It was on this date in 1944 that the Allies began to take back Europe from Nazi Germany -- and it probably wouldn't have been possible even then if the USSR hadn't been pushing back, hard, for a year and a half in the east.*
The successful invasion of Europe came at a terrible cost in human life, and it took nearly three months of fighting to cover what is now a three hour drive from the landing sites to Paris. Victory in Europe took eleven months from D-Day, and left smoking ruins.
There is war in Europe again today, with an authoritarian regime invading a smaller, weaker neighbor. The United States is beset by "America First " isolationists and a small, vocal contingent of outright fascists, just as we were in 1939 - 41. Along with our European allies, we're providing materiel support to the invaded nation, while trying to stay clear of the fight.
Will echoes of the events of WW II -- which themselves echoed the Great War only a generation earlier -- ring across Europe again? The price of inaction is paid in blood, in labor and goods lost in the flames of war, and it is always high. Civilization won last time and the time before, but victory is never certain.
Remember the past. Understand the present.
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* A source of tension between Russia and the rest of the WW II Allies that persists to this day is that the USSR lost around eleven million soldiers and seven million civilians, and Russians don't think the other Allies ever fully recognized the extent of their losses. It's a resentment Vladimir Putin exploits now, when he demonizes NATO.
The losses the Russians had vs the Nazis is a valid point. Maybe not dividing Poland with those same Nazis would have been a good way to save those Russian lives.
ReplyDeleteYeah, because I was totally defending Stalin's foreign policy. Are you high?
ReplyDeleteLook, maybe two percent (plus or minus a large error band) of the Soviet Army were political commissars. Many of the highest officers were Party members. But the dead were mostly just ordinary soldiers trying to get along, no different to their U.S., British, Canadian or other Allied counterparts. They had even less say than most of the others in what their government got up to.
As late as 1956, Communist Party membership comprised less than 5% of the Soviet population. Demographics for the Red Army are hard to come by but the rank and file probably closely approximated the gen. pop.
In contrast, about 10% of Germans were N-zi party members during WW II; among Army officers, it was about 30%. So figure their regular troops as somewhere between 10 and 30%.
The Russians wanted a second front in Europe much earlier than D-Day, because of the toll it was taking. The Western Allies absolutely relied on the Russian front grinding down German manpower, weapons and supplies. These are historical facts, not political opinions. You can go look 'em, sometimes in the writings of the men who made those decisions and in the writings of historians working from source documents.
Anon apologized, and I don't think he will mind my quoting the factual content of his note:
ReplyDelete"I was not implying you were defending the Soviets. My [...] point was more like its difficult for me personally to commiserate with them when the decisions of their nation contributed to the problem that confronted them. I understand that a lot of those who suffered and died were innocent."
The issue would be, who is "them?" After WW II, the Allies put the ringleaders on trial and dealt with them according to the determination of the court. Regular soldiers who had not committed war crimes generally escaped trial and criminal penalties. (Though many did have to undergo "denazification.") As a general principle, soldiers who did their duty are not held accountable for the decisions of their governments, unless they themselves committed war crimes.
Plenty of soldiers did plenty of bad things during WW II, and that's not unusual. One notable (if minor) example is the retouching of the photograph of a Russian soldier putting up the Soviet flag over the Reichstag: it seems he was wearing two or three watches at the time.
D-Day was one part -- a very important part -- of defeating fascist aggression in Europe. But winning the war took about everything that the Allies could find, in part because the good (or at least slightly better) guys kept holding back, trying to find some other way to resolve the problem.
Additionally, the West had to manufacture, transport, and train enough troops to make an invasion a much more likely success, especially with the previously failed British Army effort at Dieppe. The air war effort from the Western allies did tie down a lot of fighter support that would have been available to help Germany maintain air superiority over the Eastern front.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the Allies spent a lot of blood and treasure keeping the Soviets supplied during that war- the convoys up to Murmansk took a lot of ships and men needed to keep Britian alive at that point. As even Khruschev noted, the Russians wouldn't got to Berlin if it wasn't for all the Studebaker trucks that got them there.
ReplyDelete