Olof History depends upon one’s personal perspective. Through Lend Lease and later, after Pearl Harbor, America provided massive supplies to Russia through Murmansk and the Persian Gulf. One might say that this was in our self interest. From memory I recall that the Russians lost about 20 million (mostly military) persons. By contrast,, …
Olof History depends upon one’s personal perspective. Through Lend Lease and later, after Pearl Harbor, America provided massive supplies to Russia through Murmansk and the Persian Gulf. One might say that this was in our self interest. From memory I recall that the Russians lost about 20 million (mostly military) persons. By contrast,, I believe that America lost about 320,000 soldiers during the entire war in Europe and the Pacific.
I recall at Teheran that Stalin was pushing FDR/Churchill for a major invasion of Europe. (Normandy occurred on June 6, 1944). We delayed while Russian troops were bearing catastrophic losses. Our military assistance for their massive loss of life.
As for Stalin’s ‘recklessness.’ Stalingrad was the turning point of the war. It was fought building by building. Stalin ordered that any Russian soldier caught leaving the frontlines would be shot. Also, in the race to Berlin, he encouraged two field marshals (Zhukov was one) to move forward with no concern about loss of life. I think the Russians lost about 100,000 soldiers, while Ike kept American troops at a safe distance away from Berlin.
"We delayed while Russian troops were bearing catastrophic losses. Our military assistance for their massive loss of life."
I don't know if we "delayed." But if we did, it was out of rational self-interest. This was a European war, not ours, and it took forever to get Congress out of its isolationist sour apples. Realpolitik demanded that if millions of troops were going to be sacrificed anyway, better Europe's than ours.
Also, Stalin had no problem being Hitler's friend in the early stages; what went around came around.
I'm glad we made the blood-and-treasure sacrifices to help Good Europe beat Evil Europe. Defeating Hitler was a moral imperative. But our national interest was never in volunteering to let America kids die so Russian kids wouldn't.
What we COULD do that Russia and the rest of Europe couldn't was manufacture and ship billions of pounds of war goods. We did. America did nothing wrong in letting Russia take the hit on the Eastern Front.
Bill Spot on regarding American and British self interests. You can imagine that Stalin might have been pissed that millions of Soviet troops were being killed in fighting the Nazis while the US/UK equivocated for ‘good reason.” We were concerned about massive US/UK deaths, while Stalin was not. Also, Stalin, a highly suspicious fellow, thought that he was left in a meat grinder, as his ‘allies’ spoke of the difficulties of mounting a cross channel invasion of Europe.
Thanks, Keith, appreciated. Unless the war is aimed directly at your throat and you have no choice but to throw the kitchen sink and all your kids into the maw, every nation will choose self-interest over selflessness. War is politics by other means, etc.
I also have to wonder if a little bit of that UK-U.S. delay was (a) punishing Stalin for being pals with Hitler in the beginning, and (b) bleeding Russia while they could because they sensed that, as Patton famously predicted, Stalin would become a menace after the war.
Which is another way of agreeing with you that much of what every nation did was out of self-interest. Russia just didn't have much of a choice after Hitler turned on Stalin.
Fred, isn’t whose troops the key? In Ukraine, what would be the American public’s reactions, if we had 100,000 American soldiers fighting and dying along side Ukrainians and our airplanes in dog fights with the Russians? In WWII our military supplies saved many American lives when, for nearly a year, we weren’t engaged against Germany while the Russians were losing millions of men.
As a youngster in WW II, our newspapers focused mainly on American (and British) military operations, with minor coverage of Russia. Then the public impression was that the US won WW II. It took years for any public appreciation that Russian losses were more than 20 times total American/British losses.
Ultimately, this is the truth of war, Keith and Olof. Modern warfare has gotten better only in the sense that the winning side CAN do so with fewest lives lost and fewer permanently disabled personnel (on its side) because we know better how to conduct operations (strategy) and rely more on personnel using more and more precise technology. Bragging rights (up until Viet Nam) were body counts; especially how the enemy forces were pulverized into submission, until they stopped fighting conventionally and became sophisticated in assaults, rather than waging battles. I think there still is a mentality that says deaths and injuries aren't so very important as is pounding the enemy back into the 8th century, destroying civilization, civilians, and economic capacity and history of the country invaded. This mentality I think is that of Putin's military strategy, where square miles of Ukraine devastated represent gain and subjugation and high body counts among Russian and Ukrainians are pretty much OK. Why else send half of your total war making personnel into just one country and not have figured out how to train, resupply, and work on the fight message for their troops? I remember WWI (from reading and my dad in the cavalry) and that battles were mostly fought with flanks (or stationary trenches) of troops and horses and how that turned out to be tons and masses of corpuscles as fodder thrown against opposing sides and ended only when one side puked the last breath crawling across the imaginary line marking the opposition's. I imagine you saw the horribly beautiful poppy display at London Tower to celebrate the 900+ thousand British (mostly) personnel who gave their lives in that conflict, they were the fodder of a warfare style that failed for the British in the US during our revolution. A heartbreaking display for me as the poppies flowed down the Tower and filled the moat with individual remembrances of a family member, a British citizen. The warfare approach of WWI was continued into WWII by the Soviets and German military geniuses and a preference of many top ranking French and British military leader. Lives are cheap and intellectuals/academics make terrible fodder I think reflected the general military belief. The west, sadly, has become the most efficient at waging wars, long wars, unwinnable wars, because we now prize the return of our warriors and, probably, are too cheap or divided to be willing to build new monuments to their sacrifices, and the enemies of democracy are willing to absorb high body counts. And yes, I think the American entry into WWII brought the introduction of modern warfare where material and techniques and volumnous weaponary could be cheaply enough manufactured to prize lives over blood soaking of the battlefield and left us to really commit to leaving no one behind in some anonymous battlefield grave. Gads. I spent to much time thinking about this, when I could have said, I agree. Be well.
Fred What marvelous food for thought! In WW I machine guns encountered traditional military tactics and the result was devastating. Someone wise once said that armies are well prepared to fight the last war. Also, nationalism is a far stronger force than a staid military. The Soviets discovered that in Afghanistan 1979-1988, as did we in Vietnam, Iraq (2003), and Afghanistan.
This has stunned Putin in Ukraine. Moreover, his ‘paper tiger’ army seems less threatening to such neighboring countries—Poland and Baltic states. Meanwhile, we are building yet another nuclear aircraft carrier ($!0+/-) billion plus accessories, while we dare not bring it within hundreds of miles of any danger area. Plus a chance, plus la meme chose?
Well, I was not thinking of body counts, but at the lack of gratitude, and the glorifying of Stalin in the present version of Russian history. I have heard Zhukov was Stalin's favorite because he was just as merciless to his own people as to the enemy. So, I believe the loss of 20 million was not necessary, and it is appalling that it is now taken as a sign of having done so much more than everyone else against the nazis. - What the Russians are staging now in Mariupol is a revenge for Stalingrad; that's why the narrative of Ukrainian nazis is so important. - Americans were not at a safe distance in the Ardennes.
Olof ... I understand your comments and the deflection value Putin is using. Punish someone else, another country, for the terrible manner in which your leaders threw away the lives of your own people conscripted in the battles that were unwinnable.
When Putin finds no one else to blame for his megalomania, he will still see his face in the mirror. I strongly recommend Roger Cohen’s perceptive historical analysis of Putin over the years in today’s New York Times.
Olof After Stalin killed 3-6 million Ukrainians by starving them to death, some Ukrainians joined a Nazi brigade to fight against Stalin in WW II and Stalin, after the war, sent a number of Ukrainians to Siberia and relocated a number of Russians in Ukraine.
My understanding is that today ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine is a non-issue, except in Putin’s mind.
Well, both-and. Timothy Snyder would agree with you:
“…what’s interesting about the Ukrainians is that they seem to be moving more towards the argument that the nation is not about a clear story of the past. It’s more about action directed towards the future.
And I say this because both in the case of the Russian invasion in 2014 and in this much more stressful period now, when I talk to Ukrainians anyway, I don’t find them talking much about the Second World War, about ancient hatreds with Russia, or about some long narrative which has to be clear in some way. I find them more focused on what they’re doing.”
Ellie So true! During WW II I was conditioned to hate the Nazis and the Japanese. Those European countries occupied by the Nazis hated their occupiers. (When I was in zNorway in 1974, I had dinner with Norway’s top civil servant, who had fled to London with the king. His wife fled later in an open boat fearing strafing y the Nazis. He officially felt obliged to meet with a visiting Germany delegation. She flatly refused.)
Germany, by the early 1950s, was our ally in NATO. After the fall of the Berlin War, aGermany was unified. Most recently Germany did a volte face on military expenditures and on the once-imperative Russian Nord 2 pipeline. Meanwhile, Japan is costing up to us regarding China.
Ukraine has emerged, after internal changes, as principally a westward-looking independent nation. Though Russian is a common language, a number of these Russian speakers are fervent Ukrainian nationalists. Time buries many ancient hatchets. In the Middle East, three leaders from Arab states are meeting with Israel. Self interest is a funny thing that seemingly defies ‘traditional’ history.
Conditioning indeed! My late father in law was in WWII, and hated Japan so much that he refused to buy a Japanese car because it was "made by the enemy." My generation was bathed in Cold War Russia-hate; then they were our friends; now they're our enemies.
It's hard to keep up with whom one needs to hate socially :-)
Bill As Churchill, who was a fervent anti-communist expressed it, when Germany attacked Russia on June 22, 1941, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Historically, enemies change—to wit Germany and Japan.
My British uncle, who was a prisoner of war in Germany, later commanded a British tank regiment in Germany in 1949 in Hanover. My cousin, who was ExOff on an American sub sunk soon after Pearl Harbor, was in a Japanese prison case for over three years. When I went to Japan in 1974 to rate the credit of Japan, I thought, as I visited Mitsubishi, that their planes bombed Pearl Harbor. A senior Partner of Morgan Stanley refused to participate in the Japanese government bond issue because of what happened to his son with the Japanese in WW II.
As for the Irish regarding Great Britain, for some forgiveness won’t occur for eons. China and the Japanese occupation?
Olof Whatever you feel, Russians were dying by the millions while FDR/Churchill were continually postponed our Normandy invasion. At Teheran Stalin made this abundantly clear. He had the impression that FDR/Churchill were delighted to have the Russians and Germans massacring one other, while the Americans and Brits slow walked their European effort through Sicily and the boot of Italy.
This is not to overgeneralize any country’s war policy, but interestingly, in 1944 after the Normandy invasion in June, in August, while the Nazis leveled the city to rubble and annihilated the Polish underground resistance to quash the Warsaw Uprising, the Russian army lingered across the river for 63 days, letting the Germans deplete their resources.
This was a deliberate Russian effort to permit the Nazis to destroy the pro-Western forces in Warsaw. It was a heart wrenching massacre. When the US proposed airing assistance to the Polish resistance, the Russians refused to permit these planes to land in Russian-occupied territory, intimating that they might be shot down. And these were our ‘Russian allies.’
Poland and Russia had a. Long history, including when Catherine the Great sent a former lover to be king of Poland. It was a major issue between Stalin and Churchill during WW II. Of course Stalin won.
Olof History depends upon one’s personal perspective. Through Lend Lease and later, after Pearl Harbor, America provided massive supplies to Russia through Murmansk and the Persian Gulf. One might say that this was in our self interest. From memory I recall that the Russians lost about 20 million (mostly military) persons. By contrast,, I believe that America lost about 320,000 soldiers during the entire war in Europe and the Pacific.
I recall at Teheran that Stalin was pushing FDR/Churchill for a major invasion of Europe. (Normandy occurred on June 6, 1944). We delayed while Russian troops were bearing catastrophic losses. Our military assistance for their massive loss of life.
As for Stalin’s ‘recklessness.’ Stalingrad was the turning point of the war. It was fought building by building. Stalin ordered that any Russian soldier caught leaving the frontlines would be shot. Also, in the race to Berlin, he encouraged two field marshals (Zhukov was one) to move forward with no concern about loss of life. I think the Russians lost about 100,000 soldiers, while Ike kept American troops at a safe distance away from Berlin.
"We delayed while Russian troops were bearing catastrophic losses. Our military assistance for their massive loss of life."
I don't know if we "delayed." But if we did, it was out of rational self-interest. This was a European war, not ours, and it took forever to get Congress out of its isolationist sour apples. Realpolitik demanded that if millions of troops were going to be sacrificed anyway, better Europe's than ours.
Also, Stalin had no problem being Hitler's friend in the early stages; what went around came around.
I'm glad we made the blood-and-treasure sacrifices to help Good Europe beat Evil Europe. Defeating Hitler was a moral imperative. But our national interest was never in volunteering to let America kids die so Russian kids wouldn't.
What we COULD do that Russia and the rest of Europe couldn't was manufacture and ship billions of pounds of war goods. We did. America did nothing wrong in letting Russia take the hit on the Eastern Front.
Bill Spot on regarding American and British self interests. You can imagine that Stalin might have been pissed that millions of Soviet troops were being killed in fighting the Nazis while the US/UK equivocated for ‘good reason.” We were concerned about massive US/UK deaths, while Stalin was not. Also, Stalin, a highly suspicious fellow, thought that he was left in a meat grinder, as his ‘allies’ spoke of the difficulties of mounting a cross channel invasion of Europe.
Thanks, Keith, appreciated. Unless the war is aimed directly at your throat and you have no choice but to throw the kitchen sink and all your kids into the maw, every nation will choose self-interest over selflessness. War is politics by other means, etc.
I also have to wonder if a little bit of that UK-U.S. delay was (a) punishing Stalin for being pals with Hitler in the beginning, and (b) bleeding Russia while they could because they sensed that, as Patton famously predicted, Stalin would become a menace after the war.
Which is another way of agreeing with you that much of what every nation did was out of self-interest. Russia just didn't have much of a choice after Hitler turned on Stalin.
Two philosophies of war. Troops as fodder versus troops as weapons. Alas.
Fred, isn’t whose troops the key? In Ukraine, what would be the American public’s reactions, if we had 100,000 American soldiers fighting and dying along side Ukrainians and our airplanes in dog fights with the Russians? In WWII our military supplies saved many American lives when, for nearly a year, we weren’t engaged against Germany while the Russians were losing millions of men.
As a youngster in WW II, our newspapers focused mainly on American (and British) military operations, with minor coverage of Russia. Then the public impression was that the US won WW II. It took years for any public appreciation that Russian losses were more than 20 times total American/British losses.
Ultimately, this is the truth of war, Keith and Olof. Modern warfare has gotten better only in the sense that the winning side CAN do so with fewest lives lost and fewer permanently disabled personnel (on its side) because we know better how to conduct operations (strategy) and rely more on personnel using more and more precise technology. Bragging rights (up until Viet Nam) were body counts; especially how the enemy forces were pulverized into submission, until they stopped fighting conventionally and became sophisticated in assaults, rather than waging battles. I think there still is a mentality that says deaths and injuries aren't so very important as is pounding the enemy back into the 8th century, destroying civilization, civilians, and economic capacity and history of the country invaded. This mentality I think is that of Putin's military strategy, where square miles of Ukraine devastated represent gain and subjugation and high body counts among Russian and Ukrainians are pretty much OK. Why else send half of your total war making personnel into just one country and not have figured out how to train, resupply, and work on the fight message for their troops? I remember WWI (from reading and my dad in the cavalry) and that battles were mostly fought with flanks (or stationary trenches) of troops and horses and how that turned out to be tons and masses of corpuscles as fodder thrown against opposing sides and ended only when one side puked the last breath crawling across the imaginary line marking the opposition's. I imagine you saw the horribly beautiful poppy display at London Tower to celebrate the 900+ thousand British (mostly) personnel who gave their lives in that conflict, they were the fodder of a warfare style that failed for the British in the US during our revolution. A heartbreaking display for me as the poppies flowed down the Tower and filled the moat with individual remembrances of a family member, a British citizen. The warfare approach of WWI was continued into WWII by the Soviets and German military geniuses and a preference of many top ranking French and British military leader. Lives are cheap and intellectuals/academics make terrible fodder I think reflected the general military belief. The west, sadly, has become the most efficient at waging wars, long wars, unwinnable wars, because we now prize the return of our warriors and, probably, are too cheap or divided to be willing to build new monuments to their sacrifices, and the enemies of democracy are willing to absorb high body counts. And yes, I think the American entry into WWII brought the introduction of modern warfare where material and techniques and volumnous weaponary could be cheaply enough manufactured to prize lives over blood soaking of the battlefield and left us to really commit to leaving no one behind in some anonymous battlefield grave. Gads. I spent to much time thinking about this, when I could have said, I agree. Be well.
Fred What marvelous food for thought! In WW I machine guns encountered traditional military tactics and the result was devastating. Someone wise once said that armies are well prepared to fight the last war. Also, nationalism is a far stronger force than a staid military. The Soviets discovered that in Afghanistan 1979-1988, as did we in Vietnam, Iraq (2003), and Afghanistan.
This has stunned Putin in Ukraine. Moreover, his ‘paper tiger’ army seems less threatening to such neighboring countries—Poland and Baltic states. Meanwhile, we are building yet another nuclear aircraft carrier ($!0+/-) billion plus accessories, while we dare not bring it within hundreds of miles of any danger area. Plus a chance, plus la meme chose?
Don't forget Japan and Italy found their way into headlines.
Indeed. The idea of a "peoples emissary", representing all the people, actually only takes that he alone is surviving.
Well, I was not thinking of body counts, but at the lack of gratitude, and the glorifying of Stalin in the present version of Russian history. I have heard Zhukov was Stalin's favorite because he was just as merciless to his own people as to the enemy. So, I believe the loss of 20 million was not necessary, and it is appalling that it is now taken as a sign of having done so much more than everyone else against the nazis. - What the Russians are staging now in Mariupol is a revenge for Stalingrad; that's why the narrative of Ukrainian nazis is so important. - Americans were not at a safe distance in the Ardennes.
Olof ... I understand your comments and the deflection value Putin is using. Punish someone else, another country, for the terrible manner in which your leaders threw away the lives of your own people conscripted in the battles that were unwinnable.
When Putin finds no one else to blame for his megalomania, he will still see his face in the mirror. I strongly recommend Roger Cohen’s perceptive historical analysis of Putin over the years in today’s New York Times.
Olof After Stalin killed 3-6 million Ukrainians by starving them to death, some Ukrainians joined a Nazi brigade to fight against Stalin in WW II and Stalin, after the war, sent a number of Ukrainians to Siberia and relocated a number of Russians in Ukraine.
My understanding is that today ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine is a non-issue, except in Putin’s mind.
Well, both-and. Timothy Snyder would agree with you:
“…what’s interesting about the Ukrainians is that they seem to be moving more towards the argument that the nation is not about a clear story of the past. It’s more about action directed towards the future.
And I say this because both in the case of the Russian invasion in 2014 and in this much more stressful period now, when I talk to Ukrainians anyway, I don’t find them talking much about the Second World War, about ancient hatreds with Russia, or about some long narrative which has to be clear in some way. I find them more focused on what they’re doing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-timothy-snyder.html
Ellie So true! During WW II I was conditioned to hate the Nazis and the Japanese. Those European countries occupied by the Nazis hated their occupiers. (When I was in zNorway in 1974, I had dinner with Norway’s top civil servant, who had fled to London with the king. His wife fled later in an open boat fearing strafing y the Nazis. He officially felt obliged to meet with a visiting Germany delegation. She flatly refused.)
Germany, by the early 1950s, was our ally in NATO. After the fall of the Berlin War, aGermany was unified. Most recently Germany did a volte face on military expenditures and on the once-imperative Russian Nord 2 pipeline. Meanwhile, Japan is costing up to us regarding China.
Ukraine has emerged, after internal changes, as principally a westward-looking independent nation. Though Russian is a common language, a number of these Russian speakers are fervent Ukrainian nationalists. Time buries many ancient hatchets. In the Middle East, three leaders from Arab states are meeting with Israel. Self interest is a funny thing that seemingly defies ‘traditional’ history.
Conditioning indeed! My late father in law was in WWII, and hated Japan so much that he refused to buy a Japanese car because it was "made by the enemy." My generation was bathed in Cold War Russia-hate; then they were our friends; now they're our enemies.
It's hard to keep up with whom one needs to hate socially :-)
Bill As Churchill, who was a fervent anti-communist expressed it, when Germany attacked Russia on June 22, 1941, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Historically, enemies change—to wit Germany and Japan.
My British uncle, who was a prisoner of war in Germany, later commanded a British tank regiment in Germany in 1949 in Hanover. My cousin, who was ExOff on an American sub sunk soon after Pearl Harbor, was in a Japanese prison case for over three years. When I went to Japan in 1974 to rate the credit of Japan, I thought, as I visited Mitsubishi, that their planes bombed Pearl Harbor. A senior Partner of Morgan Stanley refused to participate in the Japanese government bond issue because of what happened to his son with the Japanese in WW II.
As for the Irish regarding Great Britain, for some forgiveness won’t occur for eons. China and the Japanese occupation?
Heart.
Except for the 17 Holocaust memorials in Ukraine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_memorials_and_museums
And today Ukraine has a Jewish president—Zelensky!
Olof Whatever you feel, Russians were dying by the millions while FDR/Churchill were continually postponed our Normandy invasion. At Teheran Stalin made this abundantly clear. He had the impression that FDR/Churchill were delighted to have the Russians and Germans massacring one other, while the Americans and Brits slow walked their European effort through Sicily and the boot of Italy.
This is not to overgeneralize any country’s war policy, but interestingly, in 1944 after the Normandy invasion in June, in August, while the Nazis leveled the city to rubble and annihilated the Polish underground resistance to quash the Warsaw Uprising, the Russian army lingered across the river for 63 days, letting the Germans deplete their resources.
This was a deliberate Russian effort to permit the Nazis to destroy the pro-Western forces in Warsaw. It was a heart wrenching massacre. When the US proposed airing assistance to the Polish resistance, the Russians refused to permit these planes to land in Russian-occupied territory, intimating that they might be shot down. And these were our ‘Russian allies.’
Poland and Russia had a. Long history, including when Catherine the Great sent a former lover to be king of Poland. It was a major issue between Stalin and Churchill during WW II. Of course Stalin won.