The Soviets and their admirers like to say just that, often to say they shed the blood we didn't have to.
True as far as it goes, but in quality and quantity of blood shed, two things should be kept in mind:
FIrst, the Soviet Union fought the war far differently than we would have. We in the USA would never have fought it as they did, because we view the value of life differently than they do, and would not have made our troops fight it at the points our own guns, as they did. Their sacrifice of so many men was often done brutally and callously.
Secondly, they were fighting for very existence of their own country. We never were, at any time, ever, even if at the time, it seemed that way to many. We did not have our necks and native soil on the chopping block as they did.
When I hear the Soviets and Russians making this point about how they made all the human sacrifice to winning the war, it reminds me somewhat of the person who murders his parents and then asks the judge for leniency because he is an orphan.
While true in many of your assessments, the Soviets also had a great fortune for having a superb military command commander in Georgy Zhukov. His very success in defeating the Japanese in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol with very innovative tactics elevated him up the Red Army ranks really fast, and a refinement of those tactics proved to be decisive in defeating the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Agreed.But that doesn’t change the fact that, at the time, there didn’t appear to be any certain way of defeating Hitler without the Soviets. And the huge butcher bill the war on “der Ostfront” entailed.
If you knew that the A-bomb would work as it did and when it did, to end the war, you could have taken a passive, defensive approach to the Third Reich, and to Japan as well. That would have saved a lot of lives, at the cost of a relative few others. But it would have been quite a leap of faith . . .
If the US Army had met the Wehrmacht on the plains of say, Iowa, in 1942-43 the US Army would have suffered losses as bad if not worse than did the Red Army.
The Krauts simply had better equipment and better trained soldiers than the Americans.
It took a tremendous effort by the Red Army to stop the Germans at Stalingrad and Kursk.
The Russians won because of the T-34 Tank, without it, they would have lost the war.
A German General who came across the T-34 for the first time, remarked, that if the Russians could build them on an assembly line, Germany would lose the war.