Operation Unthinkable
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The historian who wrote about Operation Unthinkable speculated that if Churchills plan had been put into effect, British troops would have refused to implement it. The evidence from the Far East suggests this wouldn't have happened. Given what we had at that point just found out about Japanese treatment of POWs it must have stuck in the throat for those involved, though.
What makes "Unthinkable" so, er, unthinkable is less the rearming of a former enemy, rather the absolute reversal of policy demonstrated by it. We declared war over Poland then fought for six bitter years at terrible cost in blood and treasure. Throughout, we supported the Russians with military supplies we could ill afford, only to, at the end, seriously consider turning their deadly foes against them.
What makes "Unthinkable" so, er, unthinkable is less the rearming of a former enemy, rather the absolute reversal of policy demonstrated by it. We declared war over Poland then fought for six bitter years at terrible cost in blood and treasure. Throughout, we supported the Russians with military supplies we could ill afford, only to, at the end, seriously consider turning their deadly foes against them.
Victor B1a
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More Unpleasentness
A chap with whom I worked on the Concorde was ex- "watercrew" on Sunderlands at the end of WWII. He was on the first Sunderland into Singers and wittnessed the "Brown Jobs" kicking Japanese off a now famous quay into the harbour and machine gunning them. No one said a word.
Originally Posted by ShotOne
Unfortunately for most Poles, this meant exchanging a Nazi jackboot for a Soviet one. Going back to the Warsaw rising, many of those Polish freedom fighters who escaped being executed or tortured by the Germans were executed or tortured by the Russians.
My ex-MiL was a Pole born in eastern Poland (now Ukraine) in the late 1920's and so was living in the area turned over to the Soviets after the German invasion in 1939. In her words, what the Germans did was nothing in comparison to what the Soviets did. She made a tape recording back in the 1970's of what happened to her and her family when the Soviets rounded them all up and put them in railway cattle trucks and trained them to the camps somewhere deep inside the USSR.
She was the only member of her family to survive the USSR camps to be 'released' to the British forces in 1942(?) and make the trip down through the USSR and via Iraq and the middle east and then onto refugee camps in South Africa.
