"Stuart Wilkes" wrote in message
om...
"John Mullen" wrote in message
...

snip

We did not badly to win the air and sea battles with Nazi Germany.
Neither
was easy and both had costs attached. Of course we couldn't have won
overall
without the support of the USA and the USSR, both of which in their own
ways
hedged their bets until the decision to enter the war was forced upon
them.

Not by their choice. The Soviets had alliances with Czechoslovakia
and France since 1935, and offered Great Britain and France a full-up
Triple Alliance with all the trimmings on 17 April 1939. Too bad
Chamberlain refused to take it seriously, preferring to pursue
Anglo-German agreement.


Given that Stalin had

1) Reneged on his agreements with Czechoslovakia when that nation
asked the Soviets to intervene in 1938

2) Just finished decimating the Red Army by killing three out of five Soviet
marshals, fifteen out of sixteen army commanders, sixty out of 67
corps commanders, and 136 out of 199 divisional commanders
and 36,761 officers.

3) Had just presided over the man made famine in the Ukraine

Its scarcely suprising that Soviet promises were viewed with
a degree of scepticism.


Of the two, that of the USSR was IMO the less honourable.

They had been excluded from the prewar European diplomacy, and their
alliance offers to the Western Allies refused. Once that was clear,
they looked after themselves. Nothing dishonorable about that.


The secret codicils to the Soviet-German non-aggression pact
were scarcely honorable , neither was the Soviet invasion
of the Baltic states and Finland, unless you consider that
the Finnish hordes poised to sweep across the borders
of the USSR were a major threat to the Rodina.

Fact is Stalin was already secretly negotiating with Germany in
1938 and thought he could cut a cosy deal with his buddy
Adolf and carve up Central Europe between them.

Oops

Keith