S8 Ep572: 11. Professor Paul Thomas Chamberlain describes the Casablanca and Tehran conferences, where Allied leaders grappled with the realization that the Soviet Union would emerge as a dominant European power. He highlights Roosevelt’s anti-colonial vision, whic
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
12. Professor Paul Thomas Chamberlain details Allied contingency plans like Operation Rank, designed to rush airborne troops into Berlin to prevent the Red Army from occupying all of Europe if Germany collapsed suddenly. He explains that by 1944, Churchill was deeply concerned about Soviet dominance and sought to redirect Western forces into the Balkans or Mediterranean to protect Britishinterests. Despite these internal tensions, the U.S. demonstrated unprecedented superpower capability by launching simultaneous major offensives across both the Pacific and Europe. (12)
1942 TORCH AT CASABLANCA
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor, Professor Paul Thomas Chamberlain. His new book is scorched earth. I highly recommend it not only as a very helpful survey of the five years of the war. |
| 0:28.6 | Well, six, if you count them from the British attack, the attack on Poland, five years for Americans, |
| 0:34.4 | but also the world we live in today. |
| 0:37.1 | Because what resulted from the |
| 0:39.4 | mass murder is borders that don't hold up witness Europe right now. Professor, Chamberlain, |
| 0:51.2 | Churchill is most concerned that the Germans will collapse and the Russians will rush in and he won't be anywhere on the continent. |
| 1:00.7 | Not in the Balkans, not in Italy, not in France. |
| 1:04.6 | However, once the landings happen, Churchill then has an idea, or if it's not Churchill, it's someone in your book, that perhaps we |
| 1:12.5 | should enlist the Germans without Hitler and turn on Stalin. Already in 44, they saw that post-war, |
| 1:21.9 | Stalin was going to be the problem, did they? Correct. Yeah. Actually, the sort of first inklings of these sorts of plans to align with the German |
| 1:33.7 | military against the Soviet Union are voiced in 1943. And again, this is a reaction to the Soviet |
| 1:41.5 | victory at Stalingrad in this realization that if the Soviet Union doesn't collapse and it emerges victorious in the war, it's going to be the most important player in Europe. |
| 1:50.4 | It's going to be, at least in military terms, there's really no force that's going to be able to rival the Red Army at this point in time. |
| 1:59.4 | And so a lot of their thinking from 1943 onward is focused not just on |
| 2:06.5 | finding the best and most efficient way to defeat Nazi Germany, but also on ensuring that there |
| 2:12.9 | is an alignment of forces on the ground in Europe at the end of the war that is is is is is is |
| 2:20.7 | capable of blocking the further expansion of Soviet influence right so very early on they're |
| 2:26.4 | already thinking about ways to kind of you know essentially contain I mean they don't |
| 2:30.8 | use this language at this point in time but but they're containing Soviet influence in Europe. |
| 2:35.0 | And they're doing it by ensuring that there are American and British and Canadian military forces in Western Europe. |
| 2:44.0 | And so the pressure really comes to the Americans in particular to find find some way to get troops in if it looks |
| 2:54.8 | like Germany is going to collapse. |
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