World War II and the Soviets

With the recent observance of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, and President Bush's trip to Moscow to help commemorate it, a number of observers have called for the U.S. and others to give the Soviet Union's role in the war its due respect.

Richard Overy, writing in The Guardian, is one such commentator:

Imagine for a moment that around half the population of Great Britain - men, women and children - died in the second world war. What kind of extraordinary trauma would this represent? How would "victory" in 1945 now be viewed, or even celebrated? Yet 27 million is the estimate of Soviet deaths by the end of the war. Actual British losses represented around 0.6% of the population; American losses were smaller, around 0.3%. But Soviet losses, from war, starvation and repression, represented about 14% of the pre-war population.

These losses were the brutal product of German invasion in 1941 and the Soviet determination to resist that aggression and expel the Germans from their territory. The scarcely credible level of sacrifice exposes just how vast and savage the war on the eastern front was. It was here that the great majority of German casualties occurred. It was here that the war was won or lost, for if the Red Army had not succeeded against all the odds in halting the Germans in 1941 and then inflicting the first major defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, it is difficult to see how the western democracies, Britain and the US, could have expelled Germany from its new empire.

By 1945 the material strength of the allies was, of course, overwhelming. The critical point came in the middle years of the war, with the Soviet Union teetering before Stalingrad, Rommel poised to take Egypt, the battle of the Atlantic not yet won and American rearmament in its early stages. Victory was not automatic. Soviet resistance meant the difference. Uncertainly, sometimes incompetently, the Soviet armed forces learned the lessons imposed on them by Germany's panzer armies in 1941. A hasty, improvised set of reforms and an economy geared almost exclusively to armaments turned the feeble efforts of 1941 into the vast setpiece battles from the summer of 1943, every one of which the Soviet side won.

German forces were defeated not by the sheer numbers (by 1943 millions of Soviet soldiers were dead or captive and the Red Army was desperate for men), but by the inventive tactics and sturdy technology of their enemy. If this had not been the case, Hitler's armies would have gone on winning, and a huge German-dominated economic empire in Eurasia would have confronted the western allies with a strategic nightmare.

Indeed, there is simply no denying the Soviet sacrifice and contributions to victory. That such the Soviets suffered such grievous losses, however, is in large part the responsibility of is own regime, which purged its armed forces of top leadership and made common cause with Germany in the years preceding the war. While Britain and France are justifiably criticized for their willingness to bend to Hitler's will in Munich, at least they, unlike the Soviet Union, did not actively aid and abet his rise to power. Far from prying Western eyes the Soviets allowed German forces to train in the vast expanses of its hinterlands in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

As Max Boot notes:

No one can gainsay the sacrifices of the Soviet people. I should know. Both of my grandfathers served in the Soviet armed forces and survived the war. They were lucky. At least 25 million Soviet citizens perished, while the United States and the British empire together lost "just" 700,000.

The history airbrushed out of this week's celebrations includes the Soviet role in the rise of Germany. In the 1920s, the Soviets aided Germany's illegal rearmament, helping to develop the tanks and warplanes later used against them. In 1939, Stalin concluded a nonaggression pact that allowed Adolf Hitler to launch his blitzkrieg against Poland, France and the Low Countries. Stalin's share in the spoils was the Baltic states, Finland and parts of Poland and Romania.

For the next two years, the Soviet Union's raw materials helped fuel the Nazi war machine despite a Western blockade. Stalin was so enamored of his comrade in crime that he refused to credit overwhelming evidence of a looming German attack on the Soviet Union. When it began on June 22, 1941, the Soviets were caught with their britches down.

The best Red Army units were foolishly positioned on the unfortified frontier, where they were overrun. Though the Soviets had a numerical advantage, the quality of their forces had been compromised by a purge of the officer corps. Partly as a result, the Red Army folded like an accordion early in the invasion. Resistance did not stiffen until winter, when the Wehrmacht was on the doorsteps of Leningrad and Moscow.

While no one should forget the contributions made by the Soviets in my view its role will always remain tainted, both for its cooperation with the Germans before the war and the oppression that followed through its occupation of Eastern Europe.

Update: I forgot to include this anecdote from a Soviet soldier:

Two weeks before the start of the war, they gathered us in the building where the top brass lived to listen to a lecture called "Germany -- The Faithful Friend of the Soviet Union." Our tanks had been mothballed, our weapons were stored in the warehouse.

I got to the park at 12:30 a.m. Planes were buzzing in the sky. Everyone was happy; the maneuvers had started! The first bomb strike hit our supplies. People shouted, "They're dummy bombs made of cement." The second one hit the neighboring battalion. People shouted that somebody had been killed, another had his leg blown off. ... Only then did we realize that this was war.

Why was it forbidden to tell us the truth, that Hitler was going to attack us? Who can believe that Stalin and the General Staff did not know that 200 German divisions were moving toward the border? Could it have been possible that the local population knew but Stalin didn't?

Modest Markovich Markov Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Kemerovo region