WWII Mythbusting, Eastern Front Edition. I live in Latvia and have run into this narrative a lot. Americans, Brits, Italians and the Dutch all have their mythologized fake history of WWII. I've written about all of them: (https://medium.com/p/ab1b82774b1d/edit )
Basic facts Russians ignore:
1. 2/3 of the trucks, 2/3 of the radios, 2/3 of the jeeps, 2/3 of the new railroad ties, and the American Mustangs used in Operation Bagration were American-sourced war materiel.
2. American aircraft losses amounted to 96,300 and American aircraft production was about 400,000. Germany's total aircraft production, in comparison, was 144,000. Where was the Luftwaffe after early 1943? Not over Soviet territory because it was busy chasing American and British targets over German, French and Italian cities. 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 was that 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 was to 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. At the Allied summit in November 1943 Stalin raised his glass in a toast to "American war production, without which the war could not be won." Evidence for Stalin's toast: A 70-year-old German visiting professor at UCLA I interviewed in 1979 told me of his experiences as an interpreter at interrogations of downed allied airmen in 1944–45. The Gestapo and Volksturm (Home Guard) would loot their backpacks and find real coffee, chocolate bars, fresh fruit, apple pie, and ice cream (it's cold enough for ice cream in unpressurized cabins). Then they'd ask, dumbfounded, where on the black market the captured airmen would get this stuff. The answer always caused the color to go out of their faces: "we fly it all over from the States." The Nazi interrogators then understood they were at war with an enemy with limitless resources and their cause doomed. All the Stephen Ambrose books will not change the fact that Germans, whose units were composed of soldiers from the same home town, unlike the Americans' random unit assignments (REPLDEPL, or Replacement Deployment), were better soldiers. Nor did they change the equally important fact that that superiority was meaningless in a war against American industrial capacity.
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. A German atomic weapon launched on a V-2 rocket against Moscow or London becomes less counterfactual fiction than real possibility. Of course, a Nazi regime not possessed by obsessive anti-semitism that denigrated "Jewish physics" is not a real possibility.
5. About the 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.
7. History Fooled by Randomness #1: Midway. If the Japanese had won this battle, the road to Hawaii would have been open and American resources bound for Europe would have been diverted. D-Day would have come a year or more later and all of Germany would be occupied by the Soviets. Thanks to random luck, and the American pilots who found four Japanese carriers and sank them in 12 minutes.
8. History Fooled by Randomness #2, Giuseppe Zangara's failed attempt to assassinate FDR on February 15, 1933, 17 days before his inauguration. Had Zangara not failed in his assassination attempt due to Lillian Cross' handbag deflecting his gun, a constitutional crisis would have occurred. Thank you, Lillian Cross.
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."
And he was right. The US constitution has no provision for presidential succession in case of the assassination of a president-elect during the transition of power. FDR's assassination would have produced a constitutional crisis. What would Hoover have done? Would VP elect John Nance-Garner, of "the vice presidency is not worth a pot to piss in" fame, have claimed the presidency? There certainly 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 JK 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 justifiably the premise behind The Man in the High Castle. I've yet to meet a Russian or Latvian who knew about Zangara before I mentioned him. Of course, most Americans never heard of him either because he challenges the inevitability of FDR's New Deal recovery and wartime leadership to certain victory.
9. The Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and the Katyn massacre of 10000 Polish army officers in May 1940. A war started over Polish independence accepted by neither Germany nor the USSR left Poland without true independence until 1989.
10. The Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939-March 1940, in which the Soviets' post-June 22, 1941 allies, Britain and Gaullist resistance France, would align with Germany's future ally, Finland, against the Soviets. Stubborn Finnish resistance in the Winter War fooled Hitler into a fatal sampling error: the Red Army would be a pushover. The Japanese knew better, but Hitler either didn't know about Khalkin Gol or ignored it.
11. The Red Army as a bystander during the Polish Home Army's anti-German uprising of August-October 1944. The concurrent, parallel and differing fates of an intact Paris liberated as Warsaw burned are subjects the mythology of May 9 prefers to avoid (Gregor Dallas, "1945").
