Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany in 1941 at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin walls in Moscow, June 22, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Alexei Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Kremlin
Who Won The War? Russians Take A Different View On D-Day -- Reuters
(Reuters) - Sitting in the shade on a bench in the center of Moscow, 77-year-old Galina Makarenko pauses for several seconds before delivering her blunt opinion on the Allied D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
"It helped us a little. But only a little," says the sprightly physicist, who was evacuated from Moscow to Kazakhstan to escape the conflict that Westerners call World War Two and Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War.
President Vladimir Putin joins the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Germany to mark the 70th anniversary on Friday of the Normandy landings that opened the western front against Hitler's forces, catching them in a giant pincer movement as Stalin's Red Army pushed them back in the east.
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My Comment: I have a different take from this Reuters article. Most people in Russia do know that the Allied effort to defeat Germany (and Japan) was just that .... an Allied effort. And while the great battles and sky-high casualty rates were on the Eastern front .... the invasion of Normandy was essential to expedite the end of the war. If the D-Day invasion never occurred, the Russians would still have defeated Germany .... but the human and economic cost would have been even more enormous to both Germany and Russia .... and the recovery for both countries would have taken decades instead of a few years.
5 comments:
I cringe though when I hear commentators say it was the most important battle essential to victory that changed the world. We had been in Italy for many years, a part of Europe last time I checked.
The heavy German losses from their ill times Russian invasion meant a diversion from the other front, ie, France, Gt Britain, and thus the Allied invasion moved on to Berlin, and there, to encounter and share, a victory with their Russian ally.
Something similar I stated in another Post today; is that one of the most important Battles of the European Front was the War in the Atlantic. The Germans were gutting efforts by US to supply arms and materials to Britain and Russia (Lend Lease program) until the 'Allies' won the war in the Atlantic. This loss had catastrophic circumstances for the Germans and allowed both the Russians and Allies to gain momentum towards both fronts.
Spam won the war!
Lend Lease was far more important than D-Day or anything that happened in North Africa during the war. That was genuinely critical.
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