This doesn’t diminish the Soviets’ contribution to the war effort, which was vast and decisive.
Were the Americans that much braver than their Soviet allies? Of course not – thousands in fact deserted – but the US Army was more prudent in its valuation of a soldier’s life.) (How many Americans were executed for desertion in World War II? One: Eddie Slovik. To retreat was a crime against the motherland: in 1941 and ’42, according to the historian Dmitri Volkogonov, 157,593 men were executed for “cowardice”. His tactics, if they can be dignified with that name, involved throwing masses of underequipped men virtually under the treads of invading panzers. Only then, with reluctance, did Stalin shift his attention from killing his own citizens to killing Germans. It was Stalin’s blindness to Hitler’s pre-invasion manoeuvres that allowed the Germans to occupy Russia’s industrial heartland at a stroke. Millions of Soviets died through the incompetence and brutality of their own political masters. It’s true that the Soviet Union sacrificed more to defeat Hitler than any other country. Strange, I would’ve thought the measure of military success was the number of enemy soldiers you killed. The Soviets lost more soldiers than the Americans therefore the Soviets deserve the larger share of the victory. How do we measure the “historical fact” of the Allies’ relative contributions to the victory over Nazism? Īccording to Wheatcroft, it’s measured by counting the number of casualties each country suffered. But seeing it described as “a matter of historical fact” made me pause. I’ve read this before I thought it was the conventional wisdom. If Wheatcroft had expressed his point less categorically – if he’d written that the Third Reich was defeated primarily by the Red Army – I wouldn’t have blinked. Even though over one hundred thirty-five thousand American GIs died – a startling figure today – between D day and V-E day, more than half a million Russians were killed. As a matter of historical fact, the Third Reich was defeated by the Red Army and not by the Western democracies. In the course of that war, the Frenchmen killed defending their country were twice as numerous as all the Americans who have died in every foreign war taken together from 1776 until today. Between the formal entry of the United States into the Great War in April 1917 and the last German offensive in March 1918, hundreds of thousands of Entente soldiers were killed, mainly British in the summer and autumn of 1917 after the frightful slaughter of the French army in the spring and in that period of nearly a year, fewer than two hundred Americans died. The idea that the United States was the savior of Europe in World Wars I and II is popular in some circles on both sides of the Atlantic, but is demonstrably false. It’s Geoffrey Wheatcroft writing in The National Interest:
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