Katyn

September 10, 2012 7:17 AM

Newly declassified documents show the United States had full knowledge of the Katyn massacre, the Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish officers. The Soviets attempted to blame Nazi Germany. The scars of Katyn remain on Poland, after the Russian State Duma admitted and condemned Stalin's role in Katyn, a delegation of 130 prominent Poles including the President on their way to commemorate the 70th anniversary at the site died in a plane crash.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College (47 comments total)

There's a memorial in Baltimore.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:24 AM on September 10, 2012

One of the things obscured by the Downfall/Untergang parodies on YouTube is what Hitler is actually saying to his Heer generals: Stalin had it right when he liquidated the Russian officer class. Katyn is pretty much business as usual for the despots of the time.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:32 AM on September 10, 2012 [4 favorites]

For the greater good of the Allies, it was necessary to overlook some ethical shortcomings on the part of the Russians. I, for one, congratulate them and the English for not bringing up our concentration camps for Japanese Americans.
posted by Renoroc at 7:39 AM on September 10, 2012 [4 favorites]

From the Wikipedia article:

According to Edward Raczyński, Churchill admitted on 15 April 1943 during a conversation with General Sikorski^†: "Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel." However, at the same time, on 24 April 1943 Churchill assured the Soviets: "We shall certainly oppose vigorously any 'investigation' by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority. Such investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism."

† Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile
posted by XMLicious at 7:39 AM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

This is my first time reading about Katyn. I had to go back and look at that number a few times before it sank in. 22,000. The mind veers away from imagining it. Looking at the Wiki article linked in the post, the massacre included:

[...] an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots.

One dot is not enough, but it's all I have, so: .
posted by fight or flight at 7:42 AM on September 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

For the greater good of the Allies, it was necessary to overlook some ethical shortcomings on the part of the Russians. I, for one, congratulate them and the English for not bringing up our concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

I don't think Japanese internment and what the Russians did in eastern Europe are analogous. Besides that, Stalin and his leadership actively lied to their American allies about Russian war aims, in order to encircle Berlin and claim the German capital as their own.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:42 AM on September 10, 2012 [6 favorites]

Lots of stuff "came out" after the war, but Katyn is really goddamn terrible: twenty-two thousand souls, all ended execution-style. The poor, poor Poles. *sigh*
posted by wenestvedt at 7:46 AM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

This is my first time reading about Katyn. I had to go back and look at that number a few times before it sank in. 22,000. The mind veers away from imagining it. Looking at the Wiki article linked in the post, the massacre included:

This one dude was personally responsible for 7,000 of them...

You know, sometimes I read in various forums about how Obama is stalinist, and how helmet laws reflect the growing oppression of America, of some shit like that, and I just have to laugh.

When the government pays one dude to execute 7000 people over the course of a month without trial or appeal, maybe you can claim they've got to Stalin.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:53 AM on September 10, 2012 [11 favorites]

For the greater good of the Allies, it was necessary to overlook some ethical shortcomings on the part of the Russians. I, for one, congratulate them and the English for not bringing up our concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

I'm as anti-American as the next guy, but the internment camps, while not a great chapter in American history, are a far cry from systematically shooting twenty-two thousand people in the head.

I mean, Christ.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:58 AM on September 10, 2012 [20 favorites]

The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

Roosevelt let the Soviets entertain Herr Hitler so he could focus his efforts in the Pacific? Of course he did. Everyone was courting Stalin back in the day and there is no dispute that the Red Army did all of the heavy lifting in the war against Germany. Stalin and his soldiers earned it.

And not to make excuses or anything, but one has to put this massacre into some context. The Soviets had a score to settle with the Polish officer corps. It was the Polish office corps, unsatisfied with their new country's eastern borders drawn up at Versailles (without Soviet participation), who invaded Soviet territory in 1919 to create a greater Poland - just when the revolution in Russia had exhausted the Reds and Whites militarily. When Poland fell under control of the Red Army the Bolsheveki took their pound of flesh back. I'm not saying it was right, but it was not unmotivated.

Poland, like every other country, was not an innocent actor in this time and place. Recall, dear friends, that when Hitler marched into the Sudentenland in the wake of the Munich agreement with Chamberlain, Poland marched in and annexed Zaolzie "to forestall the German occupation" (which conveniently was the same excuse Hitler used when he invaded Norway to prevent a British occupation.)

Crys of "poor, poor Poland" seem a bit a bit overwrought.

Katyn is pretty much business as usual for the despots of the time.

Exactly so. I can see how FDR could make room for this.
posted by three blind mice at 8:04 AM on September 10, 2012 [12 favorites]

Didn't the British government conceal their own knowledge of Katyn because they were afraid the Americans wouldn't work with the Soviets if they knew?

This is a plot point in Robert Harris's Enigma.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 8:09 AM on September 10, 2012

Didn't the British government conceal their own knowledge of Katyn because they were afraid the Americans wouldn't work with the Soviets if they knew?

You mean the British government who concluded a mutual-defense pact with Poland which brought them into war with Germany when Germany invaded western Poland, but brought them into an alliance with the Soviets who had invaded eastern Poland?

How WC could see his country forced into war with Germany by a commitment to the defence of Poland and into the arms of the Soviets - when they both invaded Poland! - has to be one of the great political slights-of-hand of all time.

Things were much more complicated in 1930s than we can possibly imagine today.
posted by three blind mice at 8:19 AM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

This is just down the street from my house.
posted by timsteil at 8:22 AM on September 10, 2012

You mean the British government who concluded a mutual-defense pact with Poland which brought them into war with Germany when Germany invaded western Poland, but brought them into an alliance with the Soviets who had invaded eastern Poland?

Not quite.

The British government which went to war for "Poland" in 1939, but only concluded an alliance with the USSR in 1941, after the latter had been invaded by nazi Germany in turn. At which point Churchill quipped that he'd conclude a treaty with the devil himself if he was anti-Hitler.

At which point Poland had long ceased to be a priority for the British, if it ever had been. The point was the end of Hitlerite Germany, not the liberation of Poland.

Though of course we should always be wary about letting hindsight rule our understanding of the situation. We know England and France went to war for a country that would still suffer half a century of more oppression under the USSR; they didn't.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:41 AM on September 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

Renoroc. Not Again
posted by JPD at 8:50 AM on September 10, 2012 [4 favorites]

Wow. Synchronicity.

That Zaolzie link answers a question I was going to google this afternoon following a conversation I had Saturday evening with a woman who was planning to take her (84 year old Jewish) father back to "the part of Eastern Czechoslovakia that was taken over by Poland before WWII where he grew up". I'd heard of the Sudetenland, of course, but not Zaolzie.

Thanks, Three Blind Mice.
posted by notyou at 8:58 AM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Andrzej Wajda made an excellent movie about Katyn. It's beautiful for the opening scene alone, where, at the midpoint of a bridge, a group of Poles fleeing the Germans meets a group of Poles fleeing the Russians, succinctly capturing Polish history in one short bit of film.
posted by kokaku at 9:13 AM on September 10, 2012 [6 favorites]

"Roosevelt let the Soviets entertain Herr Hitler so he could focus his efforts in the Pacific? Of course he did. Everyone was courting Stalin back in the day and there is no dispute that the Red Army did all of the heavy lifting in the war against Germany. Stalin and his soldiers earned it."

You have your understanding about the American war effort backwards. Just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt resolved to follow Admiral Stark's "Germany First" plan, or Plan D, where three quarters of the American war effort would be immediately dedicated to Europe while the remaing quarter would be dedicated to simply containing Japan in the Pacific - incidentally abandoning the large garrison in the Philipines in the event of its inevitable Japanese attack.
posted by Blasdelb at 9:15 AM on September 10, 2012 [4 favorites]

How WC could see his country forced into war with Germany by a commitment to the defence of Poland and into the arms of the Soviets - when they both invaded Poland! - has to be one of the great political slights-of-hand of all time.

Things were much more complicated in 1930s than we can possibly imagine today.

Churchill became PM in May, 1940, after the commitment to Poland and after the invasion by the Soviets. Poland was completely taken over by that date.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:20 AM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

When Poland fell under control of the Red Army the Bolsheveki took their pound of flesh back. I'm not saying it was right, but it was not unmotivated.

It's probably fair to say that the Polish/Russian animosity goes back a while.*





*Centuries.
posted by Atreides at 10:37 AM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

A story made even sadder when you hear about the remarkable and not often-discussed Polish contributions to the war in term of fighter squadrons and cryptography.
posted by cacofonie at 10:57 AM on September 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

This one dude was personally responsible for 7,000 of them...

Aw jeez... the awful irony of him using freakin German Pistol!

What a horrible horrible event.
posted by cacofonie at 11:01 AM on September 10, 2012

A story made even sadder when you hear about the remarkable and not often-discussed Polish contributions to the war in term of fighter squadrons and cryptography.

Don't forget the contributions of the Polish 1st Division in Western Europe, plus all of the Poles who rose up to fight the Nazis in Poland and were slaughtered by the Germans as the Russians looked on, and were then slaughtered by the Russians after that.

Long live a free Poland.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:27 AM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

Under the circumstances, it was the right thing to do to not release this information to the public at that time, as it could've undercut the Lend-Lease program.

In short, it saved lives, but Russian and American.
posted by markkraft at 12:05 PM on September 10, 2012

There's a recent book called "303 Squadron" about the Polish flyers in the RAF. I enjoyed it. And the impact of the gift of the Enigma to the Allies by the Poles is hard to overstate.

But three bind mice, I still say "poor Poland" because -- aside from the leadership who made those Realpolitik decisions -- the common citizens of Poland got really screwed. Yes, OK, everyone in Europe got screwed, but the Poles were treated very badly indeed.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:08 PM on September 10, 2012

Getting to know about Katyn was part of coming of age here in Poland. Everyone knew the truth, yet it was officially denied until the very end of the communist regime in 1989. And most everyone believed that the world knew the truth but chose to look the other way for pragmatic reasons. It's good to have it confirmed.
posted by hat_eater at 12:11 PM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Soviets had a score to settle with the Polish officer corps. It was the Polish office corps, unsatisfied with their new country's eastern borders drawn up at Versailles (without Soviet participation), who invaded Soviet territory in 1919 to create a greater Poland - just when the revolution in Russia had exhausted the Reds and Whites militarily. When Poland fell under control of the Red Army the Bolsheveki took their pound of flesh back. I'm not saying it was right, but it was not unmotivated. Poland, like every other country, was not an innocent actor in this time and place.

Well, as Mark Twain might say, there's a difference between a war and a war crime. And let's keep in mind that from 1795 to 1918 Poland did not exist, as a national political entity in the modern sense, at all. If there were "scores to settle", I would say the Poles had one themselves. Point being that it wasn't imperial ambitions that drove Poland, but creation of a buffer zone and defense in depth (true enough, semantics) -- which both 1795 and 1939 showed to be a critical weakness of the geography with which Poland was stuck. Under the circumstances, taking advantage of the Russian Civil War was probably their last hope outside of the postwar international law regime, which has proven much more stable than the League of Nations regime or the interlocked bilateral treaty regime which preceded it.

Anyhoo. As far as the plane crash at Katyn, few events make me think so virulently history is a bitch.
posted by dhartung at 12:20 PM on September 10, 2012 [6 favorites]

"Roosevelt let the Soviets entertain Herr Hitler so he could focus his efforts in the Pacific? Of course he did. "

Not true. The US specifically made treaties and policies with the British dating back to 1941 that established that the defeat of Germany was the first priority. This became especially important, in that it forced Germany to defend itself in depth throughout Europe, drawing precious resources away from offensives in Egypt and Russia.

In reality, the first major US troop offensive in the Pacific did not occur until November 20th, 1943, when landings were made in the Gilberts, on Makin and Tarawa... and that only involved 35,000 US soldiers. Compare that to Operation Torch in North Africa, which involved at least 60,000 US troops as early as November '42. Indeed, the Americans wanted to launch an invasion on the European mainland as early as '42, but the British talked them out of it.

" I am becoming more and more interested in the establishment of a new front this summer on the European continent, certainly for air and raids. From the point of view of shipping and supplies it is infinitely easier for us to participate in because of a maximum distance of about three thousand miles. And even though losses will doubtless be great, such losses will be compensated by at least equal German losses and by compelling the Germans to divert large forces of all kinds from the Russian front."
—Roosevelt to Churchill, 18 March 1942

In truth, it's a significant disservice to all those who died in the war to suggest that the US was strictly looking out after its own interests, as opposed to also trying to help its allies resist the brutality of the Germans.
posted by markkraft at 12:32 PM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

You know, sometimes I read in various forums about how Obama is stalinist, and how helmet laws reflect the growing oppression of America, of some shit like that, and I just have to laugh.

When the government pays one dude to execute 7000 people over the course of a month without trial or appeal, maybe you can claim they've got to Stalin

Obama is ordering the execution of people without trial or appeal. While the death toll is not as bad — anywhere between 300-1000 over four years, depending on the source — there's no way to know how many have died in the drone strikes now stretching across four nations. What is known is that the Pentagon considers any military male to be a combatant, and now they don't even have to know the suspect's name before they are killed.

So, while I agree that helmet laws aren't a sign of totalitarianism, the execution of enemies of the state without any chance of due process sure as hell is.
posted by deanklear at 12:42 PM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Actually, I should correct that. Guadalcanal was first in the Pacific, dating to approximately the same time as Operation Torch in Africa. Combat in the Guadalcanal campaign initially involved about 14,000 troops, but dragged on for six months, due to unexpectedly heavy resistance. By the end of that time, about 60,000 US troops had been involved, rotated in and out of theatre.

The US public thought Japan should be the priority, and, indeed, if you look at troop deployment, there was a lot of initial deployment along the west coast and in Hawaii and other US territories in the Pacific in order to stabilize the situation and prevent further invasions... but at the same time, you had US naval personnel saying that the Pacific should get 30% of the fleet, rather than just 15%... so the emphasis was largely defensive at that time, and the US was greatly taken aback by Guadalcanal at just how tough it would be to kick the Japanese out.

Really, it's a very fortunate thing we didn't invade the European mainland in '42, because that would've been a complete disaster.
posted by markkraft at 12:49 PM on September 10, 2012

Really, it's a very fortunate thing we didn't invade the European mainland in '42, because that would've been a complete disaster.

Probably would have looked something along the lines of this?
posted by cacofonie at 12:51 PM on September 10, 2012

Indeed, it would almost certainly have looked a lot like Dieppe.

It should also be pointed out that "Europe First" was a flexible doctrine, in that Britain also wanted the US to help with the defense of Australia, which was thought to be at serious risk of attack by the Japanese. There was a rush by both Japan and the US to base troops and secure the islands between US territories and Australia, so as to maintain its supply chain and prevent Australia from nearby Japanese bases that could be used as a springboard for invasion.

In truth, we were working with the British to create an entirely new supply chain, so that the British could focus their efforts on the defense of Egypt, Malta, etc. US commanders simply didn't expect any serious Japanese defense of Guadalcanal, but they rushed into the combat because they saw signs of an airfield being built that could threaten the Australian supply chain. It was, essentially, a skirmish that both sides reenforced.
posted by markkraft at 1:12 PM on September 10, 2012

So, while I agree that helmet laws aren't a sign of totalitarianism, the execution of enemies of the state without any chance of due process sure as hell is.

Not to split hairs here, but "Stalinism" is more than just totalitarianism, and refers to a highly developed and efficiently executed political ideology - Stalinism is sometimes compared with Nazism as a matter of fact.

While the decision to kill "unlawful combatants" and civilians by drone strike is reprehensible, it's nothing new; the United States has been illegally and covertly attacking other countries for years - Operation Arc Light is a particularly destructive example of what was essentially state-sanctioned murder.
posted by KokuRyu at 1:38 PM on September 10, 2012

Tragic that FDR had to walk on eggshells, conspiring to keep dirty secrets for Stalin. How was May 1943 Cold War times? This secret was supposed kept because of the Cold War, as the article in the first link suggests. 1943 was in the middle of WWII.

It's understandable that the Nazis wanted to use the atrocity/war crime/mass murder to wedge between FDR and Stalin but why was this info not outed right after WWII? Why was this atrocity of Stalin's, of all his horrendous atrocities and genocide, kept secret until now?
That is to me weird, disturbing and an outrage that the Polish people had to struggle to get this information known, that it was not revealed earlier.

The article of the first link says: "There's a big difference between not knowing and not wanting to know," Herzog said. "I believe the U.S. government didn't want to know because it was inconvenient to them."

Why was this atrocity "inconvenient" for the US gov to talk about after Stalin died, after World War II and after the US and the Soviets were in the Cold War? Why was it kept secret for so long? Anybody got any ideas about this?
posted by nickyskye at 1:48 PM on September 10, 2012

Why was this atrocity "inconvenient" for the US gov to talk about after Stalin died, after World War II and after the US and the Soviets were in the Cold War? Why was it kept secret for so long? Anybody got any ideas about this?

After the fall of Germany, one of the first things the Russians did was blockade Berlin. The Allies spent the better part of 1946 airlifting food and supplies into Berlin.

There were other signs that the Soviets weren't done fighting and were just itching for a reason to do it. And, there were many in the NATO forces that felt the same - that a fight between the US and USSR was inevitable, so might as well have at it now.

So there was a real motivation among both sides to not antagonize the other too much in hopes of avoiding that conflict.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 1:54 PM on September 10, 2012

The Soviets may have not been done fighting but the US was transparently against them after WWII. Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, when the Soviets knew the US was attacking communist Cuba for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and the rabid anti-Communism/anti-Soviet stance of the McCarthy era.

Why would this particular info about 22,000 Polish people being mass murdered during WWII not have been outed, especially after Stalin kekked in March, 1953?

Or after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989? Or after the dissolution of the Soviet state, USSR, in August 1991?
posted by nickyskye at 2:11 PM on September 10, 2012

Why would this particular info about 22,000 Polish people being mass murdered during WWII not have been outed, especially after Stalin kekked in March, 1953?

The broad circumstances of the crime were widely known after the war, what was inconvenient was the fact that the western powers knew of its real perpetrators and chose to pretend they didn't until Stalin was no longer their ally. That's why these memos were kept secret for so long.
posted by hat_eater at 2:44 PM on September 10, 2012

and chose to pretend they didn't until Stalin was no longer their ally

Wouldn't that allied with Stalin thing have ended in 1953, when he died? So why wasn't this info outed then? Or at any of the other earlier points I mentioned, like when the Soviet era ended in 1991, 21 years ago?
posted by nickyskye at 2:54 PM on September 10, 2012

Are we on the same page? "This info" is not the information of the actual perpetrators of Katyn crime. They were known to the world since shortly after the war*. It is just the content of memos indicating that the US administration had the knowledge of Soviet guilt since 1943 - outing it would make the US of A look bad. Perhaps it has been decided that enough time has passed that nobody much cares any longer. Or that it can't make the US of A look substantially worse they do now. Or both. I don't know.
*Why, as the article claims, the White House did not take an official stance on the question of Soviet guilt until 1990 when Yeltsin finally owned up, and that despite clearly stated results of Congressional investigation of 1952, is a mystery to me. Until now I thought the western democracies officially recognized the truth.
posted by hat_eater at 3:26 PM on September 10, 2012

Lots of stuff "came out" after the war, but Katyn is really goddamn terrible

VS what?

How the Cherokee people were treated?
The people of the Bikini region?
How about Armenians vs Turkey?

How about whatever hasn't come out about Iraq 'kinetic action II', Afghanistan (not the 'Soviet goading' part), Libya and, oh say, Syria?

Plenty of bastards to go round.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:27 PM on September 10, 2012

outing it would make the US of A look bad

My point is why would this have made the US look bad if the information were outed before, since the motivation was to not aggravate Stalin? When Stalin died and the Soviet state collapsed, why couldn't this have been outed before?
posted by nickyskye at 3:38 PM on September 10, 2012

My point is why would this have made the US look bad if the information were outed before, since the motivation was to not aggravate Stalin? When Stalin died and the Soviet state collapsed, why couldn't this have been outed before?

Because by then, nobody important enough gave a shit. The US had a thousand reasons to distrust the soviets - and hundreds of massacres to pin on Stalin; one more didn't matter much. Especially as it wasn't French, British, or Americans killed in it.

I suspect that there wasn't any real reason to declassify the stuff, and so it got stuffed into a filing cabinet and looked after by Top Men until it was declassified in a routine document dump.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 3:46 PM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Stalin got the jump on the 21st century OWS and eliminated the Polish 1%!
posted by TSOL at 8:02 PM on September 10, 2012

Markkraft, et al, thank you for your thoughtful comments.

It always amazes me what wasn't in the history books in school.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:55 PM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Here's my take on the movie, from the 2008 Berlinale:

In Katyn, screening out of competition, Andrzej Wajda revisits the infamous massacre. In 1940, the Soviet army executed 20,000 Polish prisoners of war in the forest of Katyn, but after the war, the Nazis were blamed for the murders. In cold grey and brown images and with a brooding score by Krzysztof Penderecki, Wadja portrays first the run-up and then the aftermath of the massacre, telling the story of several families. Eventually, in a harrowing climax, he takes us into the forest itself, where we witness the horrifying events from the point of view of those who were killed.

The opening scenes, where families are separated, scholars arrested, prisoners deported, and fascists come knocking in the night, are proficiently executed but familiar from the scores of movies already made about World War II. I was much more intrigued with the Orwellian second half of Katyn, in which history is rewritten by the victors. Under Soviet occupation, the official version of the massacre is mercilessly enforced, and anybody who dares to say otherwise or puts the "wrong" date on a gravestone won't be heard from again.

posted by muckster at 10:44 PM on September 10, 2012

Why was this atrocity "inconvenient" for the US gov to talk about after Stalin died, after World War II and after the US and the Soviets were in the Cold War? Why was it kept secret for so long? Anybody got any ideas about this?

I'm guessing bureaucratic inertia, as Fuzzy_Butt says. But who knows? It could be some domestic politics as well. It shows FDR as a politician rather than a secular saint. Many Americans like their marble to be pure white.

In truth, though, this is merely additional evidence to a known fact. It's not news that FDR initially said he believed the Soviets were behind the killings, or that he later claimed to think otherwise (though what he actually believed, he being a politico and not reliably frank in all his conversation, is another matter).

One other reason he didn't want to make too much of the issue in 1944 is that he wanted the Polish-American vote in 1944. Awkward!

For a good discussion of the matter, see Crister S and Stephen A Garrett, 'Death and Politics: The Katyn Forest Massacre and American Foreign Policy', East European Quarterly, 20, 4 (January 1987), pp. 429–46.
posted by BWA at 8:19 AM on September 11, 2012

three blind mice: "Roosevelt let the Soviets entertain Herr Hitler so he could focus his efforts in the Pacific? Of course he did. Everyone was courting Stalin back in the day and there is no dispute that the Red Army did all of the heavy lifting in the war against Germany. Stalin and his soldiers earned it."

Just to reiterate, here is Army Chief of Staff George Marshall himself explaining what the American war strategy actually was.
posted by Blasdelb at 10:50 AM on September 16, 2012