The great patriotic war

Counting the bodies is a daunting task. Casualty figures often differ. Still, total estimated casualties in the United Kingdom during WOII range around 500,000. Considering the losses the UK suffered in the First World War that’s a (morbid) bargain. I’d say no complaints for the Brits there. Not when compared to the six million Jews that died in the holocaust. Can you comprehend six million? I don’t think you can. But then try this on (emphasis mine):

According to German sources, 3,35 million Soviet soldiers had fallen into German hands by the end of 1941, of whom over two million were dead by 1942. By the end of the war some 5.75 million Soviet Soldiers had become POWs. [...] Figures issued by the Soviet General Staff in 1989 gave a figure for overall fatalities among the regular forces of 8,6 million [deaths]. In this context it is worth noting that the remainder of the Soviet war dead was made up of at least 19 million civilians. (source)

Soviet figures remain doubtful since at the time Stalin forbid counting the dead, because he knew all too well that the cost of war would be in no way justifiable. Still, these estimations tell us two things:

  1. The western public has underestimated the war at the Eastern Front, and still neglects it in their history lessons today;
  2. Stalin, however terrible he might have been, had every right to distrust the western allies who only opened a second front in the west (D-day) in late ’44 when the Russians were already coping with the Germans themselves;

The latter point lay the foundations of the cold war. Stalin argued that bombing raids on Germany by the British simply weren’t enough to help relieve the Red Army. And he was quite right, as the British mostly unfruitfully bombed civilian targets out of anger and revenge; most of the strategic bombing was done by the Americans in the later stages of the war. After continuously postponing an allied invasion in France for well over a year—apparently making no effort to keep the fascists and communists from killing each other—Stalin was surprised to find the western allies actually coming up with demands after the war. Surely the Soviet Union had single-handedly defeated the fascist enemy, and therefore had the right to dictate the peace terms?

First things first

Although Stalin comfortably forgot the millions of tons of American food, raw materials and equipment that poured into the Soviet Union (via Iran mostly) during the war, the western allies were perhaps too busy planning the geopolitical aftermath of the war even when Nazi Germany was still far from defeated. The Soviet Union accounts for half of the total number of casualties in the entire war. Considering the cold war that we got anyway, we might had been wiser paying more attention to our ally in despair—it could have saved the world a lot of misery. But we didn’t.

We declared victory in the cold war but the conflict is far from over.

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Published:
30.10.05 / 8pm
Category:
20th Century, World War 2