Free Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General by Bill O'Reilly

many will be tortured to death. Already, during one infamous murder spree in April and May of 1940, some twenty-two thousand Polish nationals were shot dead. What began as an attempt to execute every member of the Polish officer corps soon expanded to include police officers, landowners, intelligence agents, lawyers, and priests. The shootings were conducted for nights on end, often beginning at dusk and continuing until dawn. Some were mass killings carried out in the Katyn Forest, while others were individual executions inside the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons. Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner at Kalinin, personally shot seven thousand men in the back of the head as they knelt before him. Those killings took place inside a cell whose walls were lined with sandbags to deaden the sound. As soon as a victim fell dead, he was dragged from the room and thrown onto a truck for delivery to the burial site, while another handcuffed prisoner was marched before Blokhin and told to kneel. Noting that Russian pistols had so much recoil that his hand hurt after just a dozen killings, Blokhin opted for the smoother feel of the German Walther PPK.

Joseph Stalin in 1945
    The killings continued for two long months.
    In order to prevent global outrage in case word of the atrocity spread, Stalin ordered his troops to make it seem as if German soldiers had carried out the executions.
    His cruelty is so perverse that even those who serve him are in constant fear for their lives. Stalin has a standing order that none of his bodyguards are to enter his bedroom. Ever. Once, just to test them, he lay on his bed and screamed out in agony. Thinking the Soviet leader was in mortal danger, the guards rushed into the room to save his life. Stalin’s scream was fake. He was testing his guards.
    Each man was then executed for failure to follow orders.
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    Stalin will ultimately order between fifty million and sixty million deaths, far more than his hated rival Adolf Hitler.
    The entire population of Great Britain is forty-seven million people. Stalin, in effect, will eventually slaughter the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in Winston Churchill’s beloved homeland. He will do so without compassion or guilt, all the while living a life of luxury and debauchery in stark contrast to the rigors of the Communist lifestyle his government imposes.
    Yet Winston Churchill has not come to Moscow to repudiate Stalin. He has come to befriend him.
    For even though Stalin and his American counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often treat Churchill as a drunken fool, the British leader is a most astute man. He is well aware that Roosevelt and Stalin are making plans to exclude Britain from the redrawing of maps once the war is over. Churchill has flown to Moscow to negotiate directly with Stalin. Tonight he has shown his solidarity with the Soviet leader by requesting that the performance include not just Giselle , but also a special demonstration of songs and dances by the Red Army choir.
    Since the evening of October 9, when Churchill first met with Stalin at the Kremlin, a rather precarious diplomatic dance has been taking place between the two men. The Russians have pushed the German army hundreds of miles back, and it is clear that the Soviet Union will become the reigning superpower in Eastern Europe.
    Rather than retreating once the war ends, Stalin has indicated that he will occupy countries such as Poland and Hungary. Churchill has no plans to stop him. Britain’s global empire has been almost completely lost during the war—he seeks to regain some of the lost territory by dividing control of Europe between the Soviet Union and England.
    Already, Soviet forces have captured all of eastern Poland. Rather than sympathize with the Polish people, who are vowing to fight for their homeland, Churchill upbraids them for being arrogant, and for wanting to “wreck” Europe. “I don’t know if the British government will