Attention Turns to the Red Army

The end of the fighting on the European continent was accompanied by both immense relief and an acute heightening of the tensions between the Americans and Russians. Several high-ranking officials believed that Josef Stalin’s communist Russia was little better than Adolf Hitler’s fascist Germany, and that the Americans ought to continue the fighting against the Red Army. American General George S. Patton, seated second from left in this photograph, was the most vocal proponent of that strategy, suggesting loudly that the U.S. Army ought to push right through Berlin into Moscow until he was relieved of command. German officers fleeing into the American lines at the end of the war reiterated those pleas, urging their American captors to combine the German and American armies in order to fight the common enemy, Stalin’s Russian forces.