D-Day: 75 years

[Mike Henderson]

We can never forget our allies. My father was a crewmember aboard a LCI in the South Pacific. One of the few war stories he told was of landing Aussie troops on a island in the South Pacific. No one country won WW-II.

That's absolutely true. The one country that never gets talked about here in the United States is the Soviet Union. It was the Soviet Union that defeated the Germans (the US defeated the Japanese). The Soviet Union lost somewhere between 20 and 25 million soldiers and civilians KILLED during WWII, about 13% of their population. By comparison, the United States lost less than 500,000 soldiers and civilians killed during the war, significantly less than 1% of our population.

The Soviet Union destroyed close to 200 German divisions on the eastern front.

If not for the destruction of all those German divisions, the invasion on D-Day might not have succeeded. It was the Eastern Front that defeated the Germans, not D-Day. But what D-Day did was keep the Soviet Union out of Western Europe - which was very important.

Mike

[The US supplied the Soviet Union with much of the material required for them to wage war (almost 18 million tons). But it was the citizens of the Soviet Union who did the fighting and dying.]

[Another point: The Soviet Union was a backward country (from an industrial point of view) prior to WWII. WWII made them a powerful country.]