Posted 11/08/2006 05:35:00 PM by Douglas

Interesting twist on WWII from the Russian perspective.

After talking at Cambridge recently about the preponderance of the eastern front and the scale of the Red Army’s triumph, I was accosted by an angry young British historian. “Don’t you realise that we were pinning down 56 German divisions in France alone,” he said. “Without that the Red Army would have been heavily defeated.” What is less acknowledged is that without the Red Army pulverising 150 divisions, the allies would never have landed.

Well, duh. One of Hitler's biggest follies is fighting the mulit-front war, regardless of who is on the other side of those fronts. But American conscripts in France in the West Vs. Russians in the East, defending their homes? Is there any real comparison?

When Churchill was writing in the late 1940s, he knew perfectly well that Stalin was no angel. Yet the sheer scale and variety of Stalinist crimes was not known. The statistic of 27m Soviet “war losses”, which appeared in the 1960s, concealed the fact that many of them were not Russians and many were victims not of Hitler but of Stalin. It has taken the collapse of the Soviet Union and more than 60 years for this body of certainty to accumulate.

So, what's the moral to the story? We should have stayed out of FDR's war? Soviet Russia and Germany, both with their genocide, concentration camps and mass murder, would have flung themselves at each other had not The Bright Shining Beacon of Democracy, America, intervened? Who knows. I'm no historian, nor do I have a book to push. Germany fell, the Soviets took control of Eastern Europe for the next 50 years, anyway, so I can't imagine anything worse from the fallout of our abstention of WWII. I'm sure 420,000 dead Americans might beg to differ.