A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944

Начало книги

For at least a generation after the conflict ended, the Western Allies sustained a historical image of the struggle against the Nazis in World War II that began with blitzkrieg and the Battle of Britain in 1940, then traced the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, followed by D-day in 1944 and the drive of Eisenhower’s armies toward triumph on the Elbe. But little was known and less understood about the vast, misty struggle in the East between 1941 and 1945.

Today we have achieved a better perspective. We can see that the contest between the rival tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin was the decisive clash of the war, to which all else was subordinate. The United States made a critical contribution to the Soviet war effort, supplying aluminum, trucks, canned meat, radios, boots, and much else, without which the Red Army’s advance to Berlin would have been difficult, if not impossible. It was the Soviets, however, who paid the overwhelming blood price necessary to defeat the Nazis, suffering the loss of some 27 million citizens against 1 million dead in the United States, Britain, and France combined. American and British ground forces killed some 200,000 Germans in North Africa, Italy, and Northwest Europe. The Soviets killed approaching 4 million.

Читать дальше →