“That Churchill was a warmonger who destroyed Germany only to hand Europe to Stalin, or that he should have prevented the war.”
He was the first to warn of Hitler, the first to warn of Stalin, and had plans to fight the Soviets if necessary.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
— Winston Churchill (Fulton, 1946)
Two contradictory charges are often levelled at Churchill: first, that he was a “warmonger” who unnecessarily provoked Hitler; and second, that he “betrayed” Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Both are false.
Churchill famously called WWII “The Unnecessary War”—not because it shouldn’t have been fought, but because it could have been prevented had the world listened to him earlier. Throughout the 1930s, whilst the establishment appeased Hitler, Churchill demanded rearmament. Had Britain stood firm in 1936 or 1938 as he urged, the catastrophe might have been averted.
The claim that Churchill “gave” Poland to Stalin at Yalta is geostrategic nonsense. By 1945, the Red Army was already occupying Eastern Europe. Churchill had no power to evict them without starting World War III. However, he did not accept this quietly. He commissioned Operation Unthinkable, a secret war plan to attack the Soviet Union to liberate Poland. His military chiefs deemed it suicidal, but the existence of the plan proves he never “accepted” Soviet dominance.
Far from being Stalin’s dupe, Churchill was the first world leader to publicly warn of the Soviet threat in his 1946 Fulton speech, declaring that an “Iron Curtain” had descended. He defined the Cold War before the Americans even acknowledged it.