Anybody who has studied the war knows that Russia did the overwhelming share of heavy lifting against the Nazis. They had exponentially more casualties than we did and they killed exponentially more of Germany's (best) forces than we did.
We knew this even in 1943. If Omar Bradley is to be believed then the fact is that the only reason we invaded Sicily and Italy was because Stalin threatened to seek a seperate peace with Hitler if we didn't open a second front.
Not ready to invade France and not willing to face the full weight of the German war machine we committed hundred of thousands of troops to a battle that we felt was otherwise unnecessary.
“Anybody who has studied the war knows that Russia did the overwhelming share of heavy lifting against the Nazis.”
It’s always good when the bear gets bitten by the wolf, in my book.
True enough. The casualties on the Western Front were only a fraction of those on the Ostfront. The sheer scale of the slaughter there—of the battles, the killings by the Einsatzgruppen, the deaths of POWs, the bloody revenge by the Red Army—boggles the mind. Over a million men, women, and children at Stalingrad alone in a six-month period, another million during the three-year siege of Leningrad, God only knows how many hundreds of thousands or millions when the Red Army pushed into Germany in 1945.
One telling stat that Antony Beevor came up with in his recent book on Stalingrad—during the battle, between August 1942 and February 1943, the Soviets themselves executed more than 11,000 of their own soldiers for desertion or other “crimes”. That’s roughly the full strength of a Red Army rifle division. Three times the deaths we’ve suffered in Iraq in six full years, suffered in six months, killed BY THEIR OWN SIDE. That’s astonishing.
}:-)4