Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [84]
Hansen contended that if the Allies had landed in the Balkans and placed an army between Russia and Germany we would be in a position to stop future seizures like Poland. As it stood, the West might default Roumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and perhaps even Czechoslovakia. Moreover, eastern Germany and Austria were in danger.
Russian agents had stirred up revolutions in Greece and Italy, but fortunately, Hansen thought, the British commanded that area of the war and weren’t going to let them get by with it.
The final card of Poland was played. After full refusal to even deal with the London Poles, the Russians installed their own “Liberation Committee” out of Moscow to rule the country.
Having thrown Sean into a quandary with stories he had never known before, Hansen pressed his case home recalling an experience with which Sean was intimate.
When the Allies landed in France, in many towns the French Underground staged an uprising to coincide with the Allied attack. As soon as the town was liberated the Frenchmen were too busy celebrating in accepted French fashions and too relieved with the war ending for them to keep a Gallic eye on their city hall.
In fact, some French troops advanced into towns with women in their tanks and fought the last battle with one hand around a bottle or a woman. And while the Allies and the Underground were getting buried in wine and flowers and bosoms the Communists inside the French Underground quietly seized the mayoralities and police machinery of dozens of French cities. It was Hansen who issued the order to disarm the Communists, however French they claimed to be, and eject them from office.
Hansen poo-pooed the asinine “brotherhood” proclamations that followed the “big three” conferences, particularly from Yalta. The Russians subscribed to glowing statements about democracy which they did not understand and free elections which they had never held. At the same moment they paid this lip service to freedom, their hand-picked henchmen closed the book on Poland as a clear and bright signal of things to come.
Hansen decried the fact that the American General Staff had little mentality for the political situation. While the Russians and British knew enough to plan their battles in line with political advantages, the Americans walked a path of purity and innocence. This stemmed from the fact that America never was threatened by strong neighbors on her borders or even needed to keep a balance of power in her hemisphere.
Consistent with American shortsightedness, the British had to plead for permission to move across northern Germany to block it off and keep the Russians from “liberating” Denmark.
In the end American forces concentrated on an envelopment of the German Army in the Ruhr instead of choosing a rapid advance to Berlin, and Patton was called back out of Czechoslovakia. When Churchill made the last desperate plea for the Americans to dash for Berlin he was answered that Berlin had ceased to have strategic value!
When American forces pulled in back of the Elbe River, their Russian allies of the day before had begun the erection of barbed-wire barriers.
Both Russia and America had been isolationist by nature but the war changed that. Russia had become powerful. The long-smoldering giant began his move to the West. America alone could block him now.
In order to gain a right to be in Berlin, America surrendered two German provinces in another of Stalin’s typical, shrewd moves.
Hansen felt that it took no genius to figure out what would happen in Berlin when the giants met head-on. Yet, an America tired of war, unready to believe their ally of yesterday was the enemy of today, unready to accept their new status of world power would call Hansen an alarmist, a man who cried “wolf.”
And until their countrymen understood what was happening a few Hansens and a few O’Sullivans would have to step into the breach ... and