Some truth about WWII

[Rasputin]

How we didn't win the war . . . but the Russians did

Britain and America still insist they defeated the Nazis, in the face of overwhelming evidence that they were minor partners, says Norman Davies

[Rasputin]

Nonetheless, the Third Reich was not brought to its knees by bombers and blockades. Both the German military and the German civilian population proved remarkably resilient. Hitler’s continental fortress had to be reduced inch by inch by soldiers on the ground. And here the Red Army excelled.
So much may be reluctantly conceded by western analysts who can do their sums. Harder to accept is that Soviet military prowess went hand in hand with criminality. The Third Reich was largely defeated not by the forces of liberal democracy, but by the forces of another mass-murdering tyranny. The liberators of Auschwitz were servants of a regime that ran a much larger network of concentration camps of its own.



When Churchill was writing in the late 1940s, he knew perfectly well that Stalin was no angel. Yet the sheer scale and variety of Stalinist crimes was not known. The statistic of 27m Soviet “war losses”, which appeared in the 1960s, concealed the fact that many of them were not Russians and many were victims not of Hitler but of Stalin. It has taken the collapse of the Soviet Union and more than 60 years for this body of certainty to accumulate.

One can argue about the similarities and differences of the Holocaust and the Gulag and it is obviously a mistake to equate the two. On the other hand, it is also a mistake to pretend that Stalinist crimes can somehow be absolved because Stalin was a doughty champion of the anti-Nazi cause.

All of which makes the Churchillian model open to revision. Britain can no longer stand centre stage. The axis powers are joined on the criminal list by the Soviet Union, which also turns out to have been the principal victor. The western allies are not all-conquering heroes but did well to finish in the winners’ enclosure.

The Americans arrived too late and in too few numbers to play the dominant role. The forces of democracy played their part in the defeat of fascism, but were left controlling less than half the continent. In the greater part of Europe one totalitarian tyranny was replaced by another. More often than not, the rhetoric of “freedom” and “liberation” was misplaced.