“Both Hitler and Churchill despised Stalin. Arguably Churchill hated Stalin worse than Hitler did. But Hitler let it unhinge him where Churchill never did. Despicion was never the issue; derangement was. Churchill never stopped seeing Stalin for what he was and even ordered up a top secret plan to see whether the Soviet Union could be invaded after the Nazis fell. When he saw that the Western Allies didn’t have the means or will to do that, he accepted reality, bided his time and put his voice behind the concept of the Cold War. Hitler, on the other hand, let his antipathy towards Stalin blind him to certain realities. The result was Stalingrad and eventual defeat.”

Probably a subject for another debate at another time, Wretchard, but I think your comparisons of Hitler and Churchill vis a vis Stalin are flawed. Yes, it’s true both of them hated Stalin, but to a degree they worked with him–one cannot look at the Western-Soviet alliance of 1941-45 without also looking at the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939-1941.

I see it more as Hitler and Stalin were both ambitious gangsters who used one another when and where they could but ultimately planned on “knocking off” the other. Hitler just happened to strike first. Churchill was like the beat cop who saw both gangs for what they were. FDR was like the idealistic precinct captain who didn’t realize just what a jungle he had inherited. Or, alternately, he could be seen as a corrupt precinct captain for whom the fix was in for one side but not the other. Churchill was delighted that Hitler’s gang was taken down by Stalin’s gang but chafed under FDR’s idea that Stalin was a gangster who could be dealt with. Stalin knew that Churchill was restrained by the Americans, first FDR and then Truman–what else explains his support for Israel’s struggle against the British in 1948…?