How the War Was Won

During World War II, Soviet forces suffered a staggering death rate of nearly 50 percent (“Who Really Won the War?” October 2007). This was not a heroic sacrifice, but one of the greatest acts of mass murder in the history of warfare. The Japanese army “human wave” losses in the Pacific theater, as well as those of the Red Chinese in the Korean War, have been rightly defined as suicidal. Soviet losses can be similarly described. Why is the fanaticism of the Red Army seen as patriotism? Stalin issued numerous orders to “stand and fight to the last man” when strategic withdrawal would have been more sensible and certainly more humane. This do-or-die trait he shared with Hitler. Stalin’s Order Number 270, issued August 16, 1941, stated that in case of surrender, all officers involved were to be shot on the spot and all enlisted men threatened with total annihilation as well as possible reprisals against their families. Retreating soldiers, or even those who hesitated, were to be shot by rear guard units of the NKVD.

No objective student of battle would ever underestimate the huge sacrifices, in both human and material terms, that the USSR made during the war. But the inescapable conclusion one must draw is that a high percentage of these sacrifices were both needless and avoidable.

Gabriel Benzur
via e-mail

I was a child survivor of the war in Shanghai, China, when the Japanese occupied the city on December 8, 1941, and which the U.S. Army subsequently liberated in the latter part of August 1945, so I have a different take on the war.

With the possible exception of the relatively minor British involvement in the China-Burma-India theater, the United States was the only Allied power simultaneously fighting two separate and mighty conflicts: the European theater and the Pacific theater.

The tremendous distances in the Pacific required the kind of massive effort that only the United States could muster. Imagine for a moment if the United States did not have to fight in the Pacific. All those ships and men would have been brought to Europe that much sooner, and the Normandy invasion could conceivably have occurred a year earlier. And speaking of which, and without in any manner diminishing the Red Army’s heroic efforts, it never had to face as difficult an operation as Overlord.

I was privy to see a small slice of the gigantic American war effort in Shanghai, and much of the Red Army’s material success was due to the thousands upon thousands of jeeps, trucks, and other war materiel furnished to the Red Army through Lend-Lease.

Leon Jedeikin
Montreal, Canada

Disregarding Davies’s frivolous and irrelevant example of British greatcoats, it is true that Lend-Lease tanks and aircraft occupied only a small place in the Soviet force structure, but that was not the most important part of Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease delivered hundreds of thousands of radios and trucks, without which the Soviet army could not have fought a modern, mobile war, and Lend-Lease deliveries of raw materials were vital to the Soviet war effort. To take a few examples from Mark Harrison’s excellent book, Accounting for War, in terms of 1944 Soviet domestic output, Lend-Lease supplied 100 percent of rubber output, 40–81 percent of various nonferrous metals, 32–50 percent of various chemicals used for explosives, 50 percent of paper, 33 percent of meat products, and 37 percent of aviation fuel. Both sides of the alliance were critical. Without either side, victory over Germany would have taken longer and been much more costly.

Gary Dickson
Bucharest, Romania

The article by Norman Davies is totally accurate. The only thing I would add is that the United States had the tremendous advantage of not entering into combat until after the other nations had already taken a severe toll on the Axis military. If the U.S. military, even the one of 1944, had gone head-to-head with the German army of 1940, and the USSR sat out the war for three more years, it would have been a different story. I do not diminish at all the sacrifice and determination of the American servicemen, but they were fighting an enemy that was already suffering and was more concerned with the enemy to the East than the one to the West.

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