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Published on May 5, 2008, by the OC Register.
Sixty-three years ago this week, what was left of Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending Europe's agony in World War II, the largest and arguably most horrible war in human history. Since then, the victory over Adolf Hitler has rightfully been celebrated as the salvation of Western democracy.
In the West, that epic struggle from the beginning has been cast as good vs. evil, the enlightened Franklin Roosevelt and courageous Winston Churchill vs. the despicable Hitler. The victory is widely seen as belonging to Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, with a nod to Churchill's pluck. This view is shared by the vast majority of Americans and most Western historians of the Cold War period.
But since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of archives in Moscow to inspection by Western eyes, a different view of World War II has emerged among Western historians–though it has yet to alter the public consciousness. That view is that the defining and overriding conflict of the war was not Germany against the United States and Britain, but Germany against the Soviet Union, and that the victory in Europe was, first and foremost, a victory of Soviet arms.
To be sure, this is a claim the former Soviet propaganda machine was never shy in making, loudly and clearly, for four decades. However, with only former Nazi sources available–and those sources having good reasons for denigrating Soviet achievements and blaming Hitler's ineptness for their loss--the West mostly dismissed these claims.
But since the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1990, the lucid and well-researched books of historians such as Richard Overy ("Russia's War"), David Glantz ("When Titans Clashed" and many others) and Evan Mawdsley ("Thunder in the East") have brought many to the brink of accepting the basic veracity of the Soviet view.
Consider:
•The scale of the fighting on the Eastern Front in 1941-45 dwarfed anything seen in any other theater of the war. Millions of men and thousands of tanks and aircraft maneuvered along a front extending 1,000 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea (and later into the Balkans).
•Throughout the nearly four years of the war in the East, the Soviets were battling 70 percent to 85 percent of the entire German army, the Wehrmacht.
•The Red Army suffered more than 8 million killed, missing or captured in the war. Soviet civilian casualties were about twice that. Germany suffered well over 3 million killed on the Eastern Front. By comparison, British military losses in the entire war totaled about 350,000, and U.S. losses on all fronts from 1941-45 totaled about 300,000.
•After the Stalingrad counteroffensive in December 1942 – and, some argue, after the Germans were thrown back from Moscow a full year before -- the Wehrmacht was on the strategic defensive, and Soviet victory was only a matter of time. Either way, the Soviet juggernaut was moving inexorably forward at a time the Western Allies were barely up off the mat.
All of which is not to minimize the sacrifices and determination of Great Britain and enormous American achievements in World War II. It simply recognizes that the heavy lifting in defeating Nazi Germany was done by the Soviet Union. As Soviet leader Josef Stalin said, Britain provided the time, the U.S. provided the money and the USSR provided the blood. The British-U.S. strategic bombing campaign, Lend Lease shipments to the USSR, the threat (and later, the fact) of invasion from the West that kept German divisions in France and Italy–these all contributed mightily to victory and undoubtedly shortened the war by months or years. But they were not decisive.
The decisive events occurred on the steppes and in the snows of the Soviet Union in 1941-42 and were brought to fruition in a long and bloody dénouement in 1943-45. The Soviets were going to win, with or without the U.S. and Great Britain.
Whether the U.S. and Britain would have won without the Soviet Union seems debatable. If the Soviet Union had collapsed and surrendered in 194–as Hitler and many others in the West expected at the time – Hitler would have had Caucasus oil, Ukrainian grain and a huge pool of labor to add to his war machine, which he could have turned back on Britain with a vengeance. It is quite conceivable that the U.S. and a Nazi Europe, each with huge industrial and manpower resources, would have ended up facing each other in stalemate across a mutually protective ocean.
But luckily, we'll never know for sure. Stalin, using horrifically brutal methods and despite making gross and enormously costly mistakes in the initial months, was able to hold his nation together, mobilize its people and industry, identify talented generals and put them in key posts, and lead the USSR to victory.
So the picture that has emerged is a World War II much more complex and morally ambiguous than "the Good War" propounded in popular U.S. history. As of June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it was not a war of "good vs. evil"–a more appropriate oversimplification would be "evil vs. evil, with good forced to take sides."
And the man who saved Western democracy was not Roosevelt or Eisenhower or even Churchill. The man who saved Western democracy, as an incidental consequence of saving himself, was Josef Stalin.
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