Chapter 41 Chapter Forty-One

The Negative Front (from "The Lost World Empire") provocation in the atlantic Just as our submarine campaign began to show better results in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stepped up his countermeasures.Every month comes new reports of Roosevelt's increasingly daring move to place the U.S. Navy across the course of the convoy, in the gap between the Canadian and British convoys that were ours. The areas where the submarines had their best victories were not dramatic to newspaper readers, but ominous to our General Staff.Vice Admiral King of the U.S. Navy brazenly declared: "The western hemisphere starts from the twenty-sixth longitude of west longitude." up.In addition to "neutral patrols", the U.S. Navy also secretly engaged in some escort activities.Taking advantage of German tolerance and the ignorance of the United States Congress, this heinous act of war has succeeded.Finally, in May of this year, the president declared a "national emergency indefinitely," slyly suggesting that Americans might actually have to shed some blood if things got worse.Thus he publicly justified his increasingly British intervention.

But this was preceded by comprehensive talks between the British and American military staffs in Washington in January in extreme secrecy that went far beyond any meeting between Germany and Italy.At the meeting, the two sides agreed that once a global war broke out, the policy of "Germany first" would be adopted.This is the neutrality of the United States in 1941, and this is Roosevelt's dedication to his people.All the while he spouted assurances to the American people that the United States would never enter the war as long as Britain received sufficient aid.Churchill conspired with him.His famous speech that ended with "Give us the guy and we'll get the job done" also provided cover for his subterfuge—a statement Churchill himself knew full well was utterly empty.Yet the most egregious interventions by the American president during this period were in the Balkans.The Balkan campaign of 1941 did not have to happen.Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt instigated a manageable political problem into a brutal armed conflict.Yugoslavian perfidy:

donovan's mission Roosevelt was known to send unofficial envoys, often bypassing existing diplomatic channels and formal government agencies.In this way, if the conspiracy he planned is exposed, he can be irresponsible and will not leave any written records.He can explore, ask without obligation.Among the emissaries he sent, the most famous was Harry Hopkins, who assisted him in his unfortunate plan of general support for the Bolsheviks.Next was Colonel William Donovan, who founded the notorious OSS spy network late in the war.In March 1941, Donovan visited Yugoslavia, which spelled disaster for the country.It is a pure war crime for an American president to intervene in the political situation in the Balkans in order to drag other countries into the anti-German war when the war in Greece is in full swing.Yet that was Donovan's mission, and he succeeded.

We did not start the Greek War.It was the aborted adventure of our paper ally, Benito Mussolini.In the summer of 1940, Mussolini had ordered his Libyan troops to invade Egypt.Britain was fighting for survival on home soil.He thought Italy could grab the Mediterranean empire on the cheap.In October, he ordered the invasion of Greece.In typical theatricality, he timed the invasion on the day of his meeting with Adolf Hitler in Florence.Beforehand, he told Hitler nothing.Mussolini was eager to show the Führer that he was not a vassal, but a daring military conqueror like Hitler. Unfortunately, in just a few weeks, the tiny Greek army crushed the Italians, drove them to Albania, and captured the Italian base at Edda.After this political and military disaster, the dictator who partnered with Hitler was revealed to be nothing but an incompetent, gaping-mouthed fool.The British in Egypt mustered up their morale and counterattacked.As soon as Britain showed its might, Mussolini's "indomitable army" either fled with incredible speed, or surrendered in the most cheerful mood of the holiday.This is a shameful performance rarely seen in the history of modern warfare.The Italian Army was clearly not interested in fighting and was useless.Back in November, most of the Italian navy was broken while anchored in the port of Taranto. (Britain's brilliant torpedo-bombing raid from aircraft carrier planes was later successfully imitated by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.) Thus, our southern flank was exposed.Hitler was fiercely loyal to his only true ally, Mussolini.For political reasons, he believed that the Italians should be supported.At the same time, the neutralization of the Balkans to the south of us is important due to our imminent invasion of the Soviet Union.In order to avoid the spread of the flames of war in Greece, the Fuehrer made a brilliant political move, planning to use a few elite German divisions to extinguish it in one fell swoop.He wisely seized Romania's oil fields and forced a realignment of relations between Hungary and Germany.He ignored Russian protests and sent troops through Bulgaria to fight in Greece.Roosevelt's emissary arrived in Belgrade just as preparations were being made to settle the Balkans.

Simovich Cabal Winston Churchill had a wild idea of ​​dragging both neutral Yugoslavia and Turkey into this Greek mess, thereby opening up a major battleground against us in the Balkans - where the peoples of other countries were as usual Die fighting for Britain.In January, Donovan tried to interest Yugoslavia in Churchill's ploy, but Prince Regent Paul pushed the American intervention away.However, Donovan finally got in touch with a cabal in the Serbian military led by Air Force General Simovic.Yugoslavia was cobbled together from the Versailles Agreement, torn apart by the incompatibility between the German-friendly Croats and our bitter rivals, the Serbs.The Serbian military applauded Churchill's rash plans - remember, it was Serbian daredevils who started World War I in Sarajevo.When Donovan visited in March, he found that the British plot was about to collapse.Because under heavy pressure from the head of state, Yugoslavia was about to join the Axis powers.At this time, Roosevelt sent a strongly worded note to the Yugoslav government. This document has been recorded in history: "The American government is not only looking at the present, it is also looking at the future. Any country that can be easily occupied as an excuse , submitting to orders, will garner less world sympathy than a nation that stands up to resistance—even if that resistance lasts only a few weeks."

This is actually an order from the President of the United States, five thousand miles away, to Yugoslavia to get involved in a war against Germany, or it will be punished in a future peace treaty!Rarely have acts of brutality more ruthless than this in the annals of man.Yugoslavia, through Prince Paul, gave the American ambassador a noble no: "You great country is cruel. You speak of our honor, but you are far away." This is the turn of the Simovich cabal, which has been instigated and encouraged by the promises of the United States.This group has spread like a cancer throughout the Yugoslav armed forces.Through overnight bloodless revolutions, the conspirators overthrew the government, seized power, and canceled the agreements with the Axis powers.Subsequently, the Serbs happily took to the streets to parade.Western newspapers expressed comfort and praise to the "heroic Yugoslavs".

"Punishment Action" However, all this is just a flash in the pan.Adolf Hitler ordered the swift and merciless destruction of Yugoslavia.He had to do it.If a cabal in the Balkans were to succeed in openly defying Germany, it would be sure to spark bloody rebellions everywhere in our peaceful new European order. "Operation Punishment"—A heavy bombing razed Belgrade to the ground on April 6.The German Army conquered Yugoslavia in eleven days and at the same time began its march on Greece.Hitler let Germany, Italy and the Balkan allies carve up Yugoslavia.As a state, it no longer exists (although Bolshevik partisan activities in the mountains are still a nuisance).The troubled people of Yugoslavia paid the price for Churchill and Roosevelt's machinations with a large number of deaths, army surrender and national destruction.

From a technical point of view, the Yugoslav campaign was admirable.A quick victory always looked easy, but the terrain was mountainous and the Yugoslav army had over a million strong soldiers.The German Army won by the resoluteness of the head of state and the swiftness of the attack.The battle plan for this campaign had to be worked out by the German High Command in one sleepless night, because unlike our previous land operations, there was no ready-made battle plan for the invasion of Yugoslavia in the archives.However, the plan was still executed flawlessly, and it is incredible that our casualties were less than 600 soldiers.

One of the most boring clichés about World War II is that Hitler was defeated because he had unleashed a personal rage against Yugoslavia by delaying the attack on the Soviet Union for a long time in order to exact revenge on a small but harmless neighbor. Precious three to five weeks.In fact, Hitler's decision was made out of necessity.A hostile front in the Balkans, so close to the Romanian oil fields to the south, could not be tolerated when an attack on Russia was planned.As for the fury of the head of state, it was a way for him to urge the generals.As embarrassing as it is to be the target of such a temper, the tactic has worked time and time again.The lost time argument is also not worth refuting, since it is the weather and ground conditions that dictate the timetable for our operations against the Soviet Union.

It must be admitted, however, that Germany would have been much better off had Italy remained out of the war.It is very advantageous to secure the flank with a zone formed by several neutral countries.All Mussolini did was add to our negative front the two giant peninsulas of Italy and the Balkans.In the end, the war was decided on the traditional battlefield in Europe—that is, the vast northern plain from the Volga to the English Channel. However, due to the dispersion of troops on the southern front, we could not produce a huge force on the traditional battlefield. This is a fatal mistake.

mediterranean strategy Some of our top generals, including Hermann Göring and Admiral Raeder, urged the Führer as early as 1941 to seize Gibraltar, North Africa and the Suez Canal, now that the war had spread south against our will in order to free the The Mediterranean hits Britain.The English front was overstretched, and they were too thin to stop the attack.That way we could seal off our southern flank with the impassable Sahara Desert, and Britain's air routes to Africa and Asia would be cut off.The blow to British morale and supply lines should have brought Churchill down and the peace we and the British so badly needed could have been achieved. Hitler would love to do this, but the Spanish dictator Franco perfidiously refused to join us in fighting the British—after Germany had won the civil war for him—and the Führer was not interested.The main thing on his mind was the invasion of Russia.Just when the overall situation was ready to attack the Soviet Union, the situation in North Africa, Yugoslavia and Greece changed, and he immediately acted energetically, quickly and decisively.Our armed forces are invincible.The history of the time is full of glorious German victories, one after another. catastrophic folly of churchill Winston Churchill did our cause a favor with a strategic botch that rivaled Mussolini's.When we entered Greece, the British army in Africa was sweeping through Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the Italians were fleeing or surrendering everywhere.That is the perfect time for Britain to sweep through North Africa and stabilize its lifeline in the Mediterranean before we have time to make a big attack in the future.Churchill, however, wrote that although he knew the strength of the British His strength was very poor, not enough to compete with the German army on the Greek peninsula for a long time, but he felt "bound by morality" and had to send troops to aid Greece.Therefore, he drew the elite from the invincible African troops, missed the favorable opportunity for a large-scale offensive in Africa, but threw the drawn troops into the battlefields of Crete and Greece, and was soon defeated, with heavy casualties, and the remnants had to withdraw out, a reenactment of a little Dunkirk, because in Greece it wasn't the Italians they were fighting.When the soldiers who survived returned to Africa, they found that they were facing the Germans again, because when they were transferred to Greece to fight, Rommel had led his famous African division to land in Tripoli and consolidated the position.That would have ended the merry Brits' easy victory in Africa.As elsewhere, it was up to the Americans to rescue them again. "Morality" has nothing to do with Churchill's stupidity.His fascination with the Balkans began with his defeat at Gallipoli during World War I.Such an obsession had alienated him from Roosevelt late in the war.In councils of war he was reduced to a pitiful vassal, babbling in vain about the Balkans to the Russians and Americans, while they coldly ended the war on the northern plains according to plans laid out by sound strategic principles. If Churchill had not intervened in the Balkans and had allowed his generals to end the African campaign early in 1941, the destruction of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Allied landings in Morocco, Sicily, and Italy might have been unnecessary.The war could perhaps be shortened by two years, and both sides spared much horror and bloodshed.But that's not the case. Translator's Note: Long gave an unlikely explanation for Colonel Donovan's visit to Yugoslavia.The Simovich revolution was mass.Most Yugoslavs were willing to risk Hitler's wrath.They paid the price, and they earned the respect of America and the world.The present unique friendship between Communist Yugoslavia and the United States has its origins in that heroic resistance of 1941.But even if Long's conclusions are factual, it seems that Roosevelt and Churchill were blamed for the devastation suffered by Yugoslavia, while the little fact that the Germans burned Belgrade to ashes with Molotov cocktails, occupied its territory, and massacred its people is totally unacceptable. It would be foolish not to mention it. It is true that President Roosevelt used emissaries at times; but their importance has been exaggerated by films and books that seek outlandish tension, and by some military histories.These emissaries generally only do some secondary heavy work, mainly for the sake of speed or confidentiality, and the effect through formal channels is not so good.It would be inaccurate to lump Harry Hopkins or Colonel Donovan with such nobodies.