Russia destroyed more than 40,000 German tanks from June 1941 to November 1944. By the time the Allies came ashore at Normandy, the Germans had already lost the war, writes Scott Ritter. Larry Wilkerson responds.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, C-in-C of the German armed forces, signs the unconditional surrender at Karlshorst, Berlin, May 8, 1945. (Lt. Moore/U.S. Army/National Archives and Records Administration)
Edited by Ray McGovern
First published by RayMcGovern.com
In June 2019, Scott Ritter wrote an instructive review of key aspects of WWII, “What Russia Rightfully Remembers, America Forgets” Scott’s fellow Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) were asked to comment on his article and an informal colloquy emerged – primarily between Scott and Larry Wilkerson.
At the 80th anniversary of VE Day Friday, I have the dubious distinction of remembering that glorious day as a 5 year-old. I am grateful to be still around and happy to have the opportunity to offer below the fact-based views of younger esteemed colleagues, who have grappled long and hard with political-military issues of this kind – both as historians and as practitioners. I have slightly condensed their prose.
Description from Ralph Creer and Melvin Shaffer at entrance to the Reich Chancellery, May 1945. “Debris had been removed from the entrance by the Russians in order to enter and search for Hitler and his government. The famous bunker was here and the smell of death emanated from every direction. We searched for any remains of Hitler and photographed the entire structure. The Russians showed us where the body of Hitler had been burned and informed us that his remains had been removed.” (DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University/Wikimedia Commons)
From “What Russia Rightfully Remembers, America Forgets”
By Scott Ritter
June 26, 2019
On June 6, 2019 President Trump commemorated the 75th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, popularly known as D-Day, when approximately 160,000 U.S., British, Canadian and Free French soldiers landed in and around the beaches of Normandy, France.
Speaking at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, where the remains of 9,388 American fighting men, most of whom perished on D-Day, are interned, Trump promoted the mythology of American omniscience that was born on the beaches of Normandy. …
For Americans, D-Day stands out among all others when it comes to celebrating the Second World War. Immortalized in books, a movie starring John Wayne, and in the HBO series titled Band of Brothers, the landings at Normandy represent to most Americans the turning point in the war against Hitler’s Germany, the moment when the American Army (together with the British, Canadian and Free French) established a foothold in occupied France that eventually led to the defeat of Germany’s army.
What Trump overlooked in his presentation was the reality that the liberation of Europe began long before the D-Day landings. And the burden had almost exclusively been born by the Soviets.
Trump’s speech was simply the latest in a series of historically flawed remarks delivered by a succession of American presidents ever since they began giving speeches at Normandy in commemoration of D-Day. President George W. Bush’s address on the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings was typical of the genre, maximizing American glory while ignoring that of the Soviets. …
Bush: “Our GIs had a saying: ‘The only way home is through Berlin.’ That road to VE-Day was hard and long. …. And history will always record where that road began. It began here, with the first footprints on the beaches of Normandy.”
But Bush was wrong: the road to Berlin had its origins at the approaches to Moscow, where the Soviet army turned back German invaders in December 1941.
It was paved at Stalingrad in 1942 with the blood and flesh of 500,000 dead Soviet soldiers, who had killed more than 850,000 Nazi soldiers and their allies; and it was furthered in the bloody fields of Kursk, in 1943, where at the cost of more than 250,000 dead and 6,000 tanks destroyed, the Soviet army defeated the last major German offensive on the Eastern front.
The Russians destroyed more than 40,000 German tanks from June 1941 to November 1944. By the time the U.S., British, Canadian and Free French forces came ashore at Normandy, the Germans had already lost the war. …
It was as if the road to Berlin had ended with Americans capturing the Nazi capital, compelling Adolf Hitler to commit suicide …. But that honor fell to the Soviets, who, in a two-week campaign, lost more than 81,000 killed and a quarter of a million men wounded seizing Berlin from fanatical Nazi defenders. …
The German Attack
Armed with heavy shovels, a hastily assembled workforce of Moscow women and elderly men gouge a huge tank trap out of the earth to halt German Panzers advancing on the Russian capital. In the feverish effort to save the city, more than 100,000 citizens labored from mid-October until late November 1941 digging ditches and building other obstructions. When completed, the ditches extended more than 100 miles. (U.S. Information Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany. Some 3.8 million Axis soldiers, backed by more than 6,000 armored vehicles and 4,000 aircraft, launched a surprise attack along a continuous front that ran from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
Known as Operation Barbarossa, the German offensive decimated the defending Soviet forces, breaking through the front lines and driving deep into Soviet territory, initiating a conflict that would last nearly four years.
During that time, more than 26 million Soviet citizens would die, including 8.6 million soldiers of the Red Army (these are conservative numbers — some estimates, drawing upon classified information, hint that the actual number of total deaths might exceed 40 million, including more than 19 million military deaths).
[In contrast, the U.S. military killed or MIA in both the European and Pacific theaters numbered about 407,000 – less that 5 percent of Soviet losses.]
The traumatic impact of what became known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War cannot be overstated. The complete devastation of entire regions at the hands of the invading Germans is something Americans never have experienced, and as such can never comprehend. …
Anti-aircraft gunners on the roof of Moscow’s central Hotel “Moskva”. (RIA Novosti archive/Wikipedia)
Bogged Down in the West; Relentless Attack From the East
While the landing at Normandy had gone well, the advance inland was a different matter. By June 23, 1944 — a mere 17 days after the D-Day landings — the U.S. and U.K. forces were stuck in ferocious fighting with German troops dug in behind thick hedgerows that made movement of men and armored vehicles virtually impossible.
The port of Cherbourg was still in German hands, which meant that desperately needed supplies were not getting to the troops doing the fighting and dying. Any serious reinforcement of the German position in France would have made the allied beachhead tenuous.
But there wouldn’t be any German troops moving into France, for the simple reason that they were all tied down fighting a life-or-death struggle on the Eastern front, trying to cope with a massive Soviet offensive known as Operation Bagration … [that] made anything taking place in France pale by comparison.
[Operation Bagration was named after a Tsarist general who had fought Napoleon.]
By the time Operation Bagration ground to a halt, in mid-August 1944, some 400,000 German soldiers from Army Group Center — the most highly trained, experienced men in the German army — were either dead, wounded or taken prisoner, and some 1,350 tanks destroyed.
The Soviet offensive tore a gigantic hole in the German lines that had to be filled with troops and material that otherwise would have been available to contain the Normandy landings.
Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. (Robert F. Sargent/Chief Photographer’s Mate (CPHoM)/U.S. Coast Guard/Public Domain)
The cost of this victory, however, was staggering — 180,000 Soviet dead and 590,00 wounded, matching in a span of two months the total casualties suffered by the U.S. in the entire European theater of operations, including North Africa, from 1942 to 1945. …
Operation Bagration saved D-Day, but you won’t hear any American presidents acknowledging that fact.
Nor will any Americans pause and give thanks for the sacrifice of so many Soviet lives in the cause of defeating Nazi Germany.
Let there be no doubt that the United States played an instrumental role in the defeat of Hitler — the U.S. was the arsenal of democracy, and its lend-lease support to the Soviet Union was critical in the success of the Soviet army.
But the simple fact is that we never faced the German A-team — those men had perished long ago on the Eastern front, fighting the Soviets. The German army the U.S. faced was an amalgam of old men, young boys, unmotivated foreigners (including thousands of captured Russian and Poles), and worn-out, wounded survivors of the fighting in the east.
America beat the Germans, but because of the pressure brought to bear on Germany by the Soviet Union, the outcome in Western Europe was never in doubt.
Why does this matter? Because facts matter. History matters. The hubris and arrogance derived from America’s one-sided, exaggerated and highly inaccurate version of the Second World War …
It gives total disregard for any Russian perspective regarding the future of a continent the Soviets liberated through the blood and sacrifice of tens of millions of their citizens. While we Americans continue to celebrate a version of events that is highly fictionalized, the Russians commemorate a reality anchored in fact.
… There will come a time when fiction-based arrogance will clash with fact-based realism. If history tells us anything, those who more accurately remember the lessons of the past will fare far better than those who, by their ignorance, are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
Landing ships putting cargo ashore on one of the invasion beaches, at low tide during the first days of the operation, June 1944. (U.S. Coast Guard/Wikimedia Commons)
Comment by Larry Wilkerson
It’s all well and good to correct historical perceptions that are dead wrong. … However, any such “correction” ought to at least touch upon the full story, not just parts of it.
The true U.S. strategy in WWII, summed up in George Marshall-like terms, was to become the arsenal of democracy, though of course that’s a misnomer, because those for whom we were the almost existential arsenal were the Soviets, certainly no democracy.
Marshall knew we were not the best soldiers on earth, not by a long shot. So how to win a global struggle against those who clearly were, the Wehrmacht? Marshall knew that what we did do better than anyone else on earth was produce things. So, the “dollar men.” The invention of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). The turning of the most massive productive capacity in human history, to war production. That’s what we did.
We [America] supplied the Soviets through Iran (840,000 wheeled vehicles, for example) and through Murmansk. Without the Iran link (actually put in motion BEFORE U.S. entry into WWII in December 1941), Stalingrad would never have been defended successfully. Paulus 6th Army would have won and got to the oil Germany coveted.
In short, without the U.S.-established LOCs (lines of communication [and supply]) through Iran and Murmansk, the Soviets would have lost badly.
I used to show my students a grainy, black-and-white video clip of a Russian regimental commander entering Berlin. Close-up on the vehicle in which he was riding: “FORD”. We need to tell the complete story.
Lend Lease, The 30,000th Truck Delivered to Russia / Russian and American army personnel observed one year of operating and production of the 30,000th truck at an American truck assembly plant at Khorramshahr. Iran. (Office of History, HQ, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers/Wikimedia Commons)
Scott Ritter Response
Having spent my life studying the Red/Soviet/Russian military from both the perspective of a historian (my honors thesis dealt with the doctrinal links between the Tsarist military and the Soviets) and a professional preparing to face them on the field of battle, I try to take a responsible fact-based position when writing on any topic that touches the subject.
I’ve read extensively on the Eastern Front, and am particular indebted to both John Erickson’s Road to Stalingrad/Road to Berlin, and David Glantz’s When Titans Clashed. Both speak of the tremendous contribution made by Lend Lease to the Soviet war effort, but neither give the U.S./U.K. aid program war-winning status.
Glantz in particular addresses the question head on, writing “If the Western Allies had not provided equipment and invaded Northwest Europe, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht. The result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers would have waded at France’s Atlantic beaches rather than meeting the Allies at the Elbe.”
I don’t diminish the role played by the US, but my reading of history shows that Gen. Paulus had lost at Stalingrad well before that battle ever began, with the German’s having been exhausted in the brutal winter fighting of 1941-42.
I stand by everything I wrote about the role played by the Soviets in defeating Nazi Germany.
German troops with a 7.5 cm leichtes Infanteriegeschütz 18 cannon crossing the Soviet border during Operation Barbarossa, near the border marker IV/95. The location was determined by border marker number as the right bank of the Solokiya river, Chervonohrad Raion of Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. (Public Domain/Wikipedia)PD-US
Response from Larry Wilkerson
And I stand by all that I said about the US employing its awesome productive capacity to aid the British, the Free French, the Russians, other lesser “allies,” and itself in an unprecedented way, while waging war on two major fronts, the European and the Pacific (it’s what got us the military-industrial complex, sad to say). There have been few really delving studies of this because logistics is not sexy.
Just as Parmenion made Alexander the Great great (see The Logistics of the Macedonian Army), so U.S. productive capacity “won” WWII. Admittedly, a lot of dead and living Soviet soldiers – and partisans from Stalingrad to Kiev, as well as German high-command mistakes – helped majorly, as did the rugged T-34 tank (particularly at Kursk where battle-sight zero was twenty feet most of the time and tankers whom I have interviewed personally, from both sides, lost their hearing permanently due to the incredible noise of so many tank guns operating simultaneously).
Anyone who’s read Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier (the All Quiet on the Western Front of WWII) knows what the Soviet contribution was and it was, in a word, awesome. Logistics, aside from not being sexy, is always underreported, underplayed, and rarely given its due. It’s the nature of the beast, particularly for Americans who are raised by Hollywood as much as by any biological parents.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary; former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Ray McGovern, former army infantry intelligence officer and later chief of C.I.A.’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch; was also C.I.A. one-on-one briefer of The President’s Daily Brief 1981-1985.
to me, every word by activists for peace,
every essay that untwists the facts, feels
like another drop of water i dearly need
to cross the desert created by countless
fearmongers, warmakers, hypocrites around.
while my country, that started – and lost – two world wars,
excluded representatives from russia and belarus from WWII
commemorations bc “they might instrumentalize them”
[reasoning so breathtaking, that i wish it weren’t true],
it happily invites new US missiles on its territory as of 2026.
so, for the first time in 20 years, moscow is within reach again.
what an achievement! WHAT A RULES-BASED ORDER!
In 1942 President Truman, then still a senator, recommended funding both the Nazis and Russians to bleed them dry so the USA could then capitalise on the destruction. (Let us not forget Ford, IBM and various other American firms were heavily involved in supporting Nazi Germany.)
When I took my oath in 1971, the Lt. had all us future 11Bravos stay behind and told us that nothing is won until our men walk on the graound. Thus the Infantry Soldier. I agree the Soviets won the war through their blood and willingness to die in unfathomable numbers. So, yes, Major Ritter. I also agree that American aid helped make the number of Soviet deaths fewer (if we can use that term) and their victory faster. Yes, the German soldier was superior to all. Where Colonel Wilkerson is spot on is while amateurs speak of strategy and tactics, professionals speak of logistics. This is what lost the war on the Eastern Front for Hitler.
Wilkerson is nothing more than a capitalist and American exceptionalist using the tied phrase, “the arsenal of democracy” as if that is something to be proud of. He sounds just like the UAW president Shawn Fain who spouts that phrase like building machines of war is great for jobs while he supports the tariffs that eliminates them. Both spout nauseating nationalism, the twin scourge of capitalism.
If you want to read two books about WWII, read Vasily Grossman’s astounding Stalingrad and Life and Fate. They both are incredible looks inward at the Russian soul and what it meant to the Soviet people to destroy Nazism to save, not Stalinism, but Bolshevism.
The U.S. having offshored its manufacturing capacity decades ago to stuff Wall Street sharpies’ pockets full of money-for-nothing and financialized its economy to the point where the entirety of the U.S. empire teeters on a sky-high pinnacle of unrepayable debt, it is inevitable that the arsenal of multipolarity centered in China and the Russian Federation will usher the U.S. war machine into the museum of murderous tyrannies and humanity will get another shot at living in relative peace and harmony without deluded madmen murdering millions to impose “full spectrum dominance” on a world in which by its very nature such a fantasy is impossible.
Mr. Wilkerson has just forgotten an important aspect of the story. The US – especially the US financial sector – was instrumental to allow Hitler to rise to power. This is illustrated by Antony C. Sutton in his well researched book “Wall Street and Hitler”. Thus if Mr. Wilkerson claims now it was the US that was instrumental to the defeat of the Nazis he should have mentioned too, that the US was instrumental in allowing Hitler coming into power and providing the Reichswehr with key technologies i.e. the production of synthetic fuels. Furthermore analysts in the Reichswehr have warned against the invasion of Russia due to huge logistic obstacles. Thus at the very moment when the Wehrmacht did not achieve its strategic goal to destroy the Russion army within the forst six months of the war the Germanys have lost the war strategicalls. See on this the works of David m. Glantz and John Erickson.
Scott provides a verifiable reality check, which takes nothing away from the price paid by others. The discussion is disturbing because it illustrates the attitude of those who pay others to die on their behalf and then take the credit, those in smoke filled rooms far from the front lines who send United States soldiers to die for reasons all too often completely at odds with what they and their victims were led to believe.
As Colonel Wilkerson points out, logistics is relatively neglected in discussions of war. I suspect that one reason Ulysses Grant won our Civil War was that he’d been assigned to logistics (to his chagrin) during the Mexican War.
And rarely is it ever said that Germany’s attempt to colonise the “wild east,” was inspired because the U.S. was successful in colonising the wild west. Hitler even called the slavs “redskins,” and marvelled at the way the U.S. colonisers killed the Indians and put them in their camps and then presented themselves as the world’s greatest democracy. This is the more important point left completely out of the discussion in school and among military historians.
Well, how would you describe the colonization of “the wild east” by the Russian empire…..?
As something that does not in anyway justify what the Nazis did, if that is what you are implying.
The other thing that greatly inspired Hitler was the British Empire.
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was reportedly one of his favourite films.
Thank you. And let’s not forget slavery, the Jim Crow that followed it, and the discrimination and lynching that continues to this day. (George Floyd; Brionna Taylor anyone?) Laws that restrict the conduct of Labor Unions, but no such laws governing corporations. The accumulation of vast wealth amid grinding brutal poverty. Wars that nobody voted for or wanted. And by ALL means, let us never forget the support, nay LOVE for such “democrats” abroad as Pinochet, Bandera, Aparteid white South Africans, Roberto D’Aubuisson, and all the democratic death squads throughout Latin America, and of course our most recent paramour the Democratic, Human Rights paradise I S R A E L and the democracy it’s vomiting up in Gaza (oh those Lucky Gazans!!)
Arsenal of WHAAAAT????
What a fantastic conversation about the REAL WWII…
I was fortunate to have a High School Social Studies teacher who was there, survived and knew first hand this part of the story…
It’s too bad my president doesn’t know and doesn’t even give a rats patutie…
My father towed a glider across the English Channel on D-Day. He was in Paris on VE Day. He acknowledged that the Soviet Union won the war for the Allied side. Wilkerson can jabber all he wants, trying to defend the myth that the United States saved the world, but the fact is that it didn’t. I’m shocked at what Wilkerson has said here, and disgusted.
I couldn’t help but wonder about that Ford vehicle that the Russian regimental commander rode into Berlin.
Ford was making vehicles for the Nazis since 1925…it was renamed Ford-Werke in 1939.
Could the Ford in the pic that Col. Wilkerson shows his students be one that the Russian Army had captured along the way, as it drove the Nazis back all the way from Moscow to Berlin ?
As Truman said while in Congress if Germany is winning we are for Russia and if Russia is winning we are for Germany. So we are playing both side and were for sleeveless. Once Russia was winning we had to save Germany from Russia for ourselves. If Germany was winning we might have to call on our nuclear weapons to save Russia for ourselves.
A two front major war to stall communism in Russia and China that lost some and gained some. But the final act was halting use of nuclear weapon rather than using them in the Korean War to retrieve China for our proxy.
The nukes in the planning that didn’t come in time while we played with the more template stalling for time perhaps knowing the military as they covet WMD’s. (d-day 1944 waiting to seethe breaking point) We helped Germany and Japan through the 1930’s so communism must have been the target ever since the end of WWI)
It was the same case in regards to the Japanese. So slightly mentioned in this article. The US and Britain held high hopes that between the German and Japanese armies that they would defeat or weaken the USSR so they could attack afterwards. Plans were made to conquer the USSR on a drastic measure and divide it up. Plans rebuild since on multiple occasions also. The main deterrent though became the development of nuclear arms in the USSR.
An ugly situation has arisen around the eightieth VE Day. I can fully appreciate the support the USA gave to the Soviet army and civilians. Yes, mr Wilkerson, a great industrial effort was made, but I put the appreciation and value of the massive and sheer human, individual and blood sacrifices of the Soviet army and civilians on a much higher scale than the personal input in industrial processes. To treat Russia’s Memorial Day as we have done, shows us how low we have sunk in the west.
And what’s happening with Trump, the devil may know!
I completely agree with you. Wilkerson has revealed himself to be a cheerleader for American imperialism.
Something the Nazis didn’t understand real well: Masses of trucks+fuel are necessary in a tank war.
The Red Army had both. Those trucks were, to large degree, made in by GM, Packard, Dodge, and Ford.
Later in in the European war, when the Nazis were losing, they fielded tanks that devasted Red Army tanks. The allies are very lucky that the Nazis didn’t/couldn’t field those tanks earlier in the war, and/or in greater numbers starting in 1944.
So, yes, of course, the Red Army defeated the Nazis in Europe (even though Germany was open to invasion from the west via Strassburg in the early fall of 1944 — see the book “Decision at Strassburg”), but the Red Army despite having good tanks, wouldn’t have gone anywhere sans massive material support from the USA.
The great bulk of the Lend Lease aid including all those trucks didn’t start arriving until early 1943 – after the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad had been decided.
As far as those “Wunderwaffen” Panzers you talk about (Panthers, Tiger 1 and Tiger 2), they made little overall difference and even greater numbers of such tanks would only have resulted in larger losses for the Wehrmacht. Perhaps you might care to familiarise yourself with the tank battles at Kursk (the biggest tank battles in history) and the subsequent results: Soviet victory.
Your last sentence (“…the Red Army despite having good tanks, wouldn’t have gone anywhere sans massive material support from the USA.”) is just typically misguided American exceptionalism ie the views of citizen of a nation that refuses to accept the historical reality that a Communist Army beat the Nazis.
Hear, hear.
therm,
Right, and to drive into Poland, Ukraine, and Germany, those Ford/GM/Packard/Dodge trucks were absolutely needed. The Russian winter stopped the Nazis from taking Moscow in 1941, not tanks.
Right, I pre-agreed with your point the that vastly better German tanks didn’t make a huge difference, when I wrote in my original comment:
“The allies are very lucky that the Nazis didn’t/couldn’t field those tanks earlier in the war, and/or in greater numbers starting in 1944.”
I stand by my last sentence. Nothing you have posted contradicts that sentence of mine.
That “Communist army” had massive support from the USA in its defeat of Nazi Germany.
Not Communist, but Stalinist. The Soviets fought so hard to save the ideal of Communism that Stalin had all but destroyed along with all the old Bolsheviks and the Soviet generals in the purges of 36 through 38.
Yes, those Tigers were impressive. But they were expensive and too few and mechanically fragile. Where they appeared in the battle they could impose decisive effects in their immediate area, but the war was being decided elsewhere on the battlefield by the more numerous, less expensive, and more technically robust Shermans and T-34s. As Stalin is supposed to have said: “Quantity has its own quality.” Today the mighty modern equivalents of the Tigers, the Abrams and Leopards, die under onslaughts of cheaper Lancet drones.
Begemot:
That’s why I wrote in my original comment:
“The allies are very lucky that the Nazis didn’t/couldn’t field those tanks earlier in the war, and/or in greater numbers starting in 1944.”
However, to drive into Ukraine, Poland, and Germany itself, the masses of T34s needed those Ford/GM/Dodge trucks to keep them supplied.
Sherman tanks (though easier to repair in the field than German tanks) weren’t serious tanks, unlike the T34.
Yes, of course, modern tanks are no good if hit on the top with an anti-tank round, from a drone or manned helicopter.
In the 1940’s the Studebaker truck was considered by many to be the best (superior leaf springs, and durable engines) and the company sold 1.5 ton trucks to Russia. In fact, Soviet trucks from the 1950’s were based primarily on the Studebakers.
Also, I read a great little autobiography of Eddie Rickenbacker, and how he travelled to Russia during WW2 to help with the problems they had with the P49’s the Soviets bought from the US–great story there.
mark stanley,
Interesting, but I can’t imagine Studebaker sent as many cargo trucks to the USSR as GM did.
Also the standard cargo truck was 2.5 tons.
I think the important thing here is not to argue logistics, important as they are. (Khrushchev said that my Midwestern home area saved many Russians from starvation with SPAM) But to remind Americans of the dreadful loss of life and devastation of the land the Soviets suffered, and not deceive ourselves, as we do, that our Hollywood heros won the war.
Scott,
Right, the events of the “Longest Day” didn’t win the war. Breaking of the German and Japanese codes (and Purple the Japanese code was more difficult) probably had more to do with winning the war.
Ironically Stalin seems to have forgotten that the USA opened a front in Africa, which diverted significant German forces away from the Soviet Union well before 1944.
Or to put it more concisely, you all agree.
Now try the bigger question, one that affects today. Why was it that when WW2 ended, the allies USSR and China, were made enemies and the enemies, Germany and Japan, were made allies?
What is the point of going to war when the dead are treated with such disregard?
That’s actually an easy question to answer. For western countries Soviet Russia was always “ the enemy” ever since the Bolshevik Revolution. The West and “ White Russians “ tried to “ strangle it from birth” as paraphrased by Winston Churchill by sending an expeditionary force into Russia that was defeated. Further, a case can be made that western industrialists and financiers turned a blind eye and participated in the secret rearmament of Nazi Germany during the thirties in order to build a force capable of attacking a communist Soviet Union. To western capitalists the Soviets were always the real enemy. Patton wasn’t the only Genera or government official who stated we fought the wrong side. This was never more clear by wars end as former scientists,soldiers and top officials who weren’t implicated directly in war crimes fled to the West and were given safe haven . Former Wehrmacht soldiers and officers given prominent roles in the new West German police forces and Ministries. Von Braun and associates given VIP treatment in America’s space and rocket industry.
On and on the list goes . The whole of WW2 was an exercise in cynical expediency with no side being able to claim innocent victimhood.
And sadly nothing about that type of practice has very much changed.
Brilliant. I have to think on this.
Because those Anglo-American powers that supposedly allied with Russia and China had ulterior motives that had little to do with defeating fascism and more to do with using it as a tool against Russia and China. The USA in particular inspired the Nazis with its racial segregation laws and supported Hitler financially with the aim of setting Germany and Russia against each other.
You are quite right. Thank you.
John Manning,
Well, too many Nazi officers made it into positions of power within the US establishment, and later NATO. The US and UK also wanted German technology, which was NOT limited to rockets, but included transistorized computers (see Konrad Zuse) and very advanced materials sciences.
While in the 1930s, people like the Dulles brothers were openly pro-Hitler, and the Dulleses had significant power in the USA in the 1950s.
Then, the English royal family is German, and England has a long term hatred for Russia.
Mao and the Nationalists had stopped fighting each other during the war, but after the war anti-Communist hysteria stripped the US State Department of Chinese scholars, so the US had no clue regards Nationalist failures.
Japan, besides being next to Russia and China, had stolen masses of gold in Asia during the war; this would be a big reason to occupy Japan and the Philippines (see “Gold Warriors”, Seagraves, also see “The Yamato Dynasty”).
Somebody take time and inform Trump about this. I find it utterly contemptible how the West is behaving towards Russia.
Well, it ain’t just Trump.
Disgustingly, Biden kept Putin away from VE events.
Yeah, it seems odd to single out Trump. He is at least willing to sit down and talk with geopolitical adversaries and not ignore them as if they didn’t exist. If Trump were in office in 2022, he likely would have sat down with Putin and heard him out, and maybe even been able to cut a deal to prevent tanks rolling across the borders of Ukraine. The Biden administration wouldn’t even give Putin the time of day and just ignored his grievances until he felt compelled to take matters into his own hands. They WANTED a brutal war of attrition in Ukraine to bleed Russia, and were happy to pay through the nose to defend Ukraine down to the last Ukrainian so long as it also hurt Russia.
Amen.
Steve,
Right, and in 2021 + early 2022, Team Biden increased the shelling of eastern Ukraine. I detest DJT, but I don’t see him doing that were he in office then.