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I think the wide availability of US and British war stories, tales, and legends, relative to those of other countries, is probably due to them being in English. I'm sure every side has their stories of cunning tricks they pulled, daring midnight raids, undercover operations, ingenious hardware, extreme training, victory against all odds, and everything else. But we hear our stories from our grandparents, books, and the English internet. It's less common to look across to the other sides and learn about how they saw things.

That's one of the reasons this article is very important.

"Russian tanks had a significant advantage over US tanks". This is much debated by WWII historians. When the U.S. tanks finally did square off against the Soviet tanks, U.S. tanks won : https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-Sherman-tank-compare-to-th... . U.S. reliability and logistics made up for any discrepancies in the specifications.

I'm not sure who you're quoting when you say, "Russian tanks had a significant advantage over US tanks," but I don't have any reason to think your quote is true. In case you intend that as a paraphrase of what I was saying, let me correct that misreading. I was making no claims about the relative quality of the tanks; by all reports, Soviet tanks were vastly inferior to German tanks as well.

Rather, my primary tank-related claim was that the USSR was producing enormous quantities of war materiel, as exemplified by tanks; in 01943 they outproduced Germany almost 2:1 in quantity of tanks, and even in 01944 when Germany was catching up, they still outproduced them. The quality of that materiel was merely adequate, but it still would have represented a very significant military threat to the US's position in Europe, as it had to Germany's.

My second claim was that the USSR was in a better logistical situation with respect to Europe than the US was. I don't think that's controversial, since Moscow is in Europe, and so was most Soviet farmland and much Soviet arms production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...

U.S. + British + France GDP was 7 times bigger than Russia at end of the war. Western allied air supremacy ( including a nuclear monopoly ) would have obliterated Soviet logistics.

The West had the upper hand and Stalin knew it.

How, then, is it that an iron curtain fell across Europe?

I wonder if those GDP numbers capture everything relevant to military advantage. The USSR produced as many tanks in a year and a half as Britain did throughout the whole war, despite having the same GDP.

Certainly it is true that with the nuclear monopoly the US had the upper hand; what we're discussing here is what Stalin would have believed if the bomb had remained secret, or perhaps only been demonstrated on uninhabited Pacific atolls, so the nuclear monopoly would not have figured into his calculations, or been a more theoretical factor. Or, more precisely, what Truman believed Stalin would have believed.

Not only this, but a significant number of the resistance movements against the Nazi occupation or Fascist governance in France, Italy, etc were organized by Communists or sympathetic to them. The Communist Parties maintained popularity for decades after WWII partially as a result of the role they played in resisting the Nazis, organizing resistance, etc.

Remember that the rest of western Europe and North America stood by and let Franco overrun Spain while the communist movement (small c and big-C) actively tried to fight him.

So there were in fact forces on the ground in many parts of Europe that would not have seen potential Red Army invasion forces as the same kind of invasion force as the Germans. At least for a period of time.

"while the communist movement actively tried to fight".

They also allied with them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

Remember this stuff also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communis...

The history is complicated. The Ribbentrop pact was within the Communist parties seen as necessary to bide time, since the USSR knew Germany was going to invade them. But I would agree, it's inexcusable in retrospect.

I am not an apologist for Stalinism, I am not saying any of this was a good thing. I am mostly accused of being a Trotskyist, or whatever.

But the role of the Communist movement in resisting Nazism in Europe is something not widely understood in the Anglo-American sphere. To the point where some on the right in the US have now started to conflate the two. Which is... nonsense.

Anglo-American post-war triumphalism is/was ridiculous. My father grew up in the rubble of the end of the war. There were no winners, it was tragedy all around.

It's sort of ridiculous that this conversation has degraded into debating who to blame for World War II and what was or was not excusable.

Listen, all those people are fucking dead!

Hirohito was the last surviving World War II leader; he died in 01989, 33 years ago, at which point the other leaders had all been dead for decades.

There's nobody left to blame or punish!

The youngest WWII soldiers were born around 01930, which is 91 years ago; there are very few of them left alive either.

I have the unpleasant feeling that some people are commenting on this thread because they support one or another of the belligerents in that bloody slaughter, as if it were a sportsball game, rather than because they are interested in what is true and what is false. How could you go about debugging a program if you had to argue with advocates of one subroutine or another, intentionally feeding you unreliable information so you'll blame a different subroutine for the bug? How could you go about analyzing a chemical reaction if you had to argue with people who were fans of one or another chemical compound, and tried to argue that their favorite compound would be produced from any reaction, whether or not the necessary elements were present? This is an excellent example of what I mean when I liken HN to the intellectual equivalent of the impoverished slums where I used to volunteer.

The relevant point to the factual question being discussed is that the European Resistance was, as you say, led by people who supported Stalin, and they had largely been put in charge of their various countries under the occupation of the United Nations. At the point that we're talking about, in 01945, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been dead for four years, and Europe was full of the tales of noble sacrifices and terrible suffering the Russians had experienced in order to resist the Nazis. So Stalin could reasonably anticipate a lot more popular support and a lot less government resistance for setting up Communist governments in them, should he push his military advantage further, than Hitler ever had for setting up Nazi governments.

> They also allied with them

As your own link states, this wasn't an alliance. Also if you read the "background" section of the article, you'll see that they very much saw Nazi Germany has a major threat and wanted to contains them early by allying France and Britain.

But France and particularly Britain instead prefered trying to appease Germany until the last minute with the results we know.

The non-agression pact might seem cynical from the west point of view, but if you put yourself in the soviet shoes for a second, it was a logical move.

As for your second link it's really not very assertive, most of the claims made early after the war were rebutted by historians later on.

It says it wasn't a "formal alliance". The Nazi-Soviet pact was alliance for practical purposes as seen with joint "victory parades" with the Wehrmacht and Red Army and expanded trading.

I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about. There were disclosures about Nazi-Soviet secret protocols in 1946 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... though Soviet attempts to deny this were not credible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

> was alliance for practical purposes as seen with joint "victory parades"

Alliance would mean joint fighting, not joint parading. Yes they secretly divided Europe on a map, and agreed not to fight over it, that not an alliance.

> I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about

Your second link on the French communist party activities during 39-41. It's like you didn't even read what you linked as source:

> but later historians have downplayed the PCF's role in any such actions, stating that they were isolated cases

Yes, but the actual alliance was in a secret codicil to the pact; the public face of the pact was just a truce between enemies. Both Hitler and Mussolini came to power largely on the strength of their opposition to Communism, which is why even a pact of neutrality was so scandalous to French Communists.

Yes, this is a good point: the Nazis got much of their public support from being opposed to socialism, and so the European resistance was largely run by Communists. People in the US mostly don't know this and tend to respond by shooting the messenger, which I guess is why your comment is downvoted like a dirty spammer.