And they lived happily ever after . . .

Unless, of course, the British and Americans were to gut their armies in Italy to reinvade the continent from northern France.

James writes, “The point is that the political implications of the Russians having the only army ready to march into a deflated Nazi Reich no longer exist. So far as geographical considerations go, Americans, British and Russians all have a chance.”51

If Stalin was reading along, he probably burst a krovenosnyi sosud. Not that he had much to worry about. Roosevelt, we know for a documented fact, by this time already regarded the Soviet conquest of half of Europe as a fait accompli. We know this because Cardinal Spellman, after spending ninety minutes with Roosevelt on September 3, 1943, nine days before James’s story ran in the newspaper, typed up an aide-mémoire of an extremely disturbing conversation in which Roosevelt said exactly that. (I first read about Spellman’s conversation in Martin Dies’s memoir, where Dies notes that FDR made similar remarks to him as early as 1940.) “The European people will simply have to endure the Russian domination in the hope that in ten or twenty years they will be able to live well with the Russians,” Spellman recounted FDR saying at this pre-Tehran, pre-Yalta moment. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bessarabia, the eastern half of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Germany—FDR conceded all to Communist regimes or Soviet protection! What is most weird and most disturbing about Roosevelt’s obdurate fatalism is that the entire Red Army at this time was still inside the USSR.

Spellman’s notes continued, “Finally, he hopes, the Russians will get 40% of the Capitalist regime, the capitalists will retain only 60% of their system, and so an understanding will be possible.”52 Convergence again. Convergence would rule, and neatly so.

Poor inkstained wretch James, meanwhile, had no idea the fix was in—in the president’s mind, anyway, which is where it really counts. Relying on precepts of pure Western logic, not muscular Marxist-Leninist strategy, the Times-man inserted the $64,000 question into his September 12, 1943, article: “What is there Stalin could gain from an Allied front in France which he could not gain from an Allied front in Italy, or another one in the Balkans?”

The answer to James’s question, of course, was nothing—if, that is, Stalin’s objective was the speedy defeat of Germany. But it wasn’t. It never was. On the contrary, as Russian historian Viktor Suvorov argues, Stalin wanted war to last as long as possible in order to exhaust both Germany and its Anglo-American opponents. Stalin was fighting to expand the Communist Empire. He wanted open-ended war to do so. He had been wanting such a war since the Spanish Civil War, back when his intelligence commissars failed to drag the Allied powers into it (and were shot for their failure), as Suvorov also argues. As his joined-at-the-hearts-and-minds ally, then, so, too—sometimes nefariously, mostly unconsciously—were we then fighting to expand the Communist Empire. Hardly anyone noticed, though.

[NB: Nor, according to my very bizarre detractors -- and I think this is a key point -- are we supposed to notice today.]

Timesman James continued, bubbling over with good sense, “Any time or any place where German forces are engaged by the Americans and the British represents good luck for Stalin. That is true because Hitler’s strength is taxed just as much by fighting to the south as it would be fighting to the west.”

He was right, but such Anglo-American “fighting in the south” wasn’t in Stalin’s interest. Anglo-American “”fighting in the west” was. That’s because taxing Hitler’s strength alone wasn’t the issue, couldn’t be the issue, not if Stalin were to succeed in his territorial designs. It was these divergent war aims that were at the crux of the tension and division among the “Big Three” Allies: namely, whether World War II was for simply defeating Hitler or for “Saving Marshal Stalin.” 

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