Devastating tactics

I spent most of last Sunday evening yelling insults at my TV screen. ‘Berk!’ I shouted. ‘Twat!’ Then later, ‘Oily creep!’ ‘Traitor!’ ‘Tosser!’ The first person to draw my ire was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He hadn’t hitherto been that high on my list of historical hate figures — poor old dying polio bloke with his blanket over his knee, I used to think — but then I had not before seen part four of the excellent Warlords (Channel 4, Sunday).

This final episode dealt mainly with the embarrassing way that Roosevelt’s bien-pensant, patrician optimism allowed Stalin to run rings around him in the last years of the war, with disastrous consequences for almost everyone, but especially for Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe.

Here, straight from the horse’s mouth, was Roosevelt’s brilliant gameplan: ‘If I gave Stalin everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige he won’t try and annex anything, and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.’

Not long afterwards, ‘Uncle Joe’ — as so many in the West would insist on referring to him in a desperate act of collective wishful thinking — was offered the perfect chance to demonstrate this noblesse oblige when his advancing forces reached the Vistula. Needless to say, he preferred instead to show his true colours by ignoring Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s requests to help the Warsaw uprising, only doing so at the very last minute when he knew it was too late.

All this had a catastrophic effect, not just on the Poles — at least 150,000 of whom were killed, among them the wounded soaked in petrol by the Germans and burned alive — but on the thinking of the three great Allied leaders.