Now, to destroy your silly suggestion that Battle of the Bulge was the greatest Battle of the 1944-45 Western Campaign, let's see what an accomplished
historian, Norman Davies had to say about it (in red) - as quoted from one of my previous posts:
Eugene Berkovich wrote:
Mate
What math? Math is quite clear on this. Germany had suffered lesser casulaties than US forces did most of the time they met directly.
In fact, I suggest, you read a very recent (May 1, 2005, indeed, article in Sum Times, written by Norman Davies, one of the foremost historians of the WWII)
Here's the whole of it:
Sunday Times (UK)
1 May 1 2005
Russia, the missing link in Britain's VE Day mythology
The story of ‘how we won the war’ has failed to give credit to the colossal
and costly effort in the Soviet East to bring down Hitler, writes
leading historian Norman Davies
The celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second
world war are likely to be the most verbose, the least reflective and the
last. In Moscow, politicians will be lining up to extract their pound of
kudos from the main victory celebrations on offer.
The host, President Putin, will say Soviet forces played the prime role in
defeating Nazi Germany. This will be one of the few tenable claims to be
made. The British and the Americans will talk as usual about “the common
struggle against evil” and “the triumph of freedom, justice and democracy”.
But nobody is going to present a reasonably accurate account of what
actually happened.
First, when the British talk of “how we won the war”, they forget that the
“we” of then is no longer the “we” of now. In 1939-45, Britain was still
the centre of a worldwide empire: Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders,
South Africans and Indians made huge sacrifices for us. And there were also
the allies France in 1939-40, Poland throughout the war, the USSR and the
US from 1941. The war was not a simple forerunner of the 1966 World Cup
final between England and West Germany.
Similar care has to be taken defining the other side. For Britain, the
enemy of 1939-45 was above all “the Germans”. Yet by 1939 the Third Reich
had expanded into Austria and Bohemia and one-third of the panzers that
launched the blitzkrieg against France had been built at the Skoda works.
The Axis powers included fascist Italy and imperial Japan and in the years
Britain was under most threat, they were supported by the Soviet Union. At
the height of its power in 1942-3, the Reich controlled the human and
economic resources of the greater part of Europe: 2m French prisoners, and
more than 10m forced labourers from the east toiled on German farms and in
German factories.
The Waffen SS raised dozens of volunteer divisions from almost every
occupied country, even a skeleton Legion of St George from British prisoners.
But the Soviet Union was the largest combatant state of all. It was widely
called “Russia” but Russia during the war was only one of 15 Soviet
republics, and formed only about 55% of the population. And it was ruled by
a Georgian tyrant who entered the war against the Reich only when attacked
himself.
An elementary knowledge of Soviet geography, therefore, is essential. In
September 1939, when Hitler and Stalin joined forces to destroy Poland, the
eastern half of Poland was annexed by the USSR and renamed Western
Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. All inhabitants Poles, Jews,
Byelorussians and Ukrainians were turned into involuntary Soviet
citizens, and supplied an enormous cohort of Soviet casualties.
In June 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, it was not Russia that
the Wehrmacht invaded, but Soviet-occupied Poland. The German armies
overran the Baltic states, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, but only the fringes
of Russia. They approached the outskirts of Moscow, Leningrad and
Stalingrad but never secured a main Russian city. As a result, by far the
heaviest civilian casualties were incurred in the western, non-Russian borders.
These are not territories over which President Putin presides today but
westerners rarely notice such niceties. For western attitudes to the second
world war crystallised in the immediate post-war years and have never
budged. They were moulded by the accounts of western commentators such as
Winston Churchill, which concentrated on western aspects of the war. The
political framework was provided by the popular ideology of anti-fascism.
And the moral arguments were supplied by the Nuremberg tribunal, whose
shortcomings attracted little attention.
So the horrific realities of the war in eastern Europe remained half-hidden
for years. The world heard the first official hints about Stalin’s misdeeds
from Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956. But the extraordinary scale of
wartime mortality in the USSR now estimated at 27m did not begin to
emerge until the first post-war Soviet census in 1959. It was the 1960s
before Solzhenitsyn revealed the true nature of the Gulag, the philosopher
Hannah Arendt provoked the debate on totalitarianism, and Robert Conquest
published pioneering studies in The Great Terror and The Nation Killers.
The collapse of communism in the 1990s had to precede President Gorbachev’s
admission of Soviet guilt in the Katyn massacre or ethnic cleansing in
Volhynia and Galicia. Antony Beevor’s superb studies of Stalingrad and
Berlin in 1945, which described such things as the Red Army’s brutal
contempt for its own men and systematic gang rapes of German women, were
treated as revelatory when published in the past 10 years.
What seems to have happened is that western opinion was only gradually
informed about the war in eastern Europe over 40 to 50 years, and that the
drip-feeding was insufficient to inspire radical adjustments to the overall
conceptual framework. It was significant that we learnt about Stalin after
his death and in the context of the cold war when we no longer identified
with the Soviet Union as a common partner.
But the western public at large was too emotionally attached to the
existing scenario of the second world war to indulge in major rethinking.
The western democracies never actually fought the USSR and Stalin could
never compete in the popular mind with Hitler as “the evil enemy”.
For example, the Jewish Holocaust was barely discussed for two decades
after the war but made enormous inroads into western consciousness from the
1960s exactly because it fitted so snugly into the existing scheme. It has
rightly become an emblematic episode of inhumanity but it also confirms our
preference for one, supremely evil enemy. In some countries, Holocaust
denial is a criminal offence yet Gulag denial is not even on the agenda.
The British War Crimes Act applies exclusively to crimes committed “by
Germans or on German-occupied territory”. And the European parliament, when
recently asked to grant a minute’s silence in honour of 22,000 allied
officers shot by the NKVD (the communist secret police), refused.
And all historians would agree that the Third Reich was defeated by the
effective co-operation of East and West. Yet nobody shows much enthusiasm
to quantify relative contributions or anything more precise than “Soviet
forces inflicted more German losses than the western armies combined”.
German sources, however, are more forthcoming. They state unequivocally
that 75-80% of Germany’s losses were incurred on the eastern front. The
implication is that all other contributions added up to a maximum of
20-25%. Of this, the Americans might claim 15%, and the British 10%.
Western apologists argue that the Soviet Union received enormous logistical
supplies from the West, that the Red Army was helped by the western bombing
offensive and the war at sea, and that other aspects, from industrial
production to intelligence, should not be overlooked. Yet the fact remains:
fighting is the essential activity in war. And as an adversary the Red Army
greatly excelled all its western counterparts. Suffice it to say that in
one single operation in 1944, when demolishing the Army Group Mitte in
Byelorussia, Marshal Rokossovsky destroyed a collection of Wehrmacht
divisions equivalent to the entire German deployment on the western front.
In fact the D-Day landings would be the sole operation fought by western
armies that might scrape into the war’s top 10 battles.
Not surprisingly, both military and civilian casualties in eastern Europe
reached a similar titanic scale. Here one must beware of the notoriously
false slogan of “20m Russian war dead”. The accepted figure is 27m not 20m,
it refers to “Soviet citizens” not to Russians, and includes millions of
victims killed by the Stalinist regime during and after the war. Even so,
the levels were staggering. The Red Army lost up to 13m, and still managed
to prevail.
On the civilian side, one only needs to look at the map of the German
occupation to see where the remaining 14m came from: about 2m would have
been Jews a recognised Soviet nationality caught in the Nazi trap
during the advance of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Byelorussia (now
Belarus) lost 25% of its inhabitants, though Poland and the Baltic states
were close behind. Ukraine probably suffered, alongside Russia, the largest
total loss, possibly more than 8m while the Russian city of Leningrad (now
St Petersburg) lost almost 1m citizens during the siege of 1941-4.
All these figures are tentative because Soviet officials never published
any authoritative breakdown. In any case, they had no reliable statistics.
The catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s were so colossal that no accurate
records could be kept and all figures derive from deductions, projections
and informed guesswork years later.
In Ukraine, for example, the post-war census could identify a vast
demographic black hole of missing people but not the hole’s many causes.
It could not differentiate between the unborn progeny of millions of
victims of the pre-war terror famine and collectivisation, the millions of
military deaths, the millions killed either by Hitler or Stalin, and the
millions of deportees who might or might not have perished in the Reich or
within the USSR. Historians can be fairly sure of the general categories
but not of the precise sums.
On the ideological front, westerners are accustomed to thinking of the
second world war as a two-sided conflict, of good fighting evil. The
Soviets had a similar dialectical view. They were the authors of the
concept of anti-fascism, which caught on in the West, encouraging the
illusion that all opponents of fascism were inspired by similar values. In
reality, Soviet communism was as hostile to western democracy as it was to
fascism. Hence, despite the rhetoric, the Grand Alliance of 1941-5 can be
seen as only a fleeting marriage of convenience. There should have been no
surprise, once fascism was eliminated, that the western world moved into
the cold war.
Stalinist practices, however, undermine the entire moral framework within
which the allied cause is perceived. It is not possible to maintain that
the allies were fighting for untrammelled good if the largest of their
members was habitually given to mass murder. Before 1941, enough was known
about Stalin’s concentration camps, purges, show trials and state terror
that western leaders had no excuse for ignorance. Yet such was the
desperate need for Soviet military assistance that all western suspicions
were suspended. Indeed a fairytale vision was created of “Dear Old Uncle
Joe” and his “alternative forms of democracy”.
During the war, there were thousands in London and Washington who had
witnessed Stalin’s camps and murders. But they were effectively silenced by
war censorship, and sometimes by military discipline. Officers caught
discussing what they had heard about Stalin’s crimes were threatened with
courts martial. Even Churchill, who had been a strident anti-Bolshevik and
who admitted to “supping with the devil”, warmed to the blandishments of
success.
When victory finally came, very few were willing to count the political and
moral cost. At the Nuremberg trials, three categories of criminal conduct
were established: crimes against peace (ie, wars of aggression); war crimes
and crimes against humanity. By any reckoning, Stalin’s regime deserved to
stand trial on all counts. It had been expelled from the League of Nations
for crimes against peace. While defeating the Wehrmacht, its forces had
perpetrated numberless atrocities. And in pursuing policies of mass murder,
mass deportation, repressions and ethnic cleansing the Soviet state had
manifestly entered the realm of crimes against humanity.
Yet in the victory euphoria, they need not have feared a public reprimand,
let alone a formal accusation. When German defence lawyers at Nuremberg
protested on this score, they were cut short by the chairman, Sir Geoffrey
Lawrence. “We are here to judge major war criminals,” he reminded the
court, “not to try the prosecuting powers.”
Meanwhile, the notion of a general “liberation” of Europe was false. The
liberation was genuine enough when the allies entered Rome, Paris or
Brussels; and it was dramatically evident when allied soldiers rescued the
survivors of Belsen, Buchenwald or Auschwitz. But in eastern Europe, Soviet
forces imposed a new tyranny as soon as the Nazi tyranny was crushed.
Buchenwald was emptied of one set of inmates, then used for another.
At the very time that Auschwitz was being liberated in January 1945, other
camps like Majdanek were filling up with members of the resistance movement
(our allies) whom the NKVD regarded as enemies. Wartime heroes, flown into
continental Europe by SOE and the RAF, were cast into Soviet dungeons.
Democrats were arrested, shot or put on trial. Vast tides of innocents,
including all Soviet prisoners of war who had survived German imprisonment,
all so-called “repatriants” handed over by western forces, and most of the
slave workers returning home from Germany were shot or shipped off to the
Gulag. Puppet dictatorships were introduced by force into country after
country.
So historians have a problem. Somehow they must find a way of describing a
complicated war in which the combined forces of western democracy and
Stalinist tyranny triumphed over the Axis. They must give pride of place to
the role which the Soviet Union played in the military defeat of Germany,
just as the US shouldered the main burden of the war against Japan.
At the same time they must emphasise that Stalin’s triumph had nothing to
do with freedom or justice, and that by western standards the overall
outcome was only partly satisfactory. It is a tall order. To date, nobody
has succeeded.
Norman Davies is the author of Europe: A History (Pimlico)
mate wrote:Eugene & Synthese
