There were lots of dark sides to WWII but Jacob Hornberger recounts one which shows yet another reason why FDR was one of the worst presidents in our history. His seven-piece article focuses on the fate of POWs after the war's end where allied Russian POWs recovered from the Germans and in American hands were sent back to Russia and their ultimate doom under Operation Keelhaul, while U.S. & British prisoners of war (20,000 & 30,000 respectively) were left in Russia forever and covered up by the U.S. government (you know, the very same government that tells us we should support the troops):
How could the U.S. government tell the truth about what happened to American servicemen? To tell the truth would mean exposing American complicity in the murder of over a million innocent Russian people. It would entail a closer examination of the Allied alliance with one of the most brutal political regimes in all of history. And it would expose all the scheming and machinations that resulted in the abandonment of over 50,000 Allied soldiers to our communist "friends."
What could the U.S. government have done differently as the war approached its end? It could have negotiated a peace with Germany that entailed the exile of Nazi leaders and ensured democratic regimes in all of Germany and Eastern Europe. It could have refused to participate in one of the worst holocausts in history — the forcible repatriation of Russian anticommunists — by refusing to force them to return to the Soviet Union against their will.
If Russian forces refused to return American and British POWs, one option would, of course, could have been war against the Soviet Union. But if war was not a practical option at that point, then the least that the U.S. government owed its own soldiers was to let the world know what happened — so that the soldiers would never be forgotten. Imagine the loneliness those men must have felt as they were being transported to the Soviet gulags. They had trusted their own government. They had fought and had been willing to die at the behest of their government. They had helped to win the war. Instead of coming home to their loved ones, they were being transported from a German POW camp to a Russian gulag.
... Unfortunately, however, they were forgotten, because they were abandoned by their own government — the same U.S. government that starts out every new war with "Support the troops."
As the authors of Soldiers of Misfortunecarefully document, U.S. governmental officials not only have refused to open the files on this dark and sordid episode of World War II, they have also altered and destroyed pertinent documents. Moreover, American officials still refuse to open up the files on the forcible repatriation of the Russians as well as other aspects of World War II. They claim that national security is at stake — fifty years after the end of the war.
History may be written by the victors, but in this day of information technology, so too can the truth. And the truth is that war is a deadly game where seemingly sane minds put their trust in megalomaniacal hands to be lead to unforeseen ends for obscure reasons.
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." – Jeannette Rankin
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