Remembering World War II

[igloo]

May 13, 2005, 8:08 a.m.

Remembering World War II

Revisionists get it wrong.

As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives.

Indeed, most recent op-eds commemorating V-E day either blamed the United States for Hamburg or for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, or for our supposed failure to credit the Russians for their sacrifices.

It is true that the Russians paid a horrendous price. Perhaps two out of every three soldiers of the Wehrmacht fell on the Eastern Front. We in the West must always remember that such a tragic sacrifice allowed Hitler to be defeated with far less American British, Canadian, and Australian dead.

That being said, the Anglo-Americans waged a global war well beyond the capability of the Soviet Union. They invaded North Africa, took Sicily, and landed in Italy, in addition to fighting a massive land war in central Europe. We had fewer casualties than did the Russians because we fought more wisely, were better equipped, and were not surprised to the same degree by a treacherous former ally that we had supplied.

The Soviets invaded the defeated Japanese only in the last days of the war; the Anglo-Americans alone took on two fronts simultaneously. Submarine warfare, attacking the Japanese and German surface fleets, conducting strategic bombing over Berlin and Tokyo, and sending tons of supplies to Allied forces — all this was beyond the capability of the Red Army. More important, Stalin had been an ally of Hitler until the Nazi invasion of 1941, and had unleashed the Red Army to destroy the freedom of Finland and to carve up Poland.

Do we ever read these days that when the Luftwaffe bombed Britain, Russia was sending the Nazis fuel and iron ore? When Germany invaded Russia, however, Britain sent food and supplies.

Yes, World War II started to free Eastern Europe from fascist totalitarianism, and ended up ensuring that it would be enslaved by Soviet totalitarianism. But Roosevelt and Churchill were faced with an inescapable reality in 1945 that to keep the Russians out of Eastern Europe they would have had to restart the war against their former ally that possessed it — a conflict that might well have gone nuclear in two or three years. The latter had been in great part armed and supplied for four years by their own taxpaying democratic citizenries. The Red Army was near home in Eastern Europe; the American 3rd Army was 5,000 miles from the United States.

Of course, we bombed German civilian centers. But in a total war when 10,000 a day were being gassed in the death camps, and Nazi armies in the Balkans, Russia, and Western Europe were routinely murdering thousands a week and engaged in breakneck efforts to create ballistic missiles, sophisticated jets, and worse weapons, there were very few options in stopping such a monstrous regime. This was an age, remember, before computer guidance, GPS targeting systems, and laser-guided bombs.

When the lumbering and often unescorted bombers started out against Europe and Japan, the Axis infrastructure of death — rails, highways, communications, warehouses, and decentralized production — was intact. When the bombers finished their horrific work, the economies of both Axis powers were near ruin. Armies that were systematically murdering millions of innocents in forgotten places like Yugoslavia, Poland, the Philippines, Korea, and China were running out of fuel, ammunition, and food.

Revisionism holds a strange attraction for the winners of World War II. American textbooks discuss World War II as if a Patton, Le May, or Nimitz did not exist, as if the war was essentially the Japanese internment and Hiroshima. That blinkered and politically correct focus explains why so many Americans under 30 are simply ignorant about the nature and course of World War II itself. Similarly, the British have monthly debates on the immorality of their bombing Hamburg and Dresden.

In dire contrast, even the post-Soviet Russian government will not speak of the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact, the absorption of the Baltic states, the murder of millions of German citizens in April through June 1945 in Eastern Europe, and the mass execution of Polish officers. If we were to listen to the Chinese, World War II was about the gallant work of Mao’s partisans, who in fact used the war to gain power, and then went on to kill 50 million of their own citizens — about the same number lost in all of World War II. Japan likewise has never come to terms with the millions of Asian civilians its armies butchered or its systematic brutality waged against American POWs.

The truth is that the supposedly biased West discusses the contribution of others far more than our former enemies — or Russian and Chinese allies — credit the British or Americans.

The German novelist Gunter Grass — who served in the Wehrmacht — recently lectured in the New York Times about postwar “power blocs,†in terms that suggested the Soviets and the Americans had been morally equivalent. German problems of reunification, he tells us, were mostly due to a capitalist West, not a Communist East that caused them.

Grass advances the odd idea that Germany was not liberated from American hegemony (“unconditional subservienceâ€) until Mr. Schroeder’s recent anti-Bush campaign distanced the Germans from the United States. To read this ahistorical sophistry of Grass is to forget recent European and Russian complicity in arming Saddam, their forging of sweetheart oil deals with the Baathist dictatorship, and the disturbing German anti-Semitic rhetoric that followed Schroeder’s antics. Unmentioned are the billions of American dollars and years of vigilance that kept the Red Army out of Western Germany, or the paradox that the United States is ready to leave Germany on a moment’s notice — which might explain the efforts of the Schroeder government to keep our troops there.

There is a pattern here. Western elites — the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism — are unhappy in their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all. So leisured American academics tell us that Iwo Jima was unnecessary, if not a racist campaign, that Hiroshima had little military value but instead was a strategic ploy to impress Stalin, and that the GI was racist, undisciplined, and reliant only on money and material largess.

There are two disturbing things about the current revisionism that transcend the human need to question orthodoxy. The first is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Whatever mistakes and lapses committed by the Allies, they pale in comparison to the savagery of the Axis or the Communists. Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don’t bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union?

Lost also is any sense of small gratitude. A West German intellectual like Grass does not inform us that he was always free to migrate to East Germany to live in socialist splendor rather than remain unhappy in capitalist “subservience†in an American-protected West Germany — or that some readers of the New York Times who opposed Hitler might not enjoy lectures about their moral failings from someone who once fought for him. Such revisionists never ask whether they could have written so freely in the Third Reich, Tojo’s Japan, Mussolini’s Italy, Soviet Russia, Communist Eastern Europe — or today in such egalitarian utopias as China, Cuba, or Venezuela.

Second, revisionism requires knowledge of orthodoxy. One cannot dismiss Iwo Jima as an unnecessary sideshow or allege that Dresden was simple blood rage until one understands the tactical and strategic dilemmas of the age — the hope that wounded and lost B-29s might be saved by emergency fields on Iwo, or that the Russians wanted immediate help from the Allied air command to take the pressure off the eastern front in February 1945.

But again, most Americans never learned the standard narrative of War II — only what was wrong about it. Whereas it is salutary that an American 17-year-old knows something of the Japanese relocation ordered by liberals such as Earl Warren and FDR, or of the creation and the dropping of the atomic bomb by successive Democratic administrations, they might wish to examine what went on in Nanking, Baatan, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Manila, or Manchuria — atrocities that their sensitive teachers are probably clueless about as well.

After all, this was a week in which thousands of the once-enslaved Dutch in Maastricht were protesting the visit of a president of the nation that once liberated their fathers, while thousands of neo-Nazis were back in the streets of Berlin. A Swedish EU official recently blamed the Second World War on "nationalistic pride and greed, and…international rivalry for wealth and power" — the new mantra that Hitler was merely confused or perhaps had some “issues†with his neighbors. Perhaps her own opportunistic nation that once profited (“greed�) from the Third Reich itself was not somehow complicit in fueling the Holocaust.

How odd that Swedes and Spaniards who were either neutrals or pro-Nazi during World War II now so often lecture the United States not just about present morality but about the World War II past as well.

If there were any justice in the world, we would have the ability to transport our most severe critics across time and space to plop them down on Omaha Beach or put them in an overloaded B-29 taking off from Tinian, with the crew on amphetamines to keep awake for their 15-hour mission over Tokyo.

But alas, we cannot. Instead, the beneficiaries of those who sacrificed now ankle-bite their dead betters. Even more strangely, they have somehow convinced us that in their politically-correct hindsight, they could have done much better in World War II.

Yet from every indication of their own behavior over the last 30 years, we suspect that the generation who came of age in the 1960s would have not just have done far worse but failed entirely.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

[bigpoppanils]

How odd that Swedes and Spaniards who were either neutrals or pro-Nazi during World War II now so often lecture the United States not just about present morality but about the World War II past as well.

ya know, he could have went ahead and made the distinction that the swedes were neutral and not pro-nazi unlike the spanish.

Perhaps her own opportunistic nation that once profited (“greed�) from the Third Reich itself was not somehow complicit in fueling the Holocaust.

WTF?

the people of Sweden saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.

[igloo]

ya know, he could have went ahead and made the distinction that the swedes were neutral and not pro-nazi unlike the spanish.

WTF?

the people of Sweden saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.

Im both of your statements, you are making something out of nothing...

How odd that Swedes and Spaniards who were either neutrals or pro-Nazi during ........is this really too gray for you? Most intelligent readers can make the distinction by these words. U R being ridiculous.

And since we are talking about distinctions, your statement was the "people" of Sweden.........was it all of the people, a majority, a brave minority, a subset of a subset, the govt, blah, blah, blah......

WTF right back at you

[jtk4]

I am just glad he did not tie it too the war in Iraq.

Also when talking about what the soveits did compared to the US you have to consider that we did not really have to defend our borders as much as the soviets. We could concentrate more on attacking then trying to defend, I am not saying we did not beef up our defence mostly in alaska, but you understand the importance the 2 oceans played in helping us.

Everything else seems about right to me.

[drdoom]

Whoa . . . easy now you two.

While Franco was grateful that Hitler saved his ass in the Spanish Civil War, at times he didn't want to get involved at all i.e. sending troops alla Rommel's Afrika Corp. Hitler and Mussolini were fucking livid at him - also for the Operation Mincemeat fiasco, which essentially gave Sicily to Patton.

While Sweden send supplies to the Eastern Front and composed a large majority of the Viking SS, don't forget that their king was exiled and Nazi Germany was somewhat accepted in order to qualm partisan revolts.

[drdoom]

I am just glad he did not tie it too the war in Iraq.

Also when talking about what the soveits did compared to the US you have to consider that we did not really have to defend our borders as much as the soviets. We could concentrate more on attacking then trying to defend, I am not saying we did not beef up our defence mostly in alaska, but you understand the importance the 2 oceans played in helping us.

Everything else seems about right to me.

Give credit to Russia/Soviet Union as their "retreat and let the wiinter fuck them" strategy has worked many miracles in the past.

[igloo]

I am just glad he did not tie it too the war in Iraq.

Also when talking about what the soveits did compared to the US you have to consider that we did not really have to defend our borders as much as the soviets. We could concentrate more on attacking then trying to defend, I am not saying we did not beef up our defence mostly in alaska, but you understand the importance the 2 oceans played in helping us.

Everything else seems about right to me.

Let's not forget either the role the Soviets played at the beginning of the war...and who they were allied with, and what the direct consequences of their actions caused.........not taking away a single bit of their sacrifice at the end, but since you wanted to put the U.S. contribution in "perspective".....

[italia23]

Let's not forget either the role the Soviets played at the beginning of the war...and who they were allied with, and what the direct consequences of their actions caused.........not taking away a single bit of their sacrifice at the end, but since you wanted to put the U.S. contribution in "perspective".....

Not to mention Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainian people, and his arrogance in the Red Army taking Berlin. He was just as bad as Hitler, IMO.

[igloo]

Not to mention Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainian people, and his arrogance in the Red Army taking Berlin. He was just as bad as Hitler, IMO.

Bush's Moscow misstep

Jeff Jacoby (archive)

May 13, 2005 | printer friendly version Print | email to a friend Send

Moscow was the last place President Bush should have gone to mark the 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Russian soldiers goose-stepping through Red Square, dignitaries assembled in front of Lenin's tomb, the strains of the Soviet anthem introduced by Stalin in 1944 -- this was not a scene that the leader of the free world had any business being a part of.

Of course it cannot be forgotten that the Russian people paid an enormous price during World War II -- an estimated 27 million dead, more than the losses of the other allied nations combined. Without Russia's enormous sacrifice, the Allies might never have prevailed.

But neither can it be forgotten that Russia did not enter the war on the side of the Western democracies. On the contrary: It helped unleash the war as accomplice of the Germans. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed by the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers in August 1939 paved the way for the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army a month later.

For nearly two years, Germany and the USSR were allies -- two years during which the Nazis overran Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, and sent wave after wave of bombers to attack Britain from the air. In the same two years, the Soviets occupied Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and unleashed a vicious war against Finland. Only after it was invaded by Germany in June 1941 did Moscow belatedly become an ally of the West.

Sixty years after V-E Day, moreover, Russia is the only major combatant in the European war that is not today a free democracy. Vladimir Putin has strangled his country's independent media, abolished the election of regional officials, driven a major corporation into bankruptcy in order to seize its assets, launched egregious prosecutions of businessmen who oppose him politically, and grossly interfered in the domestic affairs of neighboring countries. He is conducting a brutal war of butchery and scorched-earth destruction in Chechnya, and openly encourages nostalgia for the days of Stalinist empire and repression.

The Bush administration may have no choice but to work with him on issues like nuclear proliferation and terrorism. It doesn't have to reward his creeping fascism with high-prestige presidential visits -- least of all on an occasion intended to mark the victory over Nazi fascism.

What made all of this so much worse -- and the president's attendance at the Kremlin-sponsored pageant so much more troubling -- was Putin's repellent defense of Russia's prewar collaboration with Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union had been justified in signing the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Putin claimed, because it had to ensure the "security of its western borders." His foreign ministry denied any wrongdoing in the Red Army's bloody occupation of the Baltic republics. "One cannot use 'occupation' to describe those historical events," said the Russian ambassador to the European Union. But occupation was exactly what the Soviets inflicted on the Baltics, along with slavery, mass killing, and exile.

Putin also described the end of the Soviet Union -- which led to the liberation of Eastern Europe and the emancipation of tens of millions of human beings -- as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." In fact, the crumbling of the Iron Curtain was one of the 20th century's finest chapters, and Putin's inability to say so speaks volumes about his hostility to democracy and freedom.

The real geopolitical catastrophe of the last century was not the fall of Soviet communism but its rise and rule -- the 70-year reign of a murderous ideology that killed more people, crushed more souls, and inflicted more cruelty than any other "ism" in history. Nazi Germany in all its malignance never came close to matching the degree of evil achieved by Soviet Russia.

But whereas a conscience-stricken Germany has deeply and contritely admitted its sins -- most recently on Tuesday, when every senior member of the German government attended the dedication of a new Holocaust memorial in Berlin -- Russia never has. It would be unthinkable for an official German celebration to include swastikas and pictures of Hitler, yet the Victory Day celebration in Red Square featured banners with the communist hammer-and-sickle and images of Vladimir Lenin. Russia's communist heritage has never been meaningfully repudiated. The atrocities of Soviet communism have never been punished -- or even, in most cases, owned up to.

Which is why the pomp and circumstance in Moscow this week could not help being as much an exaltation of Russia's Stalinist empire as of the Nazis' defeat. So long as Russia refuses to break with its past, it will never be inoculated against a return to autocracy. No American president belongs on the Red Square reviewing stand next to the man who is dismantling what remains of Russian democracy -- and who still makes excuses for crimes like Molotov-Ribbentrop and the occupation of the Baltics.

[drdoom]

We should have never handed Berlin to the commies.

[jtk4]

I am not saying the US did less or sacrificed less then russia, i was just saying it was easier for us to attack when we did not have to defend. That it. I also do not think stalin was as bad as hitler, bad but not that bad.

[drdoom]

I am not saying the US did less or sacrificed less then russia, i was just saying it was easier for us to attack when we did not have to defend. That it. I also do not think stalin was as bad as hitler, bad but not that bad.

Stalin killed many more.

[ghhhhhost]

I am not saying the US did less or sacrificed less then russia, i was just saying it was easier for us to attack when we did not have to defend. That it. I also do not think stalin was as bad as hitler, bad but not that bad.

im just gona out on a limb here...and say that Russia lost 20x more people than the US did during WWII...

btw the man to thank for victory over the Nazis is Gen. Zhukov

[headpusher]

im just gona out on a limb here...and say that Russia lost 20x more people than the US did during WWII...

btw the man to thank for victory over the Nazis is Gen. Zhukov

yea and we shouldnt be thanked at all

[ghhhhhost]

i didnt say that ...but zhukov did play a pivotal role in whooping nazi ass over in Russia

[headpusher]

i didnt say that ...but zhukov did play a pivotal role in whooping nazi ass over in Russia

this is true..but your post made it sound like we shouldnt be thanked at all

[ghhhhhost]

actually it didnt..u just assumed it did based on preconceived notions of what my beliefs r

[headpusher]

actually it didnt..u just assumed it did based on preconceived notions of what my beliefs r

no..thats the way it reads..

but whatever

[ghhhhhost]

no..thats the way u read it

[ghhhhhost]

yea and we shouldnt be thanked at all

oh..and when u say "WE" ...r u reffering to the Croat Nazi Ustasi?

[headpusher]

oh..and when u say "WE" ...r u reffering to the Croat Nazi Ustasi?

no im talking about me and my fellow americans

[ghhhhhost]

ah ok..just needed that clarification...dont wana get all confused

[italia23]

im just gona out on a limb here...and say that Russia lost 20x more people than the US did during WWII...

True, but that number could have been a lot smaller if it weren't for Stalin's errant ways.

[drdoom]

im just gona out on a limb here...and say that Russia lost 20x more people than the US did during WWII...

btw the man to thank for victory over the Nazis is Gen. Zhukov

By far most overrated general. The only thing he did clever was attach bombs to dogs and have them run out and destroy Panzers. Stalingrad was a failure, as half of the red army drowned in the Volga. He had a hard time beating a signifcantly smaller army @ Kursk. Patton and the death of Rommel contributed much more to the war's outcome.

[lolahotass]

I'm going to visit my friend Oscar Russ who served in WWII. He'll be 87 years old on June 18th.

Can't wait to see my old friend.... the stories that man would tell... wow.

He fought at the battle in Guadacanal.....

Also, my friend Chris is part of the 101st Airborne unit and they are flying to France to jump out of the plane and be apart of the D-day festivites over there this weekend

I'm thankful to all soliders from years gone by, the present and the future