Soviet pride, shame

"...many North Americans and British mistakenly believe their nations alone defeated National Socialist Germany. In fact, Stalin's Soviet Union, not the western democracies, played the decisive role in defeating Adolf Hitler and his European allies. While rightly honouring our own heroic veterans, it's time we also recognize and pay homage to Russia's dauntless courage, endurance and suffering.

- The Soviet Union inflicted 75% of all World War II German casualties in titanic battles involving millions of men. Soviet forces killed 3 million German troops, and lost 11.3 million, with 18.3 million wounded. Twenty million Russian civilians died.

Britain lost 340,000 men, Canada 43,000, and the U.S. about 150,000 in the European Theater. The $11 billion of U.S. military aid to the U.S.S.R. helped Stalin, but was not decisive.

- When Allied forces landed at Normandy, the Wehrmacht's "guts had been ripped out by the Soviets," said Winston Churchill. Had the Allies met 1940's strength and quality German troops, with an intact Luftwaffe, they would have been driven into the English Channel. However battered, the Wehrmacht fought ferociously from 1944 to '45, recalling Churchill's dictum, "You will never know war until you fight Germans."

- The Soviet defeat of Japan's forces in Manchuria has been ignored. In a brilliant, blitzkrieg campaign along a 3,000-km front on Aug. 9, 1945, Soviet Far Eastern armies crushed Japan's weakened 710,000-man Kwantung Army, killing 80,000 and capturing 594,000. (...)

Stalin told Churchill he had killed 10 million farmers in the early 1930s, and hailed the butcher of 6 million Ukrainians, Commissar Lazar Kaganovich, as "our Himmler." The best current estimate of Stalin's victims is 20 million murdered before WWII, and 10 million from 1941 to '53, a total "democide" of 30 million. Hitler's toll was around 12 million after 1941.

Nor did German aggression alone begin the war in Europe. German-Soviet aggression did.

Yet Britain and the U.S. chose to become war partners with Stalin, by then history's worst mass killer. Churchill and particularly Franklin Roosevelt must share indirect guilt for Stalin's crimes, just as they would had they joined Hitler.

This aspect of the war remains taboo. At Yalta, the left-leaning Roosevelt, besotted by "Uncle Joe" Stalin's power, delivered half of Europe to communist rule, replacing a greater tyranny for a lesser one.

What should the Allies have done?

In 1939, the 20th-century's leading military thinker, Maj.-Gen. J.F.C Fuller, urged Britain not to go to war over Poland, but await the inevitable war between Germany and the U.S.S.R. that would destroy them both, then liberate Europe. Otherwise, he warned, Stalin would emerge the victor. Hitler was declared "the supreme evil" and ideological war declared. Fuller was pilloried and ignored. (...)" ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN