BTW, let's see what the Soviets were doing about 80 years ago at this time.
"The United States is a country of machines. Without the use of these machines through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war."While the Russian soldiers did most of the dying and most of the killing of Germans - that is not what won the war!
That the minister ignores the fact that the US and UK were solely responsible for the ever expanding destruction of Germany's war industry and the scale and importance of US Lend Lease to the USSR's ability to wage any kind of war against Germany.
That quote and the below figures can be found in "Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II" byAlbert L. Weeks.
Some of the figures on US Lend Lease to the USSR:
Vehicles (trucks, jeeps, etc.): 437,000
RR cars & locomotives: 13,000
Tanks: 7,000
Aircraft: 15,000
Machine Tools: 306,000
Steel: 2,300,000 tons (from rolled aircraft steel to armor plate)
Petro Prods: 2,650,000 tons
AA Guns: 8,000
Guns: 132,000
And there was much more.
In short, the USSR could not have supplied and transported its army without Lend-Lease. And they would have faced a German army infinitely better supplied than allied bombing rendered them.
I recently bought a number of WWII dvds (I am a dvd watching Luddite). One set is the Frank Capra film series Why We Fight. The volume on Russia is long and detailed and quite exciting. But of course the malarkey about the great friends the Soviets and their strong leaders (the murderous psychopath Stalin) helping us defeat the Nazis is hogwash.
The Russians decided to hold out no matter what and in being forced farther and farther eastward they did a nearly total scorched earth mission. Buildings, farmland, forests, railroads, towns all were blown up and burned. They would leave the Germans blackened empty lands to “conquer” and the Russians would later advance against them.
Worth watching on YouTube or somewhere. Also great stuff earlier on Germany,Japan and Italy all getting their young students to learn to be honored to sacrifice their very lives for the chance to die for their imperial leaders, versus the same era in the US where “freedom, religious liberty and the chance for the individual to live and excel as they choose” is described.
BTW, let's see what the Soviets were doing about 80 years ago at this time.
How about we start the clock even earlier? Germany, even before Hitler, was paying Soviet Russia big bucks for doing things that were against the Versailles Treaty. Then you can add to all of the other baggage from the Non-Aggression Treaty, the confidence of peace which gave Stalin the ability to continue the purges of his military that led to a lot of his self-inflicted casualties.
So sorry Comrade, your protests are found wanting!
Oh, and that final bit on the European Democracy? The dead of Hungary, E.Germany, Poland etc in the decades of 1950-1989 echo their cry to the heavens!
I appreciate the fight the individual Soviet Soldiers put up when their backs were up against the wall.
But what set in stone my views on The Soviet Union and WWII was the wrectched and inhumane treatment they visited on their own soldiers after the war.
I understand(but do not condone) the Soviets treatment of German POWs, but the treatment of their own solders who were captured and repatriated was one of the cruelest treatment a governement has visited on its own citizens in modern history.
Those Soviet men had fought in bloody, ungodly conditions against better trained and equipped German soldiers (at least initially) then, after capture, were subjected to worse treatment than the Jews in concentration camps
Astonishingly, there are many instances of Jewish concentration camp prisoners (on edge of starvation and murder themselves) who were able to actually muster real pity for the Soviet POW’s whose paths they often crossed during both of their journeys through Nazi Hell.
The Jews saw that the Soviet POWs breathed air at the even more tenuous whims of German guards than they themselves did, which is a damning statement of German treatment of Soviet POWs.
But even more astonishingly inhumane and cruel than German treatment of Soviet POWs was the Soviet treatment of those same men, their own men who were released after spending years in Nazi Hell. Those men, who probably had all hope die in them of ever seeing their home and loved ones again extinguished at the hands of the Nazis, only to flame up again when they were freed. Then they were rounded up, confused, and shot, disappeared, or sent off to Gulags never to be seen again.
Some few made it all the way back and into the arms of their loved ones, only to have the authorities round them up again and shipped off the Gulag where they were never seen again. And a minicule number made it out of the gulag after 20 years, some even having fivers or tanners slapped on to the top.
It is THAT heinous treatment which makes me despise the Soviet Union and taints any good they were able to impart on anything, even up to (but probably not including) any American lives that may have been lost without the involvement of resources the Germans had to divert to the Western Front.
That action by the Soviets against their own fighting men because they had contact with the West, or simply because it was easier just to destroy any man who had been captured because that included the subset of any who had contact with the West.
In my mind, that is pure, concentrated, sadistic evil, what they did to their own POW’s.
In that light I would say to anyone campaigning for acknowledgement of a greater role played by the Soviet Union for ending the war (when it comes from anyone willing to share that credit with the government) can go pound sand. I can respect the individual Soviet soldier who fought to live, and acknowledge with genuine sadness the loss of so many Soviet lives civilian and military, but anything beyond that is corrupted for me.
As a nation they didn't have the hard specie to fund a Boy Scoustki troop, much less a war. Without the US's backing they might just as well have given Stalingrad AND Moscow to Hitler because they'd have done well to stop the Nazis before Vladivostok.
FU Ruskies! If it were not for the American Arsenal of Democracy and blood and grit of our military Hitler would have eventually routed the red scum. Patton was correct in wanting to kick the Soviets back to their border. Our idiotic government thought differently.
Yeah Vlad, Comrade Stalin cut a deal that put the Mother Russia on Hitler’s side so that Poland could be carved up and 20,000 Polish Army officers and political leaders could be massacred by your side. Russia would likely have remained on Hitler’s side until 1945, but Hitler double-crossed Stalin first.
Congratulations, Russia helped turn the European crisis into a hot war in September 1939 and a lot of Russians paid the ultimate price for his strategic ineptitude.
I have been reading Victor David Hanson’s book on the Second World Wars.
One Chapter is devoted to various sieges, including the unsuccessful German siege of Leningrad. He states that more Russians died at Leningrad than all the WW II related deaths for the USA. Try to grasp that fact.
Americans, even those of us who have read and watched recent British You Tube videos can not grasp the enormous, nay un comprehendable loss of Russian lives in WW II.
BTW...... The book, The Second World Wars is hard.
The Soviets didn’t fight the Nazis until the Nazis attacked them.
We fought the Nazis without being attacked by them.