Really? Patton said the best weapon was the M1Garand. Chesty Puller preferred the Springfield 03. To say that the Soviet union beat the Germans is to poke a finger in the eye of the Americans that fought and died in Europe. You discredit the 101st Airborne that held out in Bastone. Give me a Springfield.
No big deal, but six us army divisions held an entire German army off for three days while the 101st was moving into Bastogne.
At least one, the 28th division, Pennsylvania NG, was written off as destroyed in action.
The 101st wasn’t alone.
While one should not discount the efforts of U.S. and allied troops in the ETO, there is absolutely no comparison as to who actually paid the cost to beat the Nazis. It’s not even vaguely comparable.
On the Western Front after the invasion of France, the allies had 783,860 casualties, including 164,590 killed. They inflicted 836,606 casualties on the Axis including 263,000(est) killed.
On the Eastern Front:
Russia lost (as in dead) 10,651,000. I don’t see a general casualty figure, but things were very brutal over there and the Soviets were not the best at taking care of their soldiers.
The Axis lost 5,178,000 dead.
I can’t actually find general casualty counts for either side in the East.
So just to give rough numbers, the Russians lost 80 times as many people (dead) and killed off 20 times as many Germans.
Do still want to make some kind of case that the U.S. won the war? Now, we certainly beat Japan almost single handedly, but against the Nazis, the Russians carried the load.
It should, however, be understood that the Russians managed this based on U.S. logistics. The majority of their transport and explosives were produced in the U.S. and shipped over. They would not have been able to make nearly as many tanks as they did without us filling in the gaps in what they needed.
Nonetheless, they paid the butcher’s bill like nobody else.
Don't be ridiculous.
The damage the Red Army did to the Wehrmacht, to Germany and to the Germans exceeds the damage done by the US and the UK by an enormous amount.
According to battle death statistics, US-UK forces killed 363,000 German soldiers, sailors, and airmen. According to German statistics, the total military war dead were 4.4 million (the Russians claim 5.6 million). Using the lower figure, the Red Army killed 91% of the German soldiers killed in battle, using the Russian figures, it's 94%.
The only thing the US-UK forces did was to stop the Red Army at the Elbe instead of the Atlantic Ocean - a good thing, to be sure, and it certainly saved the lives of lots of Germans.
But it did not affect the outcome of the war in any meaningful way.
America’s worst day in WWII Europe was a food processor compared to the industrial meat grinder the Soviets endured for a couple of years.