Posted on 05/05/2005 10:23:39 AM PDT by sergey1973
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.
I was just wondering, because there were NKVD everywhere around, and I'm sure they didn't want Soviet soldiers to fraternize with GI's.
Nope--at a time picture was taken, it was perfect for propaganda. Cold War came a few months later.
They would have accepted German leadership in a free Russian state, but they would no more have accepted German rule then Poland would have even had the Germans treated Poles like people and not animals. But then again, the Germans then were the Nazis (well the leadership anyways) and as such they wouldn't have been themselves if they treated the untermensch north and east slavs like human beings.
Actually the Cold War started around 1948, more like a few years later.
3 million Soviet soldiers surrendered in the first 4 months of Barbarosa. They figured they were being liberated from Stalin. By the end of 1941, 2 million of them were shot, starved or worked to death.
The brits usually manage to leave the US out of WW2, also.
"Actually the Cold War started around 1948, more like a few years later."
Officially yes, but tensions were building up soon after American/British and Soviet Troops linked up in Germany.
"The brits usually manage to leave the US out of WW2, also."
You've got to be kidding ? Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Battle of Bulge, Guadalcanal, Italian Campaign, Pacific Battles against Japanese Navy, etc--how it could "usually leave the US out of WWII " ?
The Russians sometimes claim the Cold War started in 1918-19 when U.S. and British troops seized and occupied the Russian port city of Arkhangelsk.
Nope, not kidding. Check out most British books or shows on WW2. The only battle they remember was Dunkirk, and the brits claim they won that one.
"The Russians sometimes claim the Cold War started in 1918-19 when U.S. and British troops seized and occupied the Russian port city of Arkhangelsk."
This was during Russian Civil war of 1917-1922. British and American troops were assisting anti-Bolshevik Russian White Guard Army. They used Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to supply White Guard forces.
Unfortunately for Russia and for the rest of the World, Bolsheviks won.
"Nope, not kidding. Check out most British books or shows on WW2. The only battle they remember was Dunkirk, and the brits claim they won that one."
Ah--got it -:))) Well--historical mythology is a favorite International game. Nobody likes to talk and analyzie own failures and shortcomings--that's human nature after all
-:))))
I don't think you're right on this one.
We've got a lot of uranium in Utah and Colorado, and, as I recall, the production schedule on atomic bombs was roughly one every two months after the Trinity test bomb, Little Boy and Fat Man.
I can't find a definitive reference on that one; I'm writing from memory. However, I find it hard to believe that we could crank out three bombs by 1945 and then just shut down production for four years.
As for battlefield use, it would have been impossible to reach any major soviet city, considering that from the closest bases it would have been a flight of at least a thousand kilometers across enemy dominated air space into the mouth of one of the thickest air-defense nets in the world. As for battlefield use, the range on the atomics was so small (radius) that they would have made little impact on a front line compared to the cost of making the bomb.
It's just like Normandy. Normandy was not the turning point of the war not even nearly the main battle. 8 out of 10 Third Reich soldier KIAs (of all nationalities) died on the Eastern Front. By the time Normandy happened, the Soviets were sitting on and across the Vistul and the 6th Army was being exterminated for the second time, this time in Romania.
Which Russians? Considering that US forces arrived to assist White Russian elements on their southern drive. The drive was very effective, the combined force of Imperial Russian troops and US troops routed the Bolsheviks but then Wilson showed his leftest roots and forbid the US contingent to advance. Meanwhile the Whites were not strong enough to continue pushing the regrouping Bolshaviks and eventually both the Whites and the US troops were pushed back north.
I recall something James Michener wrote about the 20th Anniversary of D-Day. It seems the French had commissioned a "commemorative" stamp which depicted the heroic French Commandos coming ashore at Normandy with a large Frog flag. Somewhere in the distance you could make out British and American flags. I know that the Russians, that is the Russians + the other captive nations that made up the former USSR, made the greatest human sacrifice of any Allied nation in WWII, but it is also true that in large measure their sacrifice was due as much to the self-delusional paranoia of their ruthless Communist dictator, as it was to German action. Whether the Russians could have/would have stood alone against Nazi Germany, as Britain did, or whether the Russians could ever have achieved victory without the material support the US provided, is definitely an open question, at least.
Well--I would prefer not to speculate whether Russia/USSR would have achieved the victory over Nazi Germany on its own without Allied assistance. This is really anything but a wild guess of what ifs. What's really important is to recognize all contributions to the victory over Nazi Germany without overlooking darker aspects of Post WWII Soviet Control of E.Europe.
"6. after dropping the second bomb on Japan we didn't have another bomb for 4 years. US has very little Uranium."
You might ask God for a refresher course in the 'truth'...
Could you be more wrong? Let us count the ways... First as to your contention that after the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan that the US did not have another atomic bomb for four years. The TRUTH is that there was a third atomic bomb being readied for a combat drop. Didn't know that, did you?
The United States actually had three Atomic weapons ready for use near the end of WWII, two of which were dropped on Japan, the third was being readied for a mission by Col. Tibbets' unit, the 509th Composite Group when Japan surrendered. The USA had two "Fat Man" plutonium Atomic weapons in the inventory at the end of calendar year 1945.
In an August 2002 interview with Studs Terkel published in the British Guardian newspaper, Paul Tibbetts recalled something similar: "Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said, 'You got another one of those damn things?' I said, 'Yessir.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'Over in Utah.' He said, 'Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.' I said, 'Yessir.' I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."
Source: Warbird Forum: The third bomb
Now let's get to your laughable contention that the US did not have another bomb for another four years...
The reason that your assertion is so incorrect to be sophmorically stupid was that there WAS a production line set up to generate plutonium cores for the "Fat Man" model of the US nuclear stockpile! Did you think that the US had invested 2 billion (1943) dollars just to make five atomic bombs in 1945? The only reason that the US did not go into wartime production mode on the 'Fat Man' plutonium cores is that the war ENDED. The "Little Boy" uranium gun-type atomic weapon first dropped on Hiroshima was a one-off model, never produced again. All of the other US atomic weapons were of the plutonium-implosion "Fat Man" model. So the first bomb was tested in the US during July 1945. Two more atomic weapons were dropped on Japan in August 1945. One more atomic bomb was being readied for Tokyo for late August 1945; it was never delivered. At the end of calendar year 1945 the US had two "Fat Man" type nuclear weapons in its inventory out of the five produced in 1945, however if Japan had not surrendered the nuclear 'production line' that you insist did not exist was designed to produce 7 plutonium cored nuclear weapons per month. More than enough to take care of the Nazis and/or the Japs.
"A third bomb was being shipped from New Mexico, target Tokyo, when the war ended. Production was geared to seven per month with an expectation that 50 bombs would be required to assure that an invasion would not be required. Release of radiation from the untested Hiroshima bomb, designed as the original gun-type and made of uranium, was a surprise. The radiation range was expected to be within the blast radius, that is, a lethal dose of radiation would only kill those already dead from concussion. The Alamogordo bomb test and later production were of the more complicated plutonium, yet cleaner, implosion device."
Source: WW2 Pacific: Little Known Facts: Atomic Bomb -- Allies
The United States did feel the need to build more nuclear weapons in the immediate aftermath of WWII, since the demobilization of the 12.34 million Armed Forces of WWII had made the post-war US nuclear monopoly the first-line of defense for the United States and its interests. No "hindsight" was necessary, since the expense of the $2 Billion Manhattan Project was amortized over the following production of US nuclear weapons from 1945 onwards.
There was no need for the US to wait to build more atomic weapons until the USSR detonated their first atomic bomb in August of 1949, as by 1949 the United States had around 235 atomic weapons in its nuclear arsenal. Winston Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain" speach at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946 - the official 'start' of the Cold War, three years before the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. Note the ramp-up in production in 1946. Notice that by the four year time frame from the end of WWII in September 1945 to September 1949 the US had produced 235 atomic weapons. You stated that ZERO were produced in that same time frame.
Which statement is the TRUTH, yours or history's...
Source: Power Point Presentation USC Berkeley - History - 105, Dr. McCray "Early Nuclear Strategy" Slide #9.
Source: Complete List of All U.S. Nuclear Weapons The NuclearWeaponsArchive.org
Now as to your last contention about the US uranium reserves. The US has 3% of the world's know uranium reserves, Canada has 12% and Australia has 28% of the world's known economically recoverable uranium reserves. The US reserves alone would have been enough to re-create the US nuclear weapons inventory at the height of the cold war five times over. Access to the raw ore was never the problem, refining it was the reason for the massive expenditure of the Manhattan Project and follow-ons in the the 1950s and 1960s.
dvwjr
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.