Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Yalta Schmalta.

Stalin can go pound snow.

It's one thing to read about the Yalta Conference of 1945 from FDR's point of view (No Ordinary Time), or Churchill's private opinion of Stalin (Closing the Ring); but it's quite another thing to read about it's effects on Poland just after the Red Army rolled across and claimed Poland for it's own.  Beyond The Call by Lee Trimble opens up a landscape not only decimated by war but gutted by distrust and cancerous from Russia's NKVD "security" network.  Allied POWs liberated by the angry Russian army weren't much better off outside the barbed-wire than in.  A bewildered bomber pilot, Robert Trimble, in an attempt to avoid being re-assigned to the Pacific theatre, volunteers for a covert post on the Eastern Front, officially to rescue downed aircraft but in reality to rescue the aircrews, both of which the Russians want to keep, in direct violation of the treaty signed at Yalta.  The job quickly blossoms into a full-on Hogan's Heroes episode and his story makes for a fantastic - if chilling - read.

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