Posted on 06/05/2019 6:24:22 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Russia told the West on Wednesday the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944 did not play a decisive role in ending World War II and that the Allied war effort should not be exaggerated.
Moscow's comments might irk war veterans in Britain where the 75th anniversary on Wednesday of the largest seaborne invasion in history was marked at a ceremony in Portsmouth attended by Queen Elizabeth and world leaders including Donald Trump and Angela Merkel.
Speaking at a weekly news conference in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a tribute to those who died on the western front of World War II and said Moscow appreciated the Allied war effort.
"It should of course not be exaggerated. And especially not at the same time as diminishing the Soviet Union's titanic efforts, without which this victory simply would not have happened," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
Russia didn’t fight the Germans in North Africa, Sicily or the Italian mainland. Russia didn’t posses a navy that ended the U boat threat in the North Atlantic as the Royal Navy and the US Navy did. Russia didn’t posses a strategic airforce that pounded German cities and war industries to dust. Russia didn’t fight the Japanese all through the islands of the Pacific. Russia didn’t posses a navy that put the Imperial Japanese Navy at the bottom of the Pacific. Russia didn’t posses a strategic air force that fire bombed Japanese cities as did the US. Russia wasn’t supplying it’s allies with arms, America did and Russia sure as hell didn’t develop and deploy two atomic bombs that bought Japan to the surrender table.
Russia did sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler that allowed them to snap up the Baltic States. Russia did invade Poland two weeks after Germany did. Russia did invade Finland and Old Joe did sit fat and sassy in the Kremlin every night during the winter of 1940/41 while the Luftwaffe was pounding London into dust. The in June of 1941 when Hitler decided he didn’t need a partner anymore suddenly Stalin was screaming for help from the West. And from the minute the US entered the war it was “You got to open up a second front, you have to do that NOW! Screw the Russians.
I read that Russia fought 120 German divisions and we fought 80.
We were ALSO fighting another Empire!!
I am more than happy with lend-lease if it saved American lives.
We would have won either way but taken quite a number more casualties, likely.
So, why did Hitler put Rommel in charge of the Atlantic Wall defenses instead of sending him to take care of the Russians?
‘The Soviet Union lost over 25 million lives’
I’m not sure that I agree with Russia on this claim, but considering that they lost 50 times as many people as the US in that war, I’m not going to go out screaming on Main Street about them.
So beautiful. And so ignorant of history.
“King Panther”? What was that?
‘And after the war Stalin himself credited the US for feeding his Armies— with Spam.’
I always wondered what led to the Cold War...nothing else made sense.
Really, we did just enough to the Japs to keep them back on their heels. There was a Europe first strategy out of the Pentagon. Everybody kind of knew that you could deal with Japan once the Germans were defeated. But defeating Japan would let Germany grow dangerously strong. As for Stalin, he simply had no ability to fight in the Pacific before the Germans were defeated without risking complete destruction himself. And he certainly could not have participated in any sort of Navy War. The most he could have done was fight the Japanese in Manchuria, but he had no ability to protect Force across the ocean into Japan, and I’m not aware of any Soviet strategic bombers that could have helped in the bombing campaign. It’s probably best for the world that they didn’t jump into the Pacific. If they would have we would probably be living with a north and south Japan today,
See my post. #41.
Half true. By June 1944, it was clear that with our logistical support, the Soviets would have beaten the Nazis eventually with our without the 2nd front. It just would have taken longer.
D-day did not save Europe from the Nazis. It did, however, save Western Europe from domination by the Soviet Union, whose regime was every bit as evil as the Nazi regime.
Both the western and the eastern fronts were essential to the defeat of Germany, so there’s no need for hair-splitting arguments over who did the most. Of course, that’s not to say that the Soviets did not deserve the damage that was inflicted on them by their self-destructive alliance with Germany after Hitler started the war.
Can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if we had let the Germans and Russians and the Chinese and Japanese wipe each other off the planet. There is no middle east without Russian and Chinese support. And seriously, what world needs the Germans? The Japanese are savages and deserved for the Koreans and Chinese to avenge their savagery.
More than one way to open a can of worms.
I don’t really agree. I think the day did save most of Western Europe from the Nazis. And as an American, I thank God for the Soviet meat grinder on the Eastern Front so fewer boys from Kentucky, Colorado, New York and Tennessee died. We lost enough as it is. Far too many Americans have zero appreciation for the size of the Soviet effort, and the weight they brought to the fight. But it would be absolutely blindingly ignorant to believe that D-Day and the battle in Western Europe was less than absolutely crucial to the Nazi defeat.
That mentality reminds me of the people who claim that the 8th AF bombing had no serious effect on Germany.
Yeah, well, we know the Soviets were complicit in starting WWII with the Nazis.
Russians won in spite of Stalin, and they lost millions more than they had to.
And we also had our hands tied with Japan at the time as well.
What did the Russkies do for us there?
And still they got half of the Korean peninsula for their miniscule efforts.
The U.S. supplied a third of the explosives used by the Soviets. Over half of all Soviet munitions were supplied by the Allies.
About a third of Soviet Aircraft were from the U.S.
The U.S. supplied enough food to feed a 10 million man army for the entire war.
“[b]When we entered the war, we were still a backward country in the industrial sense as compared to Germany…..Today (in 1963), some say the Allies really didn’t help us… But, listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us materiel without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war…We did not have enough munitions, and how would we have been able to turn out all those tanks without the rolled steel sent to us by the Americans? To believe what they say (in the USSR) today, you’d think we had all this in abundance!” - March G. K. Zhukov[/b]
The Western Allies would have waltzed into Berlin, because at least the Germans knew with them, they weren't going to be raped.
“All the money and supplies we gave Stalin were though”
Not too sure it was all free. Stalin loaded a British cruiser, HMS Edinburgh with a ton of gold bullion in the Russian port of Murmansk. They said it was intended to pay back the U.S for all the help we gave them. The Germans sank that ship and the gold 850 feet deep in the Barents Sea. The gold was recovered in the 80’s by a group of North Sea saturation divers. I was bell partner with the diver, John Rossia that brought out the first bar of gold. There is a documentary on it on youtube, “Stalin’s Gold”.
(If you watch it, don’t believe the claim that a portion of the gold was not recovered) :)
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