Replies

the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.

I wonder for how long I will have to hear this dirty fairytale.

"The dirty fairytale," as you refer to it, is sort of standard fare in the documentaries currently being played on the History Channel and other cable stations here in the US.

Since you were born and partly raised in the old USSR and have a grandfather that fought the Germans from the steepes to Berlin, what is his/your version of the behavior of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe?

Since I'm a US Vietnam War veteran and didnot do any of the terrible things that US troops are generally slurred with in that war, I can understand there might be another, more realistic account of what happened. In saying this, I do not say that ALL US soldiers in Vietnam conducted themselves honorably because the evidence is there that some did commit crimes against Vietnamese civilans and against captured NVA and VC prisoners.

BTW, those who have really studied the history of WWII have absolutely no doubt about the tremendous contribution that Russia made in defeating Germany and also the tremendous cost in suffering the Russian people paid to secure that victory.

No, in WWII, if soldiers came through your town, terrible things happened. Unless of course you were American or British, in which the troops gave out food and candy. Sure, we had soldiers that ripped off civilians and enemies but overall, the kind of mayhem that usually followed did not happen with us. That is the truth.

The rapes of the Red Army are a fact, a stone cold fact. Sure its embarrassing years later, but it happened.

There is much truth to this notion. I think that the US Army's and Navy and Air Corp) defeat of the Wehrmacht was the greatest achievment in it's history, as the German Army was THE outstanding tactical fighting force of the war, even with the dead strategic hand of Adolph Hitler at it's controls. Never has any army (German) in history fought so well for so monstrous a cause.

In assesing our victory, we must acknowledge that we were tasked with confronting only 20% of that formidable German enemy in NW Europe. 8 of every 10 German soldiers who died in WWII were killed by the other hideous regime of the time, Stalin's Soviet Russia. Just think of our casualty lists had we had to face just another 25% of the German Army in the West. While we would not have been has inhumanly profligate as the Soviets were in expending human capital, it is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of baby boomers alive today would have perished with their fathers in the mud of European battlefields.

I am just trying to keep our victory in perspective and to make the case that even though I think that we would have ultimately prevailed, it would have been at the price of the greatest death toll in our history without the contributions of the Reds. I think our fight was nearly as much to prevent the westward advance of the Red Army as to defeat the Germans. It was a good thing for the world that we stopped them by meeting? them at the Elbe River. Would have been better had we gone a bit farther east though, despite the Yalta conference agreements.