Revisiting World War II

A number of interesting newspaper articles have appeared in the lead up to the 60th anniversary of VE Day. The articles I find most intertesting are those that are pro-Soviet – or at least have a pro-Soviet subtext – or are vaguely anti-Western, or both. For example, an article by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian contains the following:

During the cold war, western leaders routinely laid wreaths at the tomb of the unknown soldier below the Kremlin walls or visited the immense cemetery for the 1 million civilians who died in the siege of Leningrad. But their gestures often masked an inner view that Nazism and communism were somehow two sides of the same evil coin.

Okay, different evil coins, but evil nonetheless.

And this:

Few paid public tribute to the relief that swept through all of Europe with the victory of Stalingrad in 1943, bringing for the first time a sense that the fascist tide had turned.

How long did this supposed relief last?

And this:

How many European or American politicians, let alone school textbooks, admit the Red Army inflicted 80% of the Nazi war machine's casualties, or that at the D-day landings the allied troops faced 58 German divisions in the west while Soviet forces had to overcome 228 divisions in their march to Berlin - and did?

Yeah, but the Soviets didn't have to invade Europe by landing in Normandy. Anyway, you get the idea.

There's also this from the Los Angeles Times:

Every spring, when the snow has melted, the searchers come armed with shovels and spades, metal detectors and long steel probes, coaxing the field to give up its bones. This spring, they have been working for two weeks, and already there is a neat pile of ribs, thigh bones, broken skulls and bits of pelvis laid out on a plastic sheet: the remains of 94 men.

In 10 years of springs, workers have unearthed the bones of more than 2,000 other men from this field steeped in birdsong and memory. By all accounts, at least 9,000 more died here during 15 horrific days in February 1942, when Russia's 32nd Rifle Division stood alone in the dead of winter as a tightening noose of German forces encircled, froze, starved and finally slaughtered them.

At least these Soviet soldiers were armed and could fight back, unlike the Polish victims at Katyn:

Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland at the start of World War II.

The Soviet secret police arrested millions of Poles. Many of them ended up in Siberian labour camps, but more than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals were executed on Stalin's direct orders in the Katyn Forest near the city of Smolensk.

The Nazis discovered the mass graves in 1943, but Moscow only admitted Soviet guilt 47 years later.

Very few of these Poles made it home again.

The Los Angeles Times article doesn't mention Katyn, to put things in perspective, but does at least point out Stalin's squandering of military manpower:

Konstantin Stepanchikov, who has written several books on Russia's war history and is a consultant to the searchers, believes that a thorough accounting could greatly inflate the government's official estimate of 8.6 million battle deaths for the Soviet army. The higher toll, he said, would reveal the degree to which Hitler's defeat may have been due as much to the willingness of Soviet commanders to sacrifice staggering numbers of soldiers as to their shrewdness in battle.

And, many Soviet veterans were treated like dirt by their own government.

There's also this introduction to an article by historian Richard Overy:

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.

Overy's point apparently being that the US and Great Britian should have done the right thing and suffered greater losses, you know, to prove they were as committed to defeating the Nazis as was the Soviet Union.

Overy concludes his article rather cryptically:

One question that almost certainly will not be asked as the world indulges in what is probably the last great bout of victory nostalgia is why those states that viewed themselves as the bearers of progress and the modern age descended between 1914 and 1945 into a hideous orgy of war, civil conflict, repression and genocide. Mercifully, 1945 marked a real break with that 30-year crisis, but the nagging issues remain. If they could do it then, what are the restraints that prevent the developed world from once again plunging into the madness of mass war and state violence? Perhaps 1945 is a lesson learned, but those restraints need to be well understood. Next time the millions of dead may not be for our allies alone to bear.

It's almost as if Overy is saying, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

Regardless, the 8th is VE Day, celebrate the defeat of Nazism and spare a thought for all of the brave men and women who fought and died so we could be free.