D-Day

[Brian Holcombe]

Their ideology and treatment of their citizens is horrendous, totally agree. I don’t want to speak for mike but I didn’t read his response as admiration but simply stating that they did have a huge impact. I’ve gone round and round with this and ultimately feel that unhindered US industrial capacity was likely the biggest single factor.

The leaders at the time expected conflict in that regard as well. Little known fact that Patton had captured Wehrmacht soldiers doing training exercises in preparation for a push back against Russia. I believe his superiors were not happy about this as they still needed Russian assistance with defeating Japan. Russia tore through Japanese occupied China at an impressive clip.

[Mike Henderson]

I will never understand the soviet worship that has become such a fad in recent years. Is it a good thing that Stalin murdered his own people on an industrial scale? Are we supposed to be grateful that the soviets fought in their own country for their own lives?

Yes the Communists killed lots of Nazis. Beyond that they have nothing in common with the men who landed at Normandy.

They hated us and tried to destroy us right up until the moment Hitler attacked them, and they went right back to hating us and trying to destroy us the moment Germany collapsed.

I suppose you're aiming your comments at me. I certainly do not worship anything about the Soviet Union.

Some years back, I begin studying the second world war. Everything I had heard prior to that is that we (the USA) won the war, especially with our invasion on D-Day. But the truth is that the major fighting was actually on the Eastern Front - and it was bitter fighting on both sides. Many, many German divisions were destroyed on the Eastern Front.

Consider the situation if Germany had not attacked the Soviet Union. All those divisions would have been in Europe and any landing would have been much more difficult, perhaps impossible.

What upset me as I studied more about WWII was that we (the US) do not tell the truth about the war - probably because of the cold war that followed WWII. But the truth is important, and I attempt to point it out occasionally.

The people who went ashore on D-Day were brave and successful. But even there we are not told the whole truth. Let's look at the KIAs for each of the five beaches on D-Day: Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword, and Utah.

Omaha was by far the bloodiest with about 2,400 KIA and is what most people think of when they think of D-Day.
Gold Beach - 350 KIA
Juno Beach - 340 KIA
Sword Beach - 683 KIA
Utah Beach - The 4th Infantry lost 197 KIA, the Airborne troops dropped behind the beach lost almost 2,500, and other groups lost about 700

Compare this to the number of KIAs for some of the battles on the Eastern Front, such as Stalingrad which had about 700,000 German KIAs and close to a million Soviet soldiers and civilians KIA.

[The Soviets recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around Stalingrad, and total Axis casualties (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been more than 800,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured. Of the 91,000 men who surrendered, only some 5,000–6,000 ever returned to their homelands (the last of them a full decade after the end of the war in 1945); the rest died in Soviet prison and labour camps. On the Soviet side, official Russian military historians estimate that there were 1,100,000 Red Army dead, wounded, missing, or captured in the campaign to defend the city. An estimated 40,000 civilians died as well.]

You don't have to like the Soviet Union to understand the truth and the extreme price they paid to defeat the Germans (under absolutely miserable conditions).

The Battle of the Bulge - which was the biggest battle on the Western front - had about 19,000 Allied KIAs. I don't have numbers for the German KIAs.

Mike

The Allied ratio of KIA to casualties in the Battle of the Bulge was about 25%. The Germans had about 100,000 casualties in that battle and if they experienced the same ratio, they would have had about 25,000 KIAs.

[Brian Holcombe]

Mike, it’s likely much easier to get a complete understanding now with people like Dan Carlin doing such comprehensive podcasts on subjects like the Ostfront.

[Mike Henderson]

Just another comment.

The Soviets were absolutely ruthless in the war and there are many examples. But one that really hit me was the following.

In France the French resistance was hobbled because if they killed a German soldier, the Germans went to the nearest village and killed ten French men and boys for each German soldier killed.

On the Eastern Front, the Soviets didn't care how many of their people the Germans killed in retaliation for the Soviet partisans killing of German soldiers. They considered the people in villages captured by the Germans as collaborators and when they recaptured the village they often executed many of the villagers as collaborators even though the villagers were quite innocent.

Mike

[Nicholas Lawrence]

I suppose you're aiming your comments at me. I certainly do not worship anything about the Soviet Union.

Some years back, I begin studying the second world war. Everything I had heard prior to that is that we (the USA) won the war, especially with our invasion on D-Day. But the truth is that the major fighting was actually on the Eastern Front - and it was bitter fighting on both sides. Many, many German divisions were destroyed on the Eastern Front.

A copy of Manstein's memoir is on my desk. Some may be ignorant that there was an eastern front, but I am not one of them.

My comment is not "aimed" at you. This is a thread about D-day. Yet there are four posts in a row about the soviets and how they won the war.

The soviets allied with the Nazis to destroy Poland. They supplied the Nazis with fuel and raw materials while they rebuilt their armies over the winter of 1939-1940. Hitler launched the war with soviet help. Deliveries of food, fuel, and raw material continued while Hitler destroyed France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway, and while he besieged Britain. Deliveries continued while Hitler destroyed Yugoslavia and Greece, and right up until the soviets were attacked.

The truth is the soviets allied with Hitler and aided him in the destruction of the democracies. The truth is they themselves enslaved every square inch of territory they conquered on the eastern front.

The truth is that your uncle and my grandfather landed in Normandy to free people, not to enslave them.

[Brian Holcombe]

I am not pro-soviet at all, whatsoever, so I hope my posts are not being viewed in that light. If that is the case it would offend me to my core, my deepest value set is for democracy.

[Matt Day]

My uncle’s (not blood) father was a navigator and was shot down over Germany and was POW. My wife’s grandfather was also shot down over Germany and was a POW, both were in the same camp and the same area at the same time. My wife’s grandfather was Jewish though, which surely didn’t bode well. Both made it home.

My kids asked what Memorial Day was, and we told them about our family’s history in the military. I dug a bit and found there is lots of information out there on the internet. It was pretty neat reading the paperwork that our relatives filled out about their planes being shot down.

Regarding the comment about “the younger generation doesn’t care about history”, in my experience most people don’t care a whole lot about history until they are a bit older.

[Edwin Santos]

The soviets allied with the Nazis to destroy Poland. They supplied the Nazis with fuel and raw materials while they rebuilt their armies over the winter of 1939-1940. Hitler launched the war with soviet help. Deliveries of food, fuel, and raw material continued while Hitler destroyed France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway, and while he besieged Britain. Deliveries continued while Hitler destroyed Yugoslavia and Greece, and right up until the soviets were attacked.

The truth is the soviets allied with Hitler and aided him in the destruction of the democracies. The truth is they themselves enslaved every square inch of territory they conquered on the eastern front.

The truth is that your uncle and my grandfather landed in Normandy to free people, not to enslave them.

This is consistent with my studies, that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had a robust economic relationship right up until June 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Hitler (correctly) concluded that unless he acted, the Soviets would eventually be recruited into the war by the UK and US so his choices were either to (1) get them to join the Axis powers or (2) invade them and eliminate them as a factor. There were negotiations to join the Axis, but they broke down because the Soviets demanded concessions which the Nazis refused and so Hitler gave up on recruiting them hence the invasion.

I have always wondered about the Soviet intentions. When they were supplying Germany, I would think it was purely economic incentive. After they were attacked and then joined the Allies, I always assumed it was for self preservation more than answering the call to a higher cause.

Don't you think it fairly obvious that every country's role in WWII was self interest? Pretty much every country that entered the war did so either because they were attacked or an eventual attack was inevitable. If anyone deserves an award for benevolence, it wouldn't be a result of Normandy. I think it would probably be more a result of post war actions i.e. Marshall Plan, the establishment of the UN and NATO, humanitarian aid, etc.
In that regard I'm not so sure the Soviet Union wins stars for being charitable. As one example, unlike NATO, the Warsaw Pact was designed to do nothing other than codify and ensure the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

However, if the point of an earlier post was that the war would have ended differently but for the Soviets, and that in the course of it they suffered staggering casualties, I'm not sure how anyone could argue those facts. I agree, that aspect of the war history was not emphasized in my high school history classes. Doesn't necessarily mean the Soviets were good guys or bad guys, but just that it is an objective fact that their role was hugely impactful. Honestly, anyone who would characterize Stalin as a good guy would have to be demented.

I believe my comment here is basically agreeing with just about everyone in the room.