The Great Patriotic War - Soviet Union in World War II   

                                                                                                                  by Wade Davis

Story of Henry Wallace dispatched by Roosevelt to Moscow. The Soviets were bitter over the Allied failure to open a Second Front, while the Americans viewed Russians as ungrateful for their failure to appreciate all of the aid being shipped at some risk through Murmansk and Vladivostok. They took Wallace to the front, where a Russian general surveyed the battlefield. Dodge trucks, he noted, boots made in Chicago, k rations of spam, and so on. But then he turned his eyes to the carnage; “Russian body” he said, “Russian blood, Russian dead”. This perfectly summed up the reality of the Second World War. 

America contributions to the Allied victory were of course extraordinary; the transformation of its economy nothing short of miraculous. In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years 16 million men and women were in uniform, and most of the rest were working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy. When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90% of the world’s rubber supply, we dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect our tires, got through 1942 by growing dandelions and recycling rubber at 400,000 depots, and then invented from scratch a synthetic rubber industry that allowed our armies to roll over the Nazis. 

In the last year of peace we produced 3.5 million private cars; for the rest of the war we made 139. Instead we built tens of thousands of planes, tanks, and trucks. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of one a day for four years. The Ford Motor Company alone produced more industrial output than the country of Italy. Farm boys of 17 from Kansas and the Dakotas, Utah and Mississippi, after seven months of training, were flying B-17s over Germany. And these planes were built on an assembly line, though all the pundits of the time said that it could not be done.

In 1944 the US produced as many weapons as the entire Axis powers together- 40% of the entire armaments employed by all the combatants on every front of the war. US supplied Russians with 500,000 vehicles, 35,000 radio sets, 380,000 field telephones and a million miles of signal wire. Not to mention raw supplies of food, clothing, boots, metals, railroad engines and cars. Altogether 38 % of GDP went to the war effort. For every four pounds of supplies- ammunition, food, petroleum, boots and bandages- that the Japanese got per capita to a front line soldier, the US sent two tons, all across sea lanes that spanned the Pacific.

	And certainly American boys fell by the thousands; US battlefield deaths in Europe were close to 300,000. But the Russians would lose half that many in the first week of the war. In the first three weeks of the invasion, the Soviet Union suffered 750,000 casualties, losing 10,000 tanks and 4,000 aircraft. 

For every British or American to die, the Soviets lost eighty-five. Close to 15 million altogether, and that figure represents only military losses, killed, missing or captured. Total Soviet battlefield casualties numbered 35 million; civilian deaths reached as high as 22 million although no one really knows. Millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians simply disappeared into German detention camps and slave labor factories; those few to survive were often irreparably scarred by the experience.  

The economic impact, including losses in resources and manufacturing capacity in western Russia and Ukraine, was catastrophic. Imagine if Hitler’s armies had invaded the east coast of the US, occupied all the land west as far as the Mississippi, all with the intent of starving or murdering every American, destroying our industrial infrastructure, seizing our farms and laying waste to our cities. That is essentially what happened in Russia.
 
In an extraordinary feat of war logistics the Russians did everything they could to keep their industrial capacity out of the hands of the Nazis. Entire industrial towns and populations- production technology, blueprints, engineering staffs, management and skilled labor were evacuated on an enormous scale. Some 1523 factories were physically dismantled and shipped eastwards along four principal routes to the Caucasus, Central Asian, Ural, and Siberian regions. 

As the Germans advanced 1000 miles on a front 1900 miles wide, they ravaged whatever was left that the Russians in retreat had not destroyed. By the end of 1941, the Soviet forces had suffered 4.3 million casualties. The Germans had captured 3 million Russian soldiers, 2 million of whom died in German captivity by February 1942. The siege of Leningrad alone cost the lives of more than a million Soviet soldiers, and more than a million civilians, many of whom died from starvation.

The war left in ashes no fewer than 70,000 Soviet cities, towns and villages. Destroyed in that process were 6 million houses, 98,000 farms, 32,000 factories, 82,000 schools, 43,000 libraries, 6,000 hospitals and tens of thousands of miles of roads and railway track.

We of course are familiar with the major strategic thrusts by the Allies, the key battles in a campaign that led to the liberation of Western Europe. But it is humbling to track for a moment what was going on at the same time on the Eastern Front.

In the year after Pearl Harbor, the 12 months leading up to November 1942, the only Allied ground combat in the European Theatre of War was in North Africa where modest British forces fought Rommel’s Africa Corps, a small mobile force of but four divisions. Meanwhile in their assault on Crimea in the summer of 1942, the Germans would capture in two months alone some 625,000 Russians, few of whom would ever again see their homeland. 

When in late 1942 Montgomery at last prevailed over Rommel at El Alamein, saving Egypt and securing the first British victory in three years of war, Winston Churchill ordered that church bells be rung all over the British Isles. Altogether the British had inflicted 60,000 casualties on Rommel’s Africa Corps, which was severely overextended and cut off from supplies. 

That same month on the Eastern Front some 9 million Germans and Russians were locked in mortal combat. At Stalingrad, at a cost of two million casualties, the Soviets destroyed the German Sixth Army, the single largest formation in the German army, severely mauled the German Fourth Army, and destroyed two Rumanian armies as well, eradicating 50 divisions and some 300,000 men. 

In July 1943, as the Allies invaded Sicily driving 60,000 Germans from the island, in Russia 6.6 million Soviet soldiers confronted 2.5 million Germans; at the Battle of Kursk, the greatest tank battle in the history of warfare, 800,000 Russians would fall.

We in the west too often assume that it was Eisenhower, along with Bradley and Patton, who defeated Hitler after a long struggle that began on the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944. In truth Hitler’s ultimate nemesis was Zhukov, perhaps Vasilevsky. 

There were in fact two D-Days that fateful summer of 1944, one in France and another on the Eastern Front in Belarus and western Ukraine, what the Russians called Operation Bagration. At the time 3 million Germans fought in the East, while less than a million struggled elsewhere, occupied Europe or guarded the home front. 

Consider these figures. In the summer of 1944 the Wehrmacht had a total of 58 divisions in the west, of which only 11 were deployed against the D-Day landings. The initial landings pitted 170,000 Allied troops against 80,000 German soldiers.

On the Eastern Front the Germans deployed 228 divisions, twenty times the manpower facing the Allies in Normandy. When the Russians launched Operation Bagration on June 22, 1944, 16 days after D-Day, they sent into battle 2.4 million troops, supported by 36,400 artillery pieces, 5200 tanks and 5300 aircraft, all the confront the German Army Group Centre, which numbered 700,000 men, 900 tanks and 1350 aircraft. 

The Russians that summer alone lost 243,508 men killed and 811,603 wounded, even as they shattered 106 German divisions. In four months the Germans in the East lost 2 million, killed, wounded or captured.

As the Soviet armies advanced ever closer to Berlin, the rivers of blood flowed ever more violently. The battle for Rumania, something of a sideshow for the Russians and one of the least costly Soviet operations of 1944-45, nevertheless resulted in more dead and wounded Russian men and women than the British and Canadians would endure in the entire campaign for northwest Europe.

By April 1945, Germany faced the end with 1.9 million German soldiers in the East fighting 6.4 million Red Army soldiers while 1 million German soldiers in the West battled 4 million Western Allied soldiers. The final battle for Berlin, which ended the war, was an exclusively Russian assault, one that resulted in another 400,000 casualties in the last month of the war.

By then total German military losses numbered 13,488,000, 75% of mobilized forces and 46% of Germany’s 1939 male population. Of these casualties 10,758,000 fell or were taken prisoner in the east. The Russians accounted for fully 80% of German casualties in the war.

As you glance at these photographs of the dead, recall that more than a million Soviet women took up arms and served on the front lines of World War II as anti-aircraft gunners, snipers, partisan guerillas and even fighter pilots. Female troops eventually earned a reputation as some of the fiercest fighters on the Eastern Front. Among others, ace pilots Lydia Litvyak and Yekaterina Budanova each downed around a dozen German planes, and sharpshooter Lyudmila Pavlichenko singlehandedly killed more than 300 enemy soldiers. 

Like all Russian forces they lived at the Front for the duration of the war, eating atrocious food, sleeping outside in the winter cold, forbidden to retreat, with surrender not an option, with limited medical support, no morphine to dull pain, all with the full knowledge that for many of them their homes had been burned and their families slaughtered by the Nazi invaders. 

In these photographs, you are seeing the faces of men and women who defeated Hitler and quite literally saved civilization. This is something that is never forgotten in Russia, and it is only through the lens of this monumental national sacrifice for the world that one can begin to understand the nation today. Perhaps as Americans and Canadians we might think about this, and honor their memory with a moment of silent prayer.

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На этих фотографиях вы видите лица мужчин и женщин, кто победил Гитлер и вполне буквально спас цивилизации. Это то, что никогда не забыли в России, и это только через призму этой монументальной национальной жертву для всего мира, что можно начать понимать нации сегодня. Возможно, как американцы и канадцы мы думать об этом и чтить их память минутой молчания, посвященная молитве.