Soviets say Allied version of D-Day is a 'distortion' of history (1984)
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
Well, they had a point...
In the 40s and 50s most Europeans who actually lived WWII considered the USSR as definitive in determining the war.
It took decades of new generations who didn't witness the facts, and tons of mythologizing from Hollywood movies to turn this around.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
As much as I dislike the actions of USSR at the time of WWII (I'm Polish), they should take much more credit for defeating Nazis. This doesn't change the fact, that they should also take much more blame for having started the war right next to the Nazis, in the first place, as well for what they did after the war.
HOWEVER, while it is true that people who lived during WWII knew USSR was winning and would prevail, even without USA's help, there was also a widespread, majority in almost every European countries, to hope US forces would come before USSR's. Germans who deserted or surrendered, when they had a choice, overwhelmingly did so to the western allies.
We knew that USSR would come to occupy while US was not interested in territorial gains. Yes, US occupation was not without propaganda and political compromises, but compare the date of the first free elections in France or in Ukraine, you will see that these opinions were founded.
One could argue that the D-Day was a decisive operation for the Cold War, less so for WWII. Without US involvement, USSR would have "freed" all of Europe by 1947, but the rest of the century would have been far more different.
It's absolutely true Russian participation in the European war was decisive, but Europe wasn't even the only war going on. There's a good argument there was another war active on the other side of the world simultaneously in which Russian participation was minimal.
Anyway the whole premise of the criticism is facile and self-serving. Russian war achievements are entirely worthy of their own celebration and remembrance in their own right. They should not more overshadow the achievements in Normandy than those commemorations should cast a shadow over the African campaign, or the invasion of Italy and the contribution of soldiers who fought on those fronts.
The USSR not only contributed most to the outcome, it also suffered most losses - 20 million or more dead, more than 10% of the population.
The article also says nothing about the fact that the US also fought in the Pacific theater without Soviet help.
Hundreds of thousands of trucks and jeeps, tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft. Not second rate or surplus but Spitfires, Hurricanes, Sherman tanks and so on, and enough to restrict the allies.
It was deemed more important to try and help keep Russia in the war.
Reporting the claim uncritically is the distortion to my mind. The role Russia played in allied victory, but clearly not D Day, is rarely forgotten.
This idea sounds patently false and I can't find a single source to support it.
According to Wikipedia, the total US expenditure on Lend-Lease was 48 billion, with 31 of those going to Britain and 11 to the USSR [1]. But saying that D-Day was delayed as a result of the sheer quantity of aid sent to Britain would still be incorrect. Nearly the entirety of Soviet economic aid during the war can be attributed to the U.S. It provided the bulk of the actual raw materiel and effectively paid for the rest through the funding British production. Now combine this with the fact that Roosevelt and his advisors were pushing to open up the Western European front in 1942, a year after Lend-Lease had gone into effect, with Churchill winning out in opposition to the idea. It simply doesn't make sense that the cost of aid to the Soviet union was even part of the equation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Multilateral_Allied...
Nor does it take off the roughly 8 or 10bn of British lend-lease to the US, or the end of war lend-lease loans. Or take into account the British lend-lease supplied to Russia, which was far from insignificant - your Wikipedia link mentions in the otherwise unpriced list £1.15bn of aero engines - that alone would be about $4.5bn US - as wartime exchange was pegged at $4 to £1.
Neither the US - nor anyone else - achieved a fully mobilised war economy overnight - supply was a constant issue for much of the war going on most of the histories I've read, and it was only by late 43/early 44 that the US was manufacturing her way out of trouble. Even that fairly poorly organised Wikipedia page includes the throwaway quote of "Even after the United States forces in Europe and the Pacific began to attain full strength during 1943–1944, Lend-Lease continued".
Russia got about 12% of all the jeeps produced, 50% of the P39s, etc.
It doesn't make sense that it wasn't part of the equation in several campaigns. Not the cost, but the logistics and production - number of tanks or whatever actually available in theatre. By 44 not so much.
Sledgehammer in 42 would have certainly failed, and failed badly. Much has been written about it. To summarise from Wikipedia - who write surprisingly little about it:
"However, the elements required for such an operation were lacking, i.e. air superiority, amphibious warfare equipment, sufficient forces and adequate supply. Despite all this, the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered Sledgehammer feasible.
If Sledgehammer had been carried out, the British could have landed only six divisions at most, whereas the Germans had 25-30 divisions in Western Europe"
It could very possibly have been the war losing campaign.
And the Ruhr and possibly Berlin getting Glassed (nuked) in late 45
In the closing days of WW II, many Germans fled to the US/UK side to escape the terror inflicted by the Soviet armies.
In 1984, the Soviet propaganda machine was in full swing, and the Soviets still occupied a big chunk of Europe. They were making threats with short range nuclear missiles and a 20 to 1 tank advantage. It looked like WW III was about to break out, but the Soviets would be out of power within 10 years.
The fact is that keeping the Russians out of D-Day celebrations and of the D-Day narrative is a political decision.
wow the casualties over 2 months is just mind boggling
Would you expect the US to invite the British and Russians to commemorations of the liberation of the Philippines on the same grounds?
What is the exact harm in it? I'm always highly impressed when foreigners come to Australian war ceremonies of their own accord.
Yet no one would think it odd or unusual if a Russian veteran or someone with a relative involved chose to go personally for whatever reason. I'm sure they'd be most welcome and hopefully treated with as much respect as any campaign vet or other attendee. I would think it odd if our PM was invited to say commemoration of the Battle of Kursk, despite that being of huge significance. I'd expect a good few Russian veterans or relatives might think it odd too.
Commemorations are for the veterans and relatives of those that took part, and to honour the participants. Which tends to make it expected to have official presence for the nationalities that took part in each campaign, the former commanders, and the descendants of those who took part, or who lost a parent or grandparent. For many attending it's a deeply personal act. I'm uncomfortable, to say the least, with commemoration as national or political PR.
In the early 1930s the Russians were evaluating a lot of military stuff and basically settled on "well, given these advantages it makes the most sense to not try too hard to specifically prevent our territory from being invaded, just let it happen and then with the help of a winter unlike anything in most of Europe slowly crush them on our home turf with our manpower advantage." And that's exactly how WW2 turned out. Sure they botched the start of it and lost more men and territory than they were expecting but they basically did the obvious thing. Hitler just thought he would be able to take all the strategic assets in the West of Russia, capture Moscow and force surrender before that happened. He was wrong. Just like everyone else who's invaded Russia.
Union's army was going domino up until Moscow, and it was defended with last reserves of reserves from the whole theatre.
Germans on other hand, were beyond simply overconfident. I watch one documentary after another showing German army having fiestas, and things along the line "Hitler ordered general A to stop and hold flag raising ceremony in city B"
On June 6, President Reagan will join French President Francois Mitterrand, Queen Elizabeth, and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at ceremonies in Caen, France, to mark the occasion.
Sometimes when reading discussions, I think that some westerners forget that the Soviet Union assaulted Poland 17 days after Germans attacked us.
So to remind everyone, Soviets started the whole bloody Second World War!
Not to mention, that after they crashed Poland they killed 22 000 Polish captives by shutting them in the back of their head in an effort to eradicate Polish culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
Russians did not fully admit this crime until freaking 2010. These liars were either denying it or blaming this crime on Germans while they had documents clearly stating orders.
They assaulted Poland in 1939, and they were assaulting us in 1944. They were waiting for Warsaw Uprising to fall, they were preventing western forces to help the uprising. Then they proceeded to effectively occupy Poland till 1989.
Even today if we discuss historical events some Russians will tend to get upset that we are not grateful for the sacrifices of the Red Army. But they were not liberating us. They were raping, pillaging and brutally crashing anyone who dared to think.
Putting any moral equality between western participation in World War II and Soviets is just wrong!
And... What belonged to who is quite close to meaningless. When do you want to set the date of the original ownership? Some 35 000 years ago when these lands were probably first settled or at some arbitrary point later on? How do you treat the right to self-determination and regions of mixed ethnicity with no absolute majority?
Lands of current Belarus and Ukraine belonged to Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before partitions, then they belonged mostly to Russia. After the first World War, we ended up in a very complex situation with vast regions with populations of mixed ethnicity and conflicting claims that resulted in wars. Poland claimed these lands as did Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine based on the wave of the modern ideas of a nation state. Poland managed to overpower them and focused on Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as the original ownership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Krai
The idea of state ownership of land has really no absolute truth to it. There are no rules that will allow fairly dividing Africa after what was done to that continent during colonialism, Middle East including Palestine or central and eastern Europe. Well, even dealing with Brexit is quite an impossible task.
The Soviets sacrificed a great deal, as did many nation's and individuals. They also received a lot of support. I'm not sure an accounting of all that is required for remembering those who fought a specific battle.
Let alone something like "well the outcome was already decided....." when we talk about the sacrifices people made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
I think the focus of US and British WW2 movies on their own accomplishments played a big role in this "distortion of history" (OTH if you've grown up on the other side of the Iron Curtain" there was no shortage of Soviet propaganda movies about WW2 either).
Personally I've come to the conclusion that the US/British invasion didn't turn the war around (it may have shortened it by a few weeks). But it most likely saved most of Western Europe from Soviet post-war-occupation.
(edit: AFAIK, what was an incredibly important contribution of (mainly) the US was the Lend-Lease-Act though to provide the Soviet Union with weapons and resources)
Obviously, I'm exaggerating but there's truth in it and it takes a lot of individual studying (of not just history) to get some vague idea of what could really be going on.
For WW2, my history teacher believed that events should be considered a history only after 100 yeas have passed. Everything less will be a political narrative.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_W...
The Nazis lost over two million soldiers in the Eastern front, whereas all the other fronts combined produced a loss of ~800k soldiers. The turning point of the war came in Stalingrad, an entire year before D-Day even started.
The Soviet Union has been a brutal regime and I'm glad they lost the cold war. But the Russian people deserve more credit than they are being given for turning back the Nazi tide.
On the other front, if France and England helped Poland, as they promised in the treaty the later broke, Hitler would be stopped much earlier and World War 2 .
One doesn't exclude the other.
And more importantly, the war was a tragedy for all people. Especially for the millions of Russians. They didn't want to go to war, they wanted to stay with their families, but they had no choice, otherwise Stalin would have them killed. These poor people suffered enormously and most were killed leaving widows and orphans. Putting any label on them, like 'agressor' or 'hero' is so terribly inadequate.
Soviets butchered their own people, Czars, and launched multiple wars against neighboring countries. They were aggressors, and not only during the world war 2, but before and after as well. Plain and simple.
At the time of the conference, Red Army was about to enter Poland.
While Churchill was happy to let Soviets do all the dying, Roosevelt cared about getting them involved in pacific. He wasn't much concerned with the war in Europe.
As soon as it became clear from Stalin that, when it comes to talking about the future of Europe he holds all the leverage, Churchill decided it's necessary to jump on the bandwagon.
And so the outcome of the Teheran conference was the "Operation overlord" (aka D-day)
To clear any doubts about the significance of Soviet contribution all that needs to be done is go wikipedia and look at the size of the battles in East Europe and compare the to the D-day.
Normandy landings don't even make it to top 10 in terms of the size. Germany was operating with 1 million+ soldiers in multiple battles compared to 50,000 including untrained and underquipped teenagers and seniors allies faced in Normandy.
Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Rzhev, Kharkow, Leningrad, etc. were mostly 10x larger in size and personnel. 90% of German army was killed in the East front.
The fact that most western people don't even know what was the major turning point in the WW2 and think it's the D-day, would leave most of those generations speechless.
Soviets and East Europeans (Yugoslavia liberated itself, Polish army took the Monte Cassino, the largest battle of Allies) won the war. Allies helped, then made a lot of movies about it.
In many countries it is taught in schools that allies were simply taking their time, waiting for the lowest risk/highest return moment. That is one version.
This is an overstatement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War...
If you go by KIA, MIA, and POW, Eastern Front is about 2 million, France/Belgium + North Africa + Italy + Navy is about 900k.
Eastern Front until 12/31/44 2,742,909 Western Front until 12/31/44 339,957
makes eastern front 91%. If you look at the size of the battles in Western front it's hard to see how would the figure exceed 339k.
For comparison, Stalingrad alone claims 500k Germans and 900k axis total. Battle of Moscow estimates 500k killed, missing, wounded or captured.
Now we can play with semantics. Are we looking at killed only, or captured and wounded or otherwise incapacitated? Is it Germans only of axis.
I think did overstate. To put it better, I would say 90% of Nazi power was defeated in Eastern front.
This does not undermine the tremendous human sacrifice by the ordinary people on the Soviet/East side: it must be remembered and respected. However, the fact that the Soviet Union was on the winning side undermined the terror, repressions and immense suffering inflicted on millions of people, including their own people and the people of the countries they invaded [3][4][5][6]. The Soviet regime, as a political subject, should not be glorified; and they certainly should have had very little to complain about. Let alone the D-Day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Poland [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_repression_in_the_So... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_occupations_by_the_So...
But Hitler must have been shocked at what Russians threw at him. Brutal war, take no prisoners and millions upon millions of soldiers.
That shouldn't have been a shock to Hitler, not even an unknown information. In the Russian Civil War¹ that preceded WW2, the Red Army amassed well over five million soldiers, and the soviet's control over the country and subsequently over the army enlistments could only improve since then.
Most allied generals believed URSS was going to be the next enemy after Hitler.
The nuclear bombs against isolated Japan were more a warning to Stalin than anything to do with Japan as disclassified documents have shown.
An interesting historical essay is Noam Chomsky's "Background to the Pacific war" (1967) in which he explains an often missed cause of that war - the economic one. Japan being shut out of the international trade by tariffs imposed by the British and US in 1937. This crippled Japanese industry, as expected.
It was beyond the pale and appaled even imperial powers whose other history included things starting like the Opium War, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and putting down the Boxer Rebellion.
Given that military action caused it that is a rather egregious to complain about the resulting sanctions and even worse to claim causus beli over it.