JUNE 6, 2024 – For years the Soviet view of the D-Day invasion was inversely proportionate to the American obsession with commemoration of that historic day. Stalin had long been pressing Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe to draw Germans away from the Eastern Front, where the Nazis had been pounding away mercilessly for nearly three years straight. The United States, especially, had been providing material aid to Stalin via the dangerous sea route around the top of Scandinavia to Murmansk and the long haul over the Trans Iranian Railway, but during the Cold War that followed WW II, Soviet propaganda went so far as to accuse the UK and the US of intentionally delaying the invasion so that the Nazis would bleed Russia (and its sister Soviet republics) dry. The historical record contains little evidence that such was the design of Churchill or Roosevelt, and even if the anti-Bolsheviks in the West hoped that Hitler would knock “Uncle Joe” down a few notches—or out of the picture altogether—the hard, cold fact was that until mid-1944, the Western Allies were simply not in a military position to open a second front—and sustain it—successfully.
What’s interesting about all of this is that the Soviet claim vs. the realities perceived by Western military strategists presented a stark contrast between the mindset of an authoritarian regime and the values of a democratic society. Stalin and his enablers thought nothing of hurling tens of thousands of soldiers into impossible battles. Churchill and Roosevelt knew that in their democracies, there were limits to human cannon fodder. This contrast is just as sharp today in the context of Putin’s assault on Ukraine and its punishing effect on eminently dispensable Russian troops.
When I crisscrossed Russia for three weeks in 1981, I was constantly reminded by Russians eager to instruct me on WW II, that their nation had suffered over 20 million deaths during “The Great Patriotic War”—the Soviet propagandistic label for WW II. To underscore the staggering figure, my Russian friends would invariably ask (rhetorically), “Do you know how many Americans died in the war?” At the time I had no clue, but I knew that our losses were a tiny percentage of the Soviet number. In fact, approximately 407,000 U.S. service people died, along with about 12,000 civilians (mostly merchant mariners aboard ships sunk by German U-boats; in the continental U.S., only six civilian deaths were attributable directly to military action (a Japanese fire balloon)).
For the record, based on my reading before my 1981 trip to Russia, I’d assumed the Soviet deaths in WW II totaled 16 million. When I kept hearing the figure 20 million, I cut my self-appointed tutors some slack: despite their heavy exposure to propaganda, they as a people, as a country, had suffered staggering losses compared to the United States, and besides, once your war deaths reach 16 million, so what if they’re exaggerated by 25%? After all, as Stalin himself is infamously quoted, “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.” And he was talking about his own people, not the enemy of his people. I wondered how many Russians thought about the terrible irony in their great sacrificial victory: preservation of the Stalinist regime in exchange for destruction of the Hitlerian one.
Tsar Putin hasn’t quoted Stalin’s line but with little hesitation he’s emulated Stalin’s actions. See Russian troops as cannon fodder sent to Ukraine. Or go back to Russia’s participation in the Great War (WW I) to witness the use of Russian soldier-peasants as cannon fodder to such a degree the policy led to the crash-and-burn ending to the 300-year reign of the Romanovs.
So back to D-Day and why for 80 years it’s been a big deal for Americans (and the French and British) and not so big for Russians. Despite our nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; our fire-bombing of Tokyo; our torching of Hamburg and Dresden, American democracy assigns a premium to human life—at least among our own kind. Every sailor who died at Pearl Harbor; every marine who sacrificed his life on Iwo Jima; and every soldier who fell on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was singled out as a hero, grieved and mourned by compatriots to this day.
If, as critics in hindsight suggest, American control of Iwo Jima turned out not to have been tactically or strategically necessary (and therefore, unnecessary for the Japanese to defend), D-Day was a different deal. It proved to be the beginning of the end for Hitler and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Somehow the Allies had to establish a beachhead from which to liberate France and push the Wehrmacht back behind its bulwark, the Siegried Line. Apart from preceding the invasion with heavy naval bombardment, no one had a better plan than to storm the beaches of Normandy. The soldiers plunging out of their landing craft—and the senior leaders who ordered them to do so—knew there would be hell to pay, and indeed there was.
Their bravery won the day and ultimately the war. Yes, in pushing Germany all the way home, Russia had soaked the earth with the blood of its people—and others too—but the Allied forces at Normandy on that day are deserving of the credit they’ve received ever since.
As those heroes fade from the stage of life and history, we should remember their contribution and example. They were the ultimate citizens, not only on that day and for that day and for the ultimate defeat of Germany but for our times too. In remembering their courage and sacrifice, we should look at our current conduct as American citizens. Is that citizenship marked by courage and sacrifice—not to mention truth and justice—or are we mired in politics as a circus act inside the tent of crass hyperbole divorced from meaningful efforts to improve the life and prospects of our country? How often do we evaluate policy—not theatrics—by the gauge of what is for the common good instead of by the measure of what is good for “me,” my cult and my clan?
Those brave soldiers who fought the good fight—and who no doubt were scared out of their boots as the front gate of the Higgins boat dropped into the waters—put everything on the line for a cause that transcended their own lives and times. Now more than ever, we get to choose whether to honor them by good citizenship or devalue their sacrifice by assaulting the foundations of our democracy.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
