The Military Carve-up, 1945

Abstract

In the closing stages of the war, the British government, and Churchill in particular, became more and more preoccupied with the advance westwards of the Russian armies and the prospect of the establishment of a Soviet empire in Eastern and Central Europe. A further worry was American reluctance to become involved in this part of Europe. In May 1943 Eden had noted ‘the instinctive distrust of the Americans for any military operations which committed them further into Europe, except by a cross-Channel invasion’. Eden commented later: ‘fear of entanglement in the Balkans and of British schemes to lure them there diverted the Americans from thoughts of Vienna and Prague and gave the Soviets too wide a field’.²²³