Who won the Second World War anyway?

By the time you read this the annual Russian victory parade may have taken place in Moscow. It is now eighty years since the end of the Second World War in Europe and its remembrance perhaps says as much about the present as the past. The three principal victors, the USSR and it successor state, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom have tended to talk up their own contributions which inevitably undermines that of others. President Trump, never one to let his ignorance of a subject restrict him from pontificating on it has announced:

“Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II, I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I.”

As well as ignoring the fact that the Second World War ended with the defeat of Japan, not Germany, Trump’s statement is sure to irritate Vladimir Putin as the Russian position is that they essentially defeated Nazi Germany with only some minor assistance from the western Allies.

There is much merit in the Russian argument. The USSR shed oceans of blood. As the graphic below shows, in absolute terms the USSR suffered more than other country and was second only to Poland in the percentage of its citizens killed.

In terms of the land fighting, USSR faced Germany virtually alone from June 1941 to June 1944 (it never considered the Allied campaigns in N Africa or Italy as a ‘front’) and was responsible for the vast majority of German military losses as the graphic below shows.

Case closed? Not quite, for the Russian narrative is quite selective. Governments in Moscow have tended to ignore the Nazi-Soviet Pact which unleashed the war in the first place. It secretly divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian states and allowed Hitler to invade Poland without worrying about Soviet intervention. The USSR used the occasion to invade Poland from the east and Germany’s subsequent war against France and Britain allowed the USSR to invade Finland, take over Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and bully Romania into giving up Bessarabia, (what is now mostly Moldova) without interference. In other words, it was the war between German and the western allies to recreate the old Tsarist empire.

The USSR did not fight to rid the world the world of fascism, it fought because it was attacked and it faced being wiped off the map with the majority of its population murdered or enslaved if it lost. Millions of its dead were due to the deliberate maltreatment and murder of its POWs and civilians by the Germans, but millions of its soldiers were captured or killed in the first place through incompetent leadership. Stalin refused to believe hundreds of intelligence warnings about an impending attack enabling the Germans to achieve total strategic and tactical surprise. Orders to counter attack all along the line resulted in huge battles of encirclement whereby the Red army lost 324,000 men at Minsk, 310,000 at Smolensk, 520,000 at Kiev and a further 500,000 at Vyazma. The USSR survived these disasters because it was able to quickly form new armies and absorb losses no other country could. Many of these new formations were poorly trained and equipped, they learned their craft in the hard school of the front but out of the shambles, capable generals like Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky emerged to forge the Red Army into a formidable fighting force capable of defeating the German Wehrmacht albeit with an indifference to staggering losses no western army or society would tolerate .

The Russians downplay western aid if they mention it at all, and in fairness it must be accepted that managed to hang on and inflict major defeats on the Germans at Moscow and Stalingrad before western material assistance, principally American, in the form of Lend-Lease came to the fore. This assistance should not be dismissed. The Americans alone supplied:

406,808 jeeps and trucks

56.6% of the rails used to supply Soviet forces

1,900 locomotives

11,075 railway cars

325,784 radio stations

380,135 field telephones

782,000 tons of canned meat

14,000,000 pairs of boots

These figures do not include the tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft that were supplied. The US also supplied over half of the USSR’s aviation fuel and explosives.

It could be said that in the during the great victories of 1943-45 the Red Army was transported on American vehicles, marched in American boots, ate American rations, communicated with American equipment, fired shells filled with American explosives that were brought to the front on American rails and trains while supported by aircraft flying on American fuel. Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals about logistics.

The story of Soviet victory is one for domestic public consumption. In the 1990s it was revealed that Stalin had admitted to Khrushchev that the USSR could not have defeated Germany on its own because the country had lost so much of its industry . ^{Khrushchev in turn said, “Just imagine how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without them. Our losses would have been colossal.”}

The Western Allies also aided the USSR indirectly. Command of the sea and the ability to land anywhere on the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe meant Germany had to place large garrisons on threatened coastlines, troops that otherwise could have been on the Eastern front. The proportion of German troops deployed there declined from 80% at the beginning of the German invasion in June 1941 to around 60% in January 1945. As this proportion dropped the Red Army became correspondingly more and more successful.

Few battles in the Second World War were won without control of the air and the Allied bombing campaign drew the German air force, the Luftwaffe, away from the eastern front. In the second half of 1944 only 24.3% of German fighter aircraft were based in the east allowing the Soviets complete air superiority during the crucial summer battles of 1944 where the Red Army in Operation Bagration smashed the German army beyond any hope of recovery.

Every nation emphasises its own triumphs over those of others and although relations with Russia are currently poisonous, its major role in the Allied victory should be acknowledged. Nor should Russia dismiss the very real assistance it received. The fact is, no one nation won the war on its own nor could any single one of them have down so. The Soviet peoples suffered and bled like no other, that must be recognised, but the simple narrative that the Soviets defeated fascism with little or no help is disingenuous and often told for political reasons. The old adage that the British supplied time, the Americans money and the Soviets blood, still holds true.