Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger View Post
Well, the UK and France were willing to fight Germany for Poland in 1939. The US was only willing to fight Germany after Hitler declared war. Anyway, after 5 years, France was beaten and the UK had suffered severely. As you stated, the British did not really care about the Poles, they only wanted to contain German expansion. I think that with the Nazis out of power, Britain would have been more than willing to cede Poland for a "victorious" exit from the war, especially if it helped contain the second, now first, most dangerous threat to Western security - communism.
You seem to be assuming that the USSR/West split had already occurred in July of 1944. That's simply not true. The Western Allies didn't begin to re-align themselves against the Soviets until early 1945, and even then the Cold War didn't really start until 1947. Despite the 'what-if' posturing a lot of people like to make, with numerous cites to Patton, there was essentially no chance whatsoever that the US and UK were going to turn on the USSR, even in 1945. The US, UK, and USSR were all extremelly committed to supporting each other against Germany in July of 1944. Unconditional surrender was first discussed at Casablanca in January of 1943, and it was all but accepted by Tehran in November of 1943. That's long, long before the events of Overlord and July 20th. Unconditional surrender was a near-certainty by that point. The Soviets had also demanded that Poland's borders be redrawn at Tehran... they would not have accepted an end to the war that left Poland in Germany's hands.