The Soviet Union Won World War II

Future of Freedom Foundation ^ | February 14, 2003 | Jacob G. Hornberger

[RJCogburn]

While Nazi Germany lost World War II, does that necessarily mean that we won it? Only if we ignore the specific objective of Great Britain and France when they initially declared war on Germany in 1939 and only if the pronoun “we” encompasses the Soviet Union, who was the true victor in the European arena of World War II.

Why did Great Britain and France declare war on Germany in the first place? The Nazi armies had invaded Poland, and thus Great Britain and France declared war to free the Polish people from Germany’s totalitarian dictatorship.

Was that objective accomplished? While it is true that Nazi control over Poland was ended by the war, the Poles nevertheless had to suffer for the next several decades under Soviet totalitarian control. It’s difficult to see how that was a victory, especially from the perspective of the Polish people, who had to suffer under Soviet communist rule for the next several decades. The same would hold true for the Czechs.

Despite the partnership entered into between the West and the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany, we must not lose sight of an important point: While it is difficult to measure evil, Stalin’s evil most certainly equals or even outranks that of Hitler, at least if we measure it in terms of how many people each of them killed. And remember: Stalin and the Soviet Union invaded Poland shortly after Hitler and the Nazis did (which raises the interesting question of why Great Britain and France declared war on Germany and not on the Soviet Union).

Of course, there’s no question that the West facilitated the Soviet victory. For example, there was President Roosevelt’s decision to furnish the Soviet communists with war materiel (“lend-lease”), which enabled the Soviet armies to more easily defeat the German armies on the Eastern front, and FDR’s “unconditional surrender” demand on Germany, which precluded the possibility of a negotiated surrender that did not involve the Soviet Union.

If the Allies could take credit for their partner’s “liberation” of Eastern Europe, wouldn’t that mean that they also would have to take responsibility for how that “liberation” was achieved?

Consider, for example, the mass rapes of German women when Soviet troops entered Germany in 1945, which are described in The Battle for Berlin by Antony Beevor. He points out there were virtually no German women, regardless of age, exempted from the mass Soviet rapes.

Is that what “unconditional surrender” meant? Were those rapes part of “our” victory? Is that why the Soviet rapists and their commanding officers were not put into the dock alongside the Nazis at Nuremberg?

For that matter, is that why Great Britain, France, and the United States failed to put Soviet officials on trial at Nuremberg for the murder of some 10,000 to 15,000 captured Polish officers, including those at the Katyn Forest? Remember: the objective at the start of the war was to liberate the Polish people, not kill them.

And what about Western participation in the murder of hundreds of thousands of anti-communist Russians after the end of the war? Despite the communist victory in the Russian Revolution in 1917, many Russians nevertheless still hated communism and communist rule by the time World War II broke out. That’s why some of them either refused to fight for Stalin’s communist dictatorship or chose to fight against it, the most notable example being Andrey Vlasov, the famous Russian general who decided to fight against Stalin and the communists after he was captured by the Germans.

In the eyes of Stalin and, indeed, in the eyes of Truman and Churchill, a Russian fighting against our partner Joseph Stalin and his communist comrades was a real no-no. So when Stalin demanded that Truman and Churchill deliver the anti-communist Russians to him after Germany’s surrender so that he could either murder them or send them to the Gulag, Truman and Churchill willingly complied. Is that what a partnership with evil to defeat evil is all about?

But what about the European Jews? Wasn’t their liberation a World War II victory for the West? It’s hard to see how, given that six million Jews had already been killed by the time Germany surrendered, in part because of Western refusal to permit them to emigrate to the West both before and during the war.

Could Great Britain, France, and the United States, rather than the Soviet Union, have won World War II? Absolutely. If they had left the Soviet communists to fight on their own and had left the door open to a negotiated surrender by Germany, Allied troops could have ended up liberating all of Germany and much of Eastern Europe from both the Nazis and the Soviets, and long before six million Jews were massacred.

[dfwgator]

The Soviet Union STARTED World War II with Germany when they jointly invaded Poland.

[Restorer]

I don't remember the exact figures, but the vast majority of German troops were killed fighting the Soviets. Without an Eastern Front to keep the Germans busy, D-Day would probably have been impossible.

We would still have won the war, but not without using nukes on Germany.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Was it Churchill who said "World War II was won by British courage, American money, and Russian blood"?.......

[onedoug]

We're still fighting WWII, at least in the sense that past is prologue. Yet the relative democratizations and free market economies of Germany - and particularly Japan, which had been a thousand prior year feudal state - are pretty good indicators that the suffering and loss of all those in, of and for it, had yet ongoing value.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I thought Japan won WW2?

[marron]

World War 2 ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We won.

[Mulder]

Communism was the biggest winner of WWII.

[Cicero]

There is considerable evidence that FDR was pro-Communist. Certainly many of his closest advisers were Communist. We know he betrayed Central Europe at Yalta, but there's some evidence that that was his intention from the very beginning, because he saw socialism as the "wave of the future."

Evelyn Waugh's great trilogy, "Sword of Honour," pretty much makes this point. Waugh recognized where things were going before the war was over.

"Sword of Honour" has never had the good press enjoyed by "Brideshead Revisited," but it may well be Waugh's greatest work. The reason it has been ignored is, presumably, because it makes exactly the point made in this article, and the leftists in the academy don't like that.

[Billthedrill]

Could Great Britain, France, and the United States, rather than the Soviet Union, have won World War II? Absolutely. If they had left the Soviet communists to fight on their own and had left the door open to a negotiated surrender by Germany, Allied troops could have ended up liberating all of Germany and much of Eastern Europe from both the Nazis and the Soviets, and long before six million Jews were massacred.

Um...no. The Soviets were attacked in June, 1941, after the beginning of hostilities in Western Europe - heck, after the French had already surrendered. I cannot imagine a sequence of events under which we could have stayed out of the European war and been in a position to accept German surrender. Assuming "we" (by which I assume he means strictly the United States) had not aided Britain, and they'd held out, and the Germans had then attacked the Soviets, AND the Soviets had then gone on to win, who on earth would the Germans have surrendered to?

Moreover, most of the murdering of the Jews did not commence until 1944, at which time all of this was pretty much settled into the sequence of events we know today as history. Why the Soviets would have won by then in the absence of aid, or why that murder wouldn't have happened anyway, is a bit of a mystery.

A very strange and anachronistic thesis, IMHO.

[bmwcyle]

But did we give up when the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor?

[Dan(9698)]

>>>...We would still have won the war, but not without using nukes on Germany.

Whatever....

May have been a few months delay though.

Wouldn't have killed all those on D Day.

Probably break even on Germans though.

[RossA]

Not at all impossible. Much, much harder, true - but inevitable, given our production capacity, technology, physicists and manpower, that the US and Britain would have beaten Germany, Italy and Japan.

Question 1: Would it have cost us millions more men? Or an A-bomb on Berlin?

Question 2: Would Russia have beaten the Germans without the vast American aid it received.

[uncbob]

Why did Great Britain and France declare war on Germany in the first place?

Especially since Russia invaded Poland also

[Dan(9698)]

>>>...Why did Great Britain and France declare war on Germany in the first place?

It is unclear why Great Britain did it. France though, wanted practice with their 6 reverse gears.

[glorgau]

Question 1: Would it have cost us millions more men? Or an A-bomb on Berlin?

Japan would have fallen in the same time frame. The German air force was beaten by the British and Americans by 1944. Check out the numbers for planes deployed against the Soviets - it was miniscule. In any case, it would have been nukes over Berlin in 1945 - if they got past the jets. Ok, nukes over Hamburg.

Question 2: Would Russia have beaten the Germans without the vast American aid it received.

The Soviets had beaten the Wehrmacht to a draw at by spring 1943. By that time, the American and British aid was not really in the pipeline yet. The northern convoys were effectively shut down, and the route through Iran had not yet been completed. It wasn't really until after Kursk in late 1943 and early 1944 that they really got rolling against the Germans. It was the American trucks and other equipment that gave the edge. So, my guess is that the Germans would have still been slugging it out with the Soviets somewhere in the Ukraine by the time the cross channel invasion came in either 1944 or 1945. The Germans couldn't win, but losing would have taken much longer.

[Porterville]

How many Soviets died after WWII b/c of Stalin?? No we won, Russia and it's sattelites lost.

[You Dirty Rats]

Not assisting the Soviet Union against Hitler would have been idiotic. Many of us would not be here today if such an asinine decision had been made, because more of our fathers would have been killed liberating Europe against a much stronger German Army.

The Yalta decisions are certainly open to criticism, but it must be noted that Roosevelt was in ill health and we needed the assistance of the Soviets to defeat the Japanese Kwantung Army.

Since we did not test the A-Bomb until late July, 1945, we could not rely on it to make decision prior to that point.

This article proves hindsight is 20-20. It is totally worthless as a realistic criticism of wartime leadership.

[Centurion2000]

Seems that this twit forgot about half the globe ..... PACIFIC theatre ring any bells ?