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| Europe |
| Overy in al Guardian on VE Day |
| 2005-05-07 |
| Imagine for a moment that around half the population of Great Britain - men, women and children - died in the second world war. What kind of extraordinary trauma would this represent? How would "victory" in 1945 now be viewed, or even celebrated? Yet 27 million is the estimate of Soviet deaths by the end of the war. Actual British losses represented around 0.6% of the population; American losses were smaller, around 0.3%. But Soviet losses, from war, starvation and repression, represented about 14% of the pre-war population. These losses were the brutal product of German invasion in 1941 and the Soviet determination to resist that aggression and expel the Germans from their territory. The scarcely credible level of sacrifice exposes just how vast and savage the war on the eastern front was. It was here that the great majority of German casualties occurred. It was here that the war was won or lost, for if the Red Army had not succeeded against all the odds in halting the Germans in 1941 and then inflicting the first major defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, it is difficult to see how the western democracies, Britain and the US, could have expelled Germany from its new empire. snip The Soviet Union is not the only state to be written out of the victory story in the west. The Chinese people also lost an estimated 20 million as a result of Japanese aggression. Just as the Soviet armed forces held down the Germans, so the less effective but numerous Chinese armed forces kept the Japanese bogged down in Asia. This is a record that is still almost unknown in the west, yet if Japan had achieved quick victory in China, large resources would have been released for an assault on the rear of the Soviet Union, or a larger military presence in the Pacific. In this case, too, western allied casualties would have been much greater without the stubborn resistance of their Asian ally. In the end, the western freedom to plan and execute a global strategy depended on the ability of the Soviet and Chinese forces to hold the main enemies at bay while western air forces bombed the Axis motherlands flat. When victory is celebrated tomorrow, it is important that we pause to remember the almost 50 million Soviets and Chinese who perished to contain the imperial aggression of Germany and Japan. |
| Posted by:Mrs. Davis |