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Documentary, Franklin D. Roosevelt - The Wheelchair President Episode 1 (WWII
Examine how President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ailing health and failing marriage impacted the conclusion and aftermath of World War II. Episode 1: Host Reynolds exposes the cover-up of Roosevelt's failing health and its impact on his wartime decisions and tough talks with Stalin and Churchill. Recorded by World at War
#FranklinDRoosevelt #Documentary
Examine how President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ailing health and failing marriage impacted the conclusion and aftermath of World War II. Episode 1: Host Reynolds exposes the cover-up of Roosevelt's failing health and its impact on his wartime decisions and tough talks with Stalin and Churchill. Recorded by World at War
#FranklinDRoosevelt #Documentary
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LearningTranscript
00:00I have just done something that Franklin Delano Roosevelt could never do on any day of his 12-year presidency.
00:241945
00:25As the global war reached its devastating climax, Franklin Roosevelt was the supreme figure of the wartime alliance, but also a man living on borrowed time.
00:45Roosevelt's health was collapsing, sapped by chronic heart disease and by two decades as a secret paraplegic.
00:56One wartime American general nicknamed him Rubberlegs, but few Americans were aware that their president could not walk unaided, or that he'd been diagnosed as being on the brink of cardiac failure.
01:11Despite these secrets, however, the public Roosevelt stands as one of America's most remarkable presidents.
01:25He crafted a new deal to drag America out of the depression of the 1930s.
01:31And amid the catastrophe of World War II, he envisioned a new deal to redeem the whole world.
01:46We are going to win the war, and we are going to win the peace that follows.
01:56Roosevelt would not survive the war, yet his desperate bid to create a lasting peace, and his tangled legacy in the post-war world, is one of the great stories of the 20th century.
02:09By 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was a man inspired by visions of a better world, yet also gripped by deep personal anxieties.
02:22America's, America's wheelchair president, racing to shape the future, before his past caught up with him.
02:31At the beginning of November 1944, American forces were delivering killer blows to the enemy.
02:53The American army dominated the war in Western Europe.
03:03In the Pacific, the American Navy had penetrated deep into Japanese coastal waters, to hunt down enemy ships.
03:14At home, the arsenal of democracy was producing more combat aircraft than Britain and Russia combined.
03:26Pundits were already talking of the superpowers, with America in a league of its own.
03:38Franklin Roosevelt had been elected president for an unprecedented fourth term.
03:43He was the most powerful man in the world, yet, ironically, one powerless over much of his own body.
03:53On election night, 7th of November 1944, Roosevelt sat here on the front porch of Springwood,
04:00the family mansion in Hyde Park, some 75 miles north of New York, savouring the taste of victory.
04:06From the porch, FDR could look along the avenue to the Albany Post Road.
04:15It was a view he knew so well.
04:18In the early 1920s, he'd stared at it day by day, in a mixture of hope and despair.
04:25A mere quarter-mile, this was a journey he longed to make, but for years his legs couldn't manage it,
04:34and now his heart was too weak as well.
04:36Franklin Delano Roosevelt's character was forged in a unique crucible of privilege and then adversity.
04:52He was the only son of wealthy New York gentry, one of the River families whose grand estates spread out expansively along the banks of the Hudson.
05:04After a pampered childhood, dominated by his widowed mother Sarah Delano Roosevelt,
05:11he went to Groton, modelled on the English Victorian public schools,
05:16on to Harvard, and then into a Manhattan law firm.
05:21A good springboard for politics.
05:24Roosevelt also married well.
05:27Eleanor was his fifth cousin once removed, and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt.
05:32She brought a wealth of useful connections for a young man with political ambitions.
05:41Over the next eleven years, she gave birth to a girl, Anna, and five boys, one of whom died before his first birthday.
05:51Eleanor was an intelligent, intense, but shy young woman.
05:56Marriage gave her new confidence and poise, but she was still prone to crippling nerves,
06:01and to what she called Griselda moments, when she went into a deep sulk.
06:06The young FDR, by contrast, modelled himself on Uncle Ted with his brash Woolwin style,
06:19even though his own branch of the family were Democrats, not Republicans.
06:26His early political career was dazzling.
06:29FDR rose through New York State politics to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I,
06:37while still in his thirties.
06:38The Navy became a lifelong passion, but even more enduring was the influence of his wartime boss, President Woodrow Wilson.
06:50Wilson tried to sell Americans on his vision for a lasting peace, built around the League of Nations.
06:57But the Senate rejected his plans, America slipped back into isolationism, and Wilson himself was laid low by a massive stroke,
07:08which paralysed him and the remainder of his presidency.
07:12For the rest of his life, FDR would be inspired by Wilson's political ideals,
07:17and also haunted by Wilson's personal tragedy.
07:25In 1920, aged 38, FDR ran as the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate.
07:32Although the Democrats lost, he was clearly a rising star,
07:37yet one already with secrets.
07:39This was a man who flew high, but lived dangerously.
07:48FDR revelled in the attention that came with politics.
07:52In 1918, one journalist penned this almost sensuous portrait.
07:58His face is long, firmly shaped and set with marks of confidence.
08:03Intensely blue eyes rest in light shadow.
08:05A firm, thin mouth breaks quickly to laugh, openly and freely.
08:11Roosevelt knew he was attractive to women, and he enjoyed it.
08:17Although married with a family, he was an incorrigible flirt.
08:22But his affection for Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's secretary, was no mere flirtation.
08:28We're all alone, no chaperone can get our number.
08:35The world's in slumber, let's misbehave.
08:39Lucy was tall and elegant, with a rich voice, deep eyes and a dazzling smile.
08:46Just how far things went between them during World War I is not clear.
08:50But FDR seems to have talked for a time about marriage.
08:53Their letters were certainly passionate, as Eleanor discovered when she found them by chance in 1918.
09:05Shocked, in panic for a while, she felt utterly betrayed.
09:10There was talk of divorce.
09:12Franklin's mother, Sarah, weighed in hard, warning her son that if he renounced his wife, shaming the family name, she would disinherit him and he would not get another cent.
09:26FDR had to listen.
09:29But the prize extracted by Eleanor for staying together was Franklin's promise that he would never see Lucy again.
09:36The affair would have ended many marriages.
09:42But Franklin still admired and respected Eleanor.
09:46Her fierce intelligence, her passionate sense of right and wrong.
09:51For her part, Eleanor still believed in Franklin.
09:56Maybe even loved him.
09:58Though theirs was almost certainly no longer a sexual relationship.
10:01And the tension eased in 1920 when she learned that Lucy had married a wealthy New York businessman.
10:13But then in August 1921 came a different and even more devastating setback for the Rosevelds.
10:20FDR was struck down by poliomyelitis.
10:24The disease was generally known as infantile paralysis because it particularly afflicted children, causing them to scream in agony and lose control of their bodily functions.
10:42Gradually, painfully, Roosevelt began to recover.
10:45But his thighs and legs remained unusable and he was confined to a wheelchair.
10:53Hating the hospital variety, FDR had wheels put on ordinary wooden chairs, which were less obtrusive.
11:01He had a special car made, which he could drive without using any foot pedals.
11:05At Springwood, ramps were installed.
11:08And he was moved from floor to floor via a pulley lift in the servants' quarters, originally used for cases and trunks.
11:18Let me be blunt about what Polio had done to this handsome, ambitious, virile politician.
11:28He was now a man who could not dress or undress himself, who had to be heaved into bed or placed on a toilet.
11:42In the language of the time, he was now a cripple at the age of 39.
11:49How would he face such a life?
11:51Franklin's mother was once again quite sure what the future must be.
11:58Her beloved son should retreat to the Hudson and retire from public view.
12:08But FDR refused to heed his mother's wishes, intent on making a political comeback.
12:14He called his polio a childish disease, something that a strong adult should simply outgrow.
12:23Against all the odds, this mama's boy, whom she dressed for much of his childhood in girls' clothes and little Lord Fauntleroy outfits, dug deep, finding an iron determination and radiating hope.
12:39FDR had a simple, straightforward faith in God.
12:50Like his father, he was a vesterman at the local Episcopal church and was sustained by an underlying belief that Providence was watching over him.
13:03In the worst sleepless nights of his illness, he would tell himself that this was trial by fire, testing his moral fibre for challenges to come.
13:16That faith and resilience would become an essential part of his charisma as a political leader.
13:22As he would say in later life, once you have spent two years trying to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion.
13:31Roosevelt's battle with himself accentuated the secretiveness ingrained in him as an only child.
13:50Being mysterious, holding his cards close to his chest would become central to FDR's political identity,
13:58allowing him to be all things to all men.
14:04In 1939, the Washington Press Corps caricatured him as the Sphinx.
14:11Even those closest to Roosevelt only understood a fraction of his mind and very little of his heart.
14:20He often said that he never let his left hand know what his right was doing.
14:30Which hand am I, Mr President?
14:33Asked Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau anxiously on one occasion.
14:38Morgenthau was an old friend and Hudson Valley neighbour.
14:41Roosevelt smiled sweetly.
14:44You are my right hand, then he added, but I keep my left under the table.
14:53Divide and rule, that would be Roosevelt's motto.
14:57In politics as in private life.
14:59No one stereotyped as a man in a wheelchair could hope to succeed politically in that day and age.
15:12Somehow Roosevelt had to walk again, or at least appear to.
15:20He was fitted with a heavy steel corset and braces, running from hips to heel.
15:25The weight was exhausting and the metal cut into his body.
15:30But the braces, when locked, enabled him to stand.
15:38He then worked to build up his torso so he could manoeuvre his locked pelvis and legs forward.
15:45Finally, he tried to walk.
15:47Every morning, imprisoned in what looked like something out of a medieval torture chamber,
15:58Roosevelt would stand near the house and vow,
16:01I must get down the driveway today.
16:04Then he would set out towards the gates,
16:08using crutches to heave each side of his body forward.
16:12After a few steps, he'd pause to rest, covered in sweat.
16:17Sometimes he'd crash to the ground and have to be put back fuming into his wheelchair.
16:24FDR never abandoned hope that he'd make it right down to the Albany post road.
16:31But after a couple of years of lumbering failure,
16:34it became clear that he could not walk freely.
16:39He would have to con the public that he could.
16:47His chance came in the election campaign of 1924.
16:53Roosevelt was booked to give the nominating address
16:55at the Democratic Party Convention in New York on behalf of the candidate Al Smith.
17:02This would be his first appearance in public since polio struck in 1921.
17:08He practised for hours with his teenage son James,
17:12so as to be ready to take those few vital steps.
17:15Behind the scenes, Roosevelt was helped to his feet and his leg braces locked in place.
17:26Then James gave him his crutches.
17:29FDR slowly heaved himself across the stage,
17:39eyes down, face fixed in concentration.
17:46The audience watched in riveted silence.
17:51In the gallery, Eleanor knitted like a maniac.
17:55When he reached the rostrum, Roosevelt handed back his crutches.
18:06He held onto the podium for dear life,
18:10grinning broadly as the crowd cheered.
18:15Roosevelt spoke for a full half hour with energy and animation,
18:21seeming almost to glow in the spotlights.
18:23At the end, he praised Al Smith as the happy warrior of the political battlefield,
18:31a reference to Wordsworth's poem honouring Admiral Lord Nelson.
18:36But it was clear from press reaction that the happy warrior
18:41who stood out on that hot June day in New York,
18:46was not Al Smith.
18:48Franklin Roosevelt.
18:49Smith failed to win the presidency in 1924 but tried again in 1928,
19:00with Roosevelt once more making the speech of nomination,
19:04this time in Houston, Texas.
19:05By now, FDR was an accomplished public speaker.
19:11More important still, he had become a public walker.
19:16Fitted with steel braces and gripping the arm of his son, Elliot,
19:21this time FDR walked to the podium using only a cane.
19:25The speech was a complete success.
19:30Americans concluded that Roosevelt had clearly recovered.
19:35He was no longer crippled, merely a bit lame.
19:38In a way, his ordeal now seemed a positive precedent.
19:46One New York paper lauded him as,
19:49a figure tall and proud even in suffering.
19:53A man softened and cleansed and illumined with pain.
20:03Thousands of Americans are here to cheer the birth of a new era in national affairs.
20:07A New Deal era, which is supposed to pull the country out of its chaos.
20:10Four years later, in 1932, with America hit by the worst depression of its history,
20:18Roosevelt himself ran for the presidency.
20:21Gaining a landslide victory and becoming the first Democrat to occupy the White House
20:27since his political mentor, Woodrow Wilson.
20:31Never was there such a joyful, jubilant, yelling, applauding inauguration crowd.
20:36Roosevelt is the nation's idol here today.
20:40First of all, let me assert my firm belief
20:45that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
20:55Amazingly, even after he took office,
21:00most Americans never discovered Roosevelt's secret.
21:04Press and photographers maintained a discreet silence about his disability.
21:10The only surviving shots of FDR in a wheelchair come from family photos or home movies.
21:20But appearance didn't alter reality.
21:23Roosevelt was the wheelchair president,
21:27and he was trying to lead his country through one of the most testing decades in its history.
21:32Yet ironically, I think, Roosevelt's infirmity was his greatest source of power.
21:42When he told Americans, traumatized by the Depression,
21:46the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
21:47The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
21:51Roosevelt, more than almost all his countrymen, knew what he was talking about.
21:56In his first two terms, Roosevelt was preoccupied with his New Deal for America,
22:12to pull the country out of the Depression through massive spending on infrastructure and social programs.
22:17But Roosevelt became more and more engaged in foreign policy as Nazism took hold in Europe.
22:30Having spent several summers in the Rhineland during his youth,
22:39he had long been convinced that the German elite were militaristic expansionists.
22:44And he saw through Hitler, describing him as a wilder and a nut.
22:49When he read the abridged English edition of Mein Kampf in 1933,
22:59FDR wrote caustically in The Flyleaf,
23:02This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says.
23:10The German original would make a different story.
23:12During the 1930s, Roosevelt could do little to shift isolationist attitudes in America.
23:25But then came the amazing German conquest of Western Europe in 1940, creating a global crisis.
23:34Roosevelt drew America closer to embattled Britain.
23:38America was then pitchforked into the global war by the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
23:53Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race.
24:01Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America.
24:05We are now in this war.
24:10We're all in it.
24:13All the way.
24:15Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.
24:23In 1942 and 1943, America, allied with Britain, engaged in a brutal struggle against Japan in the Pacific.
24:38And also through its troops against the Germans in North Africa and then Italy, probing what Churchill called the soft underbelly of the Axis, before trying to attack Hitler's hard snap in France.
24:59The sources of international brutality, wherever they exist, must be absolutely and finally broken.
25:08We must begin the great task that is before us by abandoning once and for all the illusion that we can never again isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity.
25:22But the war posed new challenges for an already weary president.
25:34Roosevelt didn't simply want victory.
25:38He wanted to shape an enduring worldwide peace and avoid a repeat of the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson.
25:51For him, I think that meant drawing communist Russia into peacetime cooperation, moving beyond the era of European imperialism, and above all, persuading Americans to take up the burdens of international leadership in an improved version of Wilson's League of Nations.
26:12It was in search of those goals that Roosevelt traveled halfway around the world in November 1943 for summit meetings in Tehran and Cairo.
26:29Here the man they nicknamed the Sphinx could take the measure of foreign leaders and test his political skills.
26:38Would his secretive, enigmatic nature, seeming to be all things to all men, work on the world stage?
26:52For Roosevelt, the highlight of the trip was his first meeting with America's other ally, Joseph Stalin.
27:00Russia's revolutionary Tsar had now gained the upper hand in his titanic struggle with Hitler.
27:07The Red Army was driving the Germans out of the Ukraine.
27:14Roosevelt hoped to establish a close, personal relationship with the Soviet leader.
27:24Terse, soft-spoken with a dry humour, Stalin seemed like a man with whom he could do business.
27:32But Roosevelt had to persuade Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.
27:41Churchill also felt he could work with Stalin personally.
27:45But as an inveterate anti-communist, he harboured dark fears about what might happen if Soviet ideology caught fire across Europe.
27:55Roosevelt's mind, by contrast, was more open.
28:00To him, Stalinism seemed very different from Leninism.
28:05The Soviets had dropped the official ideology of world revolution and had allied with the West.
28:11Roosevelt genuinely believed, I think, that it was possible to bring the Reds in from the cold, into the family of nations, and that he was the man to do it.
28:26At Tehran, Roosevelt was willing to manipulate his old ally, Winston, to achieve his goal.
28:39Keen to show the Soviets that America and Britain weren't operating as a bloc, Roosevelt went out of his way to side with Stalin against Churchill.
28:49Together, they baited the British leader about the number of Germans that should be shot after the war.
28:56Roosevelt envisaged Russia with Britain as one of the policemen who would ensure peace and order in the post-war world, as bulwarks of the new United Nations organisation.
29:12Roosevelt's other pitch for Stalin's goodwill at Tehran was tied up with his great aim for the post-war world, the end of empire.
29:27Imperialism was one of Roosevelt's obsessions, but he viewed it as essentially a vice of the Europeans with their far-flung colonial empires.
29:39He didn't seem to recognise the expansion of Russia across Asia as imperialist, and certainly not the expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
29:49When meeting on their own at Tehran, Roosevelt treated Stalin almost as a fellow anti-imperialist when discussing how to handle this issue with the reactionary Europeans.
30:02He told Stalin that after a hundred years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they'd been before.
30:14As for the British Raj in India, Roosevelt advocated what he called reform from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet line.
30:26To which Stalin responded dryly, reform from the bottom would mean a revolution.
30:33Roosevelt was delighted by the results of his journey.
30:42For him, the meeting with Stalin had been a huge step towards achieving his goal of a new world order no longer centred on the historic great powers of Europe.
30:53But the 12,000 mile round trip had taken a massive toll on the President's health. Massive, and in fact, fateful.
31:06Back in Washington in December 1943, Roosevelt was struck down with flu and seemed unable to regain his strength.
31:23At Christmas, he said he felt like a boiled owl.
31:28He would nod off in meetings and complained of persistent headaches.
31:33Several long breaks in the new year at his beloved Hyde Park did not make a real difference.
31:44What's amazing today, I think, is the almost casual amateurishness of the medical care given to the most powerful man in the world.
31:53For months, the President's personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntyre, insisted that FDR's problem was simply persistent bronchitis and the after effects of flu.
32:05But then McIntyre was a rather strange sort of presidential doctor.
32:10McIntyre's day job was Surgeon General of the US Navy, the Navy's top medical post, responsible for 52 hospitals and 175,000 doctors and nurses.
32:25Looking after the President was done on the side.
32:30He got that job through contacts in the right places and because Roosevelt had a chronic sinus condition and he was an ear, nose and throat specialist.
32:40Drive on the hill, drive on the hill, the word of the Lord.
32:51McIntyre did his presidential duties on the run.
32:55He'd call in at the White House about 8.30 in the morning and go upstairs to the President's bedroom for what he called a look-see.
33:05This consisted of sitting around while Roosevelt, still in bed, ate breakfast and chatted about what was in the morning newspapers.
33:16That, said McIntyre, told me all I wanted to know.
33:21No thermometer, no stethoscope, no taking the pulse, just listening to his master's voice.
33:30This was hardly a model of advanced medical science.
33:35It was not until March 1944, when the President was running a temperature of 104 degrees, that McIntyre grudgingly arranged for him to have a checkup at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the outskirts of Washington.
33:57In secret, he was put onto the presidential train at Hyde Park and taken for what was probably the first serious medical examination of his whole presidency.
34:12Bethesda was the Navy's premier hospital and the President was being seen by one of its young, up-and-coming cardiologists, Dr. Howard Bruin.
34:21FDR was wheeled in, jocular and chatty. He kept that up the whole time, a cover Bruin guessed for inner anxiety.
34:34The checkup itself was deeply alarming.
34:41These are Dr. Bruin's original examination notes.
34:47The President's lungs were congested, his heart enormous, and blood pressure readings dangerously high, 170 over 110, way above the norm.
35:02Bruin wrote that he was appalled at what he'd found.
35:06The diagnosis here is stark.
35:09Hypertension.
35:12Hypertensive heart disease.
35:15Cardiac failure.
35:17FDR's visit to Bethesda could not be kept a secret.
35:30But at a press conference, Admiral McIntyre insisted brazenly that the President's health was satisfactory, apart from the lingering effects of flu and bronchitis.
35:42What FDR needed, claimed his doctor, was just a bit more exercise and sunshine.
35:51Behind the scenes, however, McIntyre fought a desperate rearguard action against Bruin's devastating diagnosis.
35:59The young cardiologist was insisting that Roosevelt needed injections of the drug Digitalis to strengthen his heart, a regular daily pattern of rests in bed, and a strict diet to wean him off rich food, his infamous evening cocktails, and 20 or 30 cigarettes a day.
36:24McIntyre was absolutely furious.
36:28You can't do that, he shouted.
36:31This is the President of the United States.
36:36But Bruin was sure that is would become was if they didn't act quickly.
36:43And he calmly stuck to his guns before three boards of senior Washington medics.
36:49Eventually given leave to go ahead, Bruin achieved significant results.
37:03After a week of Digitalis, the President's lungs were clear and his heart smaller.
37:08He was sleeping much better, and had cut down his cigarettes to half a dozen a day.
37:15But his blood pressure remained very high, and with it the risk of a stroke.
37:21Yet in those days there were no medications available for high blood pressure, and the standard remedies, rest and no stress, were hard to arrange for the most powerful man in the world.
37:33But Bruin did what he could.
37:38He persuaded FDR to take a break on the estate of an old friend, Bernard Baruch in South Carolina.
37:48Early nights and a lot of fishing were real tonics.
37:52Roosevelt liked it so much that he stayed four weeks.
37:56But none of this dealt with the basic problem.
38:04How could the ailing President survive all the pressures?
38:11He had been out of the White House for nine of the first 20 weeks of 1944.
38:17He was now back, but was trying to operate on a four hour day.
38:21This was hardly satisfactory for the President of the United States.
38:27Especially a President who was planning to run for a fourth term.
38:38The Washington rumour mills speculated feverishly about how FDR's health would cope with another four years as President.
38:45The choice of his new Vice Presidential running mate would be critical.
38:53Roosevelt dithered about the alternatives.
38:57Only late in the day plumping for the obscure and inexperienced Senator Harry Truman of Missouri.
39:04And getting very stressed about the whole business.
39:07It was another alarming sign of FDR's infirmity.
39:11Dr. Howard Brewing was never consulted, but looking back he had no doubt that a fourth term was a medical impossibility.
39:24And deep down FDR surely knew this too.
39:29I think it's telling that at the end of his checkup at Bethesda, the President thanked Dr. Brewing and the staff.
39:36But then left without asking a single question.
39:42He carried on avoiding any discussion of his real condition with Brewing or any other qualified doctor.
39:49I think Roosevelt didn't want to know.
39:55Perhaps he couldn't afford to know.
39:58For this was a man with a vision who, like most statesmen, had come to see himself as irreplaceable.
40:06With vision comes hubris, the cardinal sin of all political veterans.
40:15In the summer of 1944, as the war boiled up to its climax, the wheelchair president was sure that he had to stay around to shape the political future.
40:29But given the desperate state of his health, this was a reckless gamble.
40:39The 6th of June, 1944.
40:49D-Day, the long-awaited Anglo-American landings in France.
40:56News of Operation Overlord was greeted with relief and elation across America.
41:01That evening, the President spoke by radio to the American people, not in tones of exultation, but in the form of a simple prayer.
41:13Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
41:35Help us, almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in thee, in this hour of great sacrifice.
41:48Great sacrifice.
41:57But for the moment, the GIs didn't get much farther than the hedgerows of Normandy, pinned down by fierce German resistance.
42:10Meanwhile, another D-Day dawned on the Eastern Front.
42:13Little known even today in the West, this shaped the fate of Europe as much as Operation Overlord.
42:25On the 21st of June, the Red Army unleashed its summer offensive into Bielorussia.
42:35The impact was devastating.
42:43In five weeks, while Eisenhower and Montgomery were bogged down in Normandy, the Red Army destroyed 20 German divisions.
42:57And drove forward 450 miles to the gates of Warsaw.
43:02But when the Polish Home Army rose up against the Nazis, the Soviets provided little help.
43:17Admittedly, the Red Army was now exhausted and in no condition to assault a well-defended city.
43:23But Stalin, with reason, viewed the Warsaw Rising as a deliberate attempt by the Poles to liberate their country before it fell under Soviet control.
43:42Churchill, angered by the Soviet attitude, pressed Stalin to offer aid.
43:47Machiavellian as ever in his approach to ends and means, Roosevelt kept out of this argument.
44:01For him, the real goal continued to be forging a long-term partnership with the Soviet leader.
44:07At Tehran, he'd even pretended to snooze when Stalin and Churchill haggled over the details of Eastern Europe, joking,
44:18I don't care two hoots about Poland.
44:23Wake me up when we talk about Germany.
44:25But the Warsaw Rising did have a significant effect on Roosevelt's ambassador to Russia, Averill Harriman.
44:41The Soviet response to the Warsaw Rising left Harriman feeling FDR was too confident about the Soviet regime gradually adopting Western democratic ways.
44:51The question became even more pressing when, in September 1944, the Red Army broke through into Romania and Bulgaria.
45:06The Soviets were clearly going to be a presence in Eastern Europe after the war was over.
45:11How should the West deal with them?
45:14How should the West deal with them?
45:41How should the West do zaman
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