60th Anniversary of the Allied Landing in Normandy.
Congratulations to everyone who shares our celebration of our common
victory over the forces of Evil!
As with everything big, everyone wants a stake in it, so,
just like Einstein is claimed for their own by the Swiss, Germans,
Americans and Jews, the Victory is claimed by each and every ally
(I am sure even the French have something to be proud of!)
It is not surprising, then, that a US monthly, the National
Geographic, claims that "D-Day turned the tide of war
against Hitler".
It is equally natural that many people got
really
upset about these words.
What follows is just a moderately educated layman's opinion on this
piece of history.
Let us not get carried away...
First of all, let us remember that this is the US:
- German kids learn lots of details about the German victories in
1939-1942, and then skim the rest.
- Brits love to talk about the Battle of Britain.
- Americans harp about D-day and Midway.
- Russians claim to have saved the world.
Let us try to remain calm and not take all this personal, and,
instead, examine some facts (in no particular order):
- Indeed, the Soviet war losses are
staggering:
26,500,000 soldiers (+ 17,000,000 civilians, including Jews et al).
Note that the first number included several million POWs - 3,000,000+
surrendered in 1941 alone! No country comes even close.
The next is Germany with 4,000,000 soldiers (+ 2,000,000 civilians),
2,600,000 out of them lost on the Eastern Front.
This appears to support the Soviet propaganda claim that the Soviet
Union won the war. These numbers are, of course,
controversial.
- People are not everything, especially in a highly technological
war, such as WWII. Almost all German Navy and half of Luftwaffe was
fighting the Western Allies.
- D-day invasion was, indeed, the largest amphibious operation in
history, which makes it remarkable even without considering the
strategic repercussions, e.g., the fact that 1944 was the first year
when the Summer campaign on the Eastern Front did not start with a
German offensive.
- Lend-Lease should not be disregarded either. If you look closely
into the numbers, you would realize that if Lend-Lease would have
stopped, Soviet Army might have collapsed in months: you cannot fight
without locomotives and cars, aviation fuel, trucks, gun powder,
tanks, aircraft etc etc etc. Тушёнку тоже не забудем. Наркомовские
100 грамм под тушёнку шли лучше чем без неё. (Let us not forget the
canned meat either - the 100 grammes of vodka given to every Russian
soldier daily went down with it much better than without it.)
- The war in the West started 2 years before it started in the East.
Even if you discard
the Phony war,
it will be 1 year before.
And the Battle
of Britain was not easy.
- Battle
of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign of
World War II, running from 1939 through the defeat of Nazi Germany in
1945, and it directly affected the Soviet war effort because this was
the route of most of the allied aid.
- On 1941-05-27, the British sunk
Bismarck,
a 41,673-ton battleship. If all this metal were used for tanks
(e.g., the best German tank of 1941 was the
25-ton Pz-IV)
instead of the battleship, Hitler would have had at least 1,000 extra
tanks (he started the Russian campaign with fewer than 4,000 tanks).
Was it Stalin who said that a battleship is worth two tank armies in
terms of steel and three tank armies in terms of time?
- The Americans entered the war in 1941, not 1944. If, instead of
Pearl Harbor on 1941-12-07, the Japanese (who are 50% more numerous than the
Germans) attacked Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Irkutsk, the Moscow
counteroffensive might have been much less successful. Fighting the
Japanese was not a cakewalk, but the Americans won an important battle
of Midway in 1942.
- The Western Allies fought Germans in North Africa in 1941-1943.
I am not sure what would have happened if the Germans took the Suez Canal.
When the Allies captures
Tunisia,
the Axis losses surpassed their Stalingrad losses.
- The Western Allies landed in Sicily and Italy in 1943 - and Italy,
the main German ally in Europe, surrendered that year. Do you know
that the Italians had several Armies on the Eastern Front? (One of
them was destroyed during the Stalingrad offensive).
- The last German offensive was in Ardennes, against the Western
Allies (started 1944-12-15, stopped 1944-12-22 because of fierce
American resistance, 6th SS Panzer Army transferred to the East when
the Soviet offensive started on 1945-01-15.)
No, I have no idea how things would have been without the D-day
landing - or if it failed, but I am pretty sure that the war would not
have ended in 1945. (Actually, there was a book devoted to such a
possibility, and the alternative history painted there was quite grim.)
I would not say that the Soviets won the war.
I would not say that the Americans won it it either.
One may say that the war was won by the Soviet Soldier and the
American Industry, although this is no good either...
Casualties
This is one of more controversial issues about the war. While the war
losses of democratic countries, like US and Britain, are known exactly,
the casualties in a totalitarian state (like the Soviet Union) can only
be estimated because, as a political and propaganda issue, it was subject
of a rampant unchecked government falsification.
Germany is borderline, probably somewhat closer to the democratic West
with respect to accounting for casualties, both because half of it
became democratic after the war and its pre-war totalitarian regime did
not quite encompass the Wehrmacht yet.
I have seen various estimates of Soviet and Germany war casualties.
The most trustworthy, IMNSHO,
appears in the collection of articles by B.V.Sokolov,
The Truth
about the Great Patriotic War.
Even if you do not want to trust his estimates, his evidence that the
official Soviet figures are wrong is quite compelling.
Huge Soviet casualties are not something to be proud of - they offer
a glum testimony to the institutionalized incompetence of the Soviet
commanders, who, from the bottom up, feared their superiors more than
the adversary.
Quiz for the Russians: The War as it is NOT Taught in
Russia
- Who was Lt.Col. Doolittle?
- Whose nickname was Desert Fox?
Who fought him?
Quiz for the Americans: The War as it is NOT Taught in
the US
- What 4 battles turned the tide of war in the opinion of the
official Soviet historiography?
(Answer: Zbfpbj, Fgnyvatenq, Xhefx, Qavrcre).
Relevant links
