when it was being planned, Churchill was at Yalta agreeing with Stalin
and Roosevelt on the future of Europe.”

Keegan
continued:

“It is said that
Stalin asked for the bombing of Dresden at Yalta, though in conversation, not
on paper. It is still difficult to identify who gave the critical order. Air
Marshall Saundby, Harris's deputy, admits to approving it `with a heavy heart’.
Harris said later: `The attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military
necessity by people more important than myself.’ "

American Betrayal
discusses the Yalta agreement by which
the US and Britain participated with the USSR in what surely counts as a crime
against humanity: Operation Keelhaul. This was the forcible, often violent
“repatriation” of over two million Soviet-claimed nationals in Europe to Stalin
to death and/or the Gulag, enabled and made possible by the participation of US
and British authorities and military forces. Radosh doesn’t mention this
crucial aspect of my book at all. Indeed, I have to wonder, did Radosh miss
this part of my book, too?

He goes on, again,
book-report-style, about Yalta as extracted from Harvard’s S.M. Plokhy’s
Yalta: Price of Peace
– more
mainstream, conventional consensus history, this time drawing extensively on
Soviet sources. Radosh picks up with conference developments that have little
if anything to do with
American Betrayal
.

And then:

“But as Stalin
told Molotov when signing the Yalta accords, `Do not worry. We can implement it
in our own way later. The heart of the matter is the correlation of forces.’
That correlation of forces is something West
simply wishes away
.” (Emphasis added.)

NOT IN MY BOOK

This
is a non-sequitur.

This
relates to no part of
American Betrayal
.
I repeat: This Stalin anecdote from the Yalta conference is in no way relevant
to what is under discussion in
American
Betrayal.

The
anecdote does, however, appear in both Gaddis and Plokhy, Radosh’s go-to
mainstream, conventional consensus academics.

ABOUT OUR LOST MEN

I devote a chapter of
American Betrayal
to a discussion of
American POWs/MIAs.

Chapter 11 of
American Betrayal
is the hardest chapter of the book to read just
as it was the hardest to write because it is about what is the ultimate
American betrayal, by successive US administrations, of American fathers,
brothers, husbands, sons who became prisoners of war in 20
^th
century
conflicts, fell into Soviet hands, and never returned home. Worse, these men do
not exist in the history we continue to tell ourselves as if it were true.
Among other sources, I draw from a thorough, document-based investigation
produced by staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1990, and focus
on its findings regarding thousands of American GIs, ex-POWs of World War II,
who seem never to have returned from Soviet territory.

“Actually, as Plokhy shows, the
Soviets treated American POW’s fairly well,” Radosh writes – although I
notice he doesn’t cite any of Plokhy’s evidence, either (I don’t know if there
is any).

Here we see a recurrence of the
Radosh pattern. Once more, he is holding up a conventional, secondary source
– in this case, Plokhy’s book,
Yalta:
The Price of Peace
– and simply declaring that my primary source
research is not just wrong but so much “conspiracy theory.”

And, according to this same pattern,
Radosh never mentions my primary source research, never frames my argument in
the context of my sources, as drawn from 900-plus endnotes.

Regardless of what Plokhy “shows,”
American Betrayal
shows that from the
start “the Soviets” did not treat American POWs in “well” by any standard.

Radosh either did not read my
treatment of the subject, or he did not register the harrowing facts laid out
therein, or he didn’t wish to present them to readers. Most Americans have
never heard this story of betrayal because the US government and the media
− and now Radosh – have, in effect or by design, hidden it from
them.

I will not reprise the whole chapter
here. I will however, provide the necessary background for understanding the
extent to which Radosh gets both my book and the historical record wrong.

In the early spring of 1945 (as
American Betrayal
documents), amid
rising frustration and anger on the part of General John R. Deane and
Ambassador Averill Harriman, our chief military negotiator and ambassador in
Moscow respectively, FDR wrote to Stalin seeking, even demanding permission to
send US extraction teams into Soviet-held territory to rescue lost and sick
American ex-POWs. To call these the toughest cables to Stalin of FDR’s
presidency isn’t saying much, but it’s something. I quote directly from the
cable traffic, which includes Roosevelt and Stalin’s exchange.

For the record, here is a partial
list of the cables cited in
American
Betrayal
:

• FDR
  to Stalin, March 3, 1945
  
• Stalin
  to FDR, March 5, 1945
  
• Harriman
  to FDR, March 8, 1945
  
• FDR
  to Harriman, March 11, 1945
  
• Harriman
  to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, March 14, 1945
  
• Churchill
  to FDR, March 16, 1945
  
• FDR
  to Stalin, March 17, 1945
  
• Stalin
  to FDR, March 22, 1945
  
• FDR
  to Harriman, March 26, 1945
  

Now, back
to Radosh’s inept or dishonest misrepresentation of my work, which, again,
starts:

“Actually, as Plokhy shows, the Soviets treated American
POW’s fairly well.”

He continues:

“Nevertheless,
contrary
to West,
FDR `lost his temper with Stalin and sided completely with his
representatives in Moscow, who by now were sick and tired of Soviet ways of
doing things.

In case it’s not crystal clear,
contrary to Radosh
. I have laid out in
minute and documented detail FDR’s angry if impotent attempt, completely in
accord with his team in Moscow, to compel Stalin to permit US teams to extract
our men from Red-held territories.

In other words, Radosh is making
stuff up again.

THIS TIME,
IT’S IN MY
BOOK

Nonetheless, Radosh continues to
criticize me for failing to include such information, which,
contrary to Radosh
, is, in fact,
contained in
American Betrayal:

Radosh:

“He [FDR] sent stern messages to Stalin inspired by Averell
Harriman, no pro-Soviet stooge, who was angered by the dictator’s behavior.“

We know about both FDR’s and
Harriman’s cables – from
American
Betrayal.

In other words,
it’s in my book.

Radosh now veers once again into
non-sequitur, writing:

“FDR said to Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, his unofficial advisor
on labor matters, “Averell is right: we can’t do business with Stalin. He has
broken every one of his promises he made at Yalta.” He said this on March 24; a
few weeks before his death.”

“I
looked in vain for that statement in West’s book.” 

Why is Radosh looking in vain for a
statement
that is
not relevant
to American Betrayal
? Because it’s in Plokhy?

As with the “separate peace” fear
factor, or Stalin’s “correlation of forces,” Radosh is looking for the old,
familiar notes of consensus (read: liberal) narrative in my book. He wants to
be able to hum along to the old, familiar conventional (read: liberal) strains
he already “knows” – and, apparently, wants everyone else humming along
to forever.

He goes on, as if making a slam-dunk
debating point:

“What
is
in West’s book is a condemnation of FDR for
not doing more, for not scheduling retaliatory measures, and for not taking the
advice of those who advocated turning against the Soviets although the war was
not yet over.”

In fact, the war, at least for
American and British armies in late March 1945, was largely a matter of being
restrained or diverted so the Red Army could take up its positions in Berlin,
Prague and Vienna. Except for that gross oversight, Ronald Radosh has actually
written a factual statement about my book.

I notice, however, he doesn’t share
my abhorrence at the failure of FDR and other US officials to do more to save
thousands of American GIs, former POWs of Nazi Germany, who, according to the
document trail presented in
American
Betrayal
, appear to have been liberated from Nazi POW camps only to be
imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag.

A word about “retaliatory measures.”
The phrase is Averill Harriman’s, whom Radosh singles out for praise elsewhere
in his review, but does not acknowledge in this instance. Rather than permit
the conventional military understanding of “retaliatory measures” stand, I will
turn to Harriman’s explanation on pp. 316-317 of
American Betrayal
:

“On March
14, 1945, Harriman cabled the whole sorry story [of Soviet intransigence on POW
negotiations] to the secretary of state. He detailed Soviet obstruction of U.S.
evacuation and medical teams waiting to enter Soviet-captured territory; the
“serious hardships” of sick and wounded American GIs after years of war and
privation in German prison camps; and obvious Soviet evasions of
responsibility, as when Foreign Minister Molotov tried to blame the
(Soviet-controlled) Polish Provisional Government for the pure-Moscow snafu.