Change When Hitler Lost the War to Where Hitler Lost the War
This piece reenforces the Anglo-American-centric mythology of the WWII victory over fascism. But the real war was on the eastern front, where, the Soviets, with substantial American Lendlease aid, would have defeated the Germans with or without America's direct entry into the war against Germany. With or without direct declaration of war, FDR would have put thousands of B-17s over Germany via the Royal Air Force and "volunteer" airmen, just as American sailors were fighting U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic starting in 1940. George Marshall and FDR were also planning in December 1940 to give China American bombers and “retired volunteer” American crews to bomb Japan. By attacking the old European empires Germany and Japan opened the road to the more modern American local franchise-style informal form of empire-building, an objective FDR and his advisors needed no formal declaration of war against the axis to pursue.
Here's the antidote to Anglo-American mythology:
The basic facts most Americans and Brits are ignorant of:
1. Churchill said it was the Red Army that "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine".
2. 7 of 8 German soldiers were killed on the eastern front. The Soviets encircled the Germans at Stalingrad 11 days after Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. The widely acknowledged turning point, German surrender at Stalingrad took place on January 31, 1943, three weeks before the Americans were mauled by the Germans in Kasserine Pass, Tunisia. Not exactly a real second front.
3. D-Day was not among the 10 biggest battles of WWII. The key to allied success in France after D-Day was Bagration as much as the Battle of the Falaise Gap. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/21/we-must-not-forget-the-other-d-day), just as Kursk was the key to allied success in Italy.
4. The Pacific War against Japan was a side show, though Pearl Harbor was essential to getting the USA into the war against Germany.
5. Had Hitler, in a fit of Nazi racial ideological delirium, not declared war on the US, the US would have fought a one front war against Japan into 1942, postponing D-Day by a year. Result: no East and West Germany, just a Soviet-occupied Germany and France liberated by the USSR.
6. In October 1941 the Soviet spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, gave Stalin the information needed to move 400000 fresh troops and 2000 tanks from the Amur River to the gates of Moscow in time for the December 5 counterattack against the Germans.
7. The ratio of Americans to Soviets killed in the war was about 1:65.
8. % of Americans who responded affirmatively to a 1946 Gallup poll question, "have you had to make significant material sacrifices for the war effort?": 36%. I once read an interview with a German submarine captain who was 2 miles offshore from Miami in December 1944 when the War Dept allowed Miami Beach's hotels to reopen for the time first time since Pearl Harbor. He saw threw his periscope the lit up streets with the cars, the bars, restaurants, partying politicians, Wall Street bankers, mafia, and the babes, and told his crew, "we're bombed and starving and these people are having a party. Time to go home."
9. Who rode in the back of the bus or trolley in Dallas and New Orleans in 1945, German prisoners of war or black citizens of those cities? Answer: black Americans. As an 18 year old hitchhiking across Germany in the summer of 1973, I met one: a 50 year old Lutheran minister who spoke excellent English. He'd learned it as a POW in Dallas, Texas in 1944-45. He said the day he was captured by the Americans was the happiest day of his life, including his wedding day--because he knew he would live.
Basic facts Russians and former Soviet citizens don't know or prefer to ignore:
1. American-sourced war materiel in the Red Army: 2/3 of the trucks, 2/3 of the radios, 2/3 of the jeeps, 2/3 of the new railroad ties (metal tracks), American Mustangs at the Battle of Kursk.
2. American aircraft losses and production: 96300 and 400000. Germany's total aircraft production: 144000. Where was the Luftwaffe after early 1943: not over Soviet territory because it was busy chasing American and British targets. Until late 1944 the bombing of Germany was ineffective at reducing German war production. One of my UCLA professors worked for the US Strategic Bombing Survey and studied the effect of the fire bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. His conclusion: the bombing helped German war production by closing down all the theaters, clubs and brothels. No more fun, so people worked harder. The American and British air force's role: put targets over Germany and Italy and keep the Luftwaffe away from the eastern front. But you couldn't tell the air force its main role was to give the Germans targets to shoot at.
3. In Tehran in November 1943 Stalin raised his glass in a toast to "American war production, without which the war could not be won."
4. Without the USA as a refuge for German, Italian and Hungarian Jewish physicists, Germany would have developed an atomic bomb. Imagine Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Einstein working for the Germans instead of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The Man in the High Castle becomes more than just a counterfactual sci-fi fantasy (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RSI4WY2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=126E6C3KRMPN2&dchild=1&keywords=the+man+in+the+high+castle&qid=1588930087&s=instant-video&sprefix=the+man+in%2Cinstant-video%2C261&sr=1-1).
5. American sanctions on Japan and the Battle of Moscow in December 1941: Had FDR not provoked the Japanese into going south instead of north to Siberian oil fields, Stalin would not have had the additional armies to defend Moscow and launch the December 5 counterattack. Again, the Soviets fought and died, but their victory was assured by an American target diverting the Axis attention away from the real prize.
6. The Battle of Khalkin Gol in August 1939, which convinced the Japanese they didn't want to fight the Red Army and to go south.
7. Midway: if the Japanese had won this battle, the road to Hawaii was open and American resources bound for Europe get diverted. D-Day comes a year or more later. The American pilots finding four Japanese carriers and sinking them in 12 minutes was largely random.
8. Giuseppe Zangara's failed attempt to assassinate FDR on February 15, 1933, 17 days before inauguration. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/downtown-miami/article226081690.html
The mayor of Chicago sitting next to Roosevelt in the car, Anton Cermak, was killed. He told Roosevelt while dying in his hospital bed, "I'm glad it was me and not you, Mr. President." Cermak understood why. The US constitution has no provision for presidential succession in case of assassination of a president-elect during the transition of power. FDR's assassination would have produced a constitutional crisis and there would have been no New Deal, further economic collapse, no war-winning infrastructure (no WPA, CCC, NRA agencies) built during the 1930s, no War Production Board led by J.K. Galbraith, no Lend Lease ships going to Murmansk...the list of critical pieces of the war-winning puzzle goes on and on. Zangara's successful assassination of FDR is the premise behind The Man in the High Castle.
9. The Soviet invasion of Poland on 17/9/39 and the Katyn massacre of 10000 Polish army officers in May 1940.
Who won the war: the USSR, the USA and Britain. Who won the peace? Germany, Japan, Italy and the Marshall Plan.
Russian mythology about May 9 ensures that Russia is still losing the peace through its governance choices. Mythology about wartime heroics provides the excuse for bad governance in all three of the victorious countries.
