On June 6, President Trump commemorated the 75th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, popularly known as D-Day, when approximately 160,000 U.S., British, Canadian and Free French soldiers landed in and around the beaches of Normandy, France. Speaking at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, where the remains of 9,388 American fighting men, most of whom perished on D-Day, are interned, Trump promoted the mythology of American omniscience that was born on the beaches of Normandy. “These men ran through the fires of hell, moved by a force no weapon could destroy,” Trump declared. “The fierce patriotism of a free, proud and sovereign people. They battled not for control and domination, but for liberty, democracy and self-rule. Those who fought here won a future for our nation. They won the survival of our civilization.”

For Americans, D-Day stands out among all others when it comes to celebrating the Second World War. Immortalized in books, a movie starring John Wayne, and in the HBO series titled “Band of Brothers,” the landings at Normandy represent to most Americans the turning point in the war against Hitler’s Germany, the moment when the American Army (together with the British, Canadian and Free French) established a foothold in occupied France that eventually led to the defeat of Germany’s army.

What Trump overlooked in his presentation was the reality that the liberation of Europe began long before the D-Day landings. And the burden had almost exclusively been born by the Soviets.

In his defense, Trump is not alone in promoting an America-centric version of history; his speech was simply the latest in a series of historically flawed remarks delivered by a succession of American presidents ever since they began giving speeches at Normandy in commemoration of D-Day. President George W. Bush’s address on the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings was typical of the genre, maximizing American glory while ignoring that of the Soviets. “Americans wanted to fight and win and go home,” Bush said. “And our GIs had a saying: ‘The only way home is through Berlin.’ That road to VE-Day was hard and long and traveled by weary and valiant men. And history will always record where that road began. It began here, with the first footprints on the beaches of Normandy.”

That didn’t mean there wasn’t some serious fighting left to do. “The Nazis still had about 50 divisions,” Bush noted, “and more than 800,000 soldiers in France alone. D-Day plus one, and D-Day plus two and many months of fierce fighting lay ahead, from Arnhem to Hurtgen Forest to the Bulge.”

The road to Berlin described by Bush was one where the Soviets simply did not factor into the equation. “The nations that liberated a conquered Europe would stand together for the freedom of all of Europe,” Bush said. “The nations that battled across the continent would become trusted partners in the cause of peace. And our great alliance of freedom is strong, and it is still needed today.” The “trusted partners” Bush referred to was NATO, and the “cause of peace” contained first the Soviet Union, and later Russia.

It was as if the road to Berlin had ended with Americans capturing the Nazi capital, compelling Adolf Hitler to commit suicide and thereby ending the 1,000-year Reich. But that honor fell to the Soviets, who, in a two-week campaign, lost more than 81,000 killed and a quarter of a million men wounded seizing Berlin from fanatical Nazi defenders.

President Obama continued the tradition of minimizing the Soviet role in the Second World War. “Here,” Obama said, speaking on the beaches of Normandy in 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, “we don’t just commemorate victory, as proud of that victory as we are. We don’t just honor sacrifice, as grateful as the world is. We come to remember why America and our allies gave so much for the survival of liberty at its moment of maximum peril. We come to tell the story of the men and women who did it so that it remains seared into the memory of a future world.”

According to Obama’s “story,” “it was here, on these shores, that the tide was turned in that common struggle for freedom. … Omaha, Normandy—this was democracy’s beachhead. And our victory in that war decided not just a century, but shaped the security and well-being of all posterity. We worked to turn old adversaries into new allies. We built new prosperity. We stood once more with the people of this continent through a long twilight struggle until finally a wall tumbled down, and an Iron Curtain, too.”

Obama’s was a stilted, inaccurate version of history. Before the Soviet Union became “an old adversary,” it was a new ally—a fact ignored by the American president. And the implication that the American journey that began on the beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1941, didn’t come to an end until the Soviet Union collapsed is, simply put, ignorant.

On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany. Some 3.8 million Axis soldiers, backed by more than 6,000 armored vehicles and 4,000 aircraft, launched a surprise attack along a continuous front that ran from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Known as Operation Barbarossa, the German offensive decimated the defending Soviet forces, breaking through the front lines and driving deep into Soviet territory, initiating a conflict that would last nearly four years. During that time, more than 26 million Soviet citizens would die, including 8.6 million soldiers of the Red Army (these are conservative numbers—some estimates, drawing upon classified information, hint that the actual number of total deaths might exceed 40 million, including more than 19 million military deaths).

The traumatic impact of what became known as the Great Patriotic War cannot be overstated. The complete devastation of entire regions at the hands of the invading Germans is something Americans never have experienced, and as such can never comprehend. Every year following the end of the Great Patriotic War, on June 22, the people of the Soviet Union—and later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the citizens of Russia and the other former Soviet republics—observed the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, during which time all entertainment programming is banned from television and radio.

As the number of survivors of the Great Patriotic War diminish, the Russian government, in an effort to keep the memory of those who fought and died alive and relevant to modern times, established the honorary title of City of Military Glory to honor the “courage, steadfast spirit and mass heroism” shown by the defenders of cities so designated “in the struggle for the freedom and independence of their Fatherland.” In 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, following a wreath-laying ceremony at the Kremlin, gave a speech noting his designation of five Russian cities as Cities of Military Glory.

“June 22 is a special date for Russia and for our people,” Putin said. “On this day, 74 years ago, the Nazis attacked our country in the most devious fashion and the Great Patriotic War began. The Soviet people went through the greatest trials, defended their native soil at the cost of huge sacrifices and privations, achieved an unconditional victory and vanquished a powerful enemy, thanks to their unity and unprecedented love for their homeland.” Putin continued:

“Our sacred duty is to remain true to these great values of patriotism, preserve the memory of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ feat, and honor the veterans. The conferral of the title of City of Military Glory has become not just a tradition but also a symbol of our devotion to the generation of victors. Today, this title is being conferred on the towns of Grozny, Feodosia, Petrozavodsk, Staraya Russa and Gatchina. The defenders of these cities made a tremendous contribution to bringing closer the victory over Nazism.

I think that for everyone in these towns this is a welcome event and also a very significant one, because this lofty title does not only help to preserve the historical memory, but, just as importantly, is also an expression of the genetic connection we feel with those whom we honor as heroes.

What kind of echoes does this produce in the hearts and souls of ordinary people today? If here, on this soil, my forebears were heroes, this means that I too carry a piece of all that is my treasure and pride. This is what the link between generations is all about”.

Putin’s speech was patriotic. It celebrated past military glory. It honored the dead. But there was no talk about the need to link the sacrifices of the past to the need to defend current Russian policy priorities. For Putin and the Russian people, the memories of the sacrifices incurred during the Great Patriotic War are too deeply seared into their collective psyche—their very genes, to paraphrase Putin—to allow them to be cheapened by the present.

Whether you love Putin or hate him, one thing is for certain: His speech was the epitome of how one honors their dead.

Given the sad state of affairs between the United States and Russia today, it is hard to imagine that during the Second World War the two nations were part of a “Grand Alliance” that included Great Britain (France and China were brought in at the conclusion of the war). But the reality is that the United States and the Soviet Union, while confronting the same enemy in the form of Nazi Germany, fought two different wars. In its fight against Nazi Germany and Italy, the United States lost 183,588 killed in action or missing, 560,240 wounded and 108,621 prisoners of war. In the first six months of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union lost 802,191 killed, 1,336,147 wounded and 2,835,482 prisoners of war.

No American took time out on June 22 to commemorate the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and with it the initiation of a conflict that made the D-Day landings possible through the sacrifice of tens of millions of dead Soviet soldiers and civilians. Nor did any American take time out on the day after, June 23, and give thanks to the people of Russia and the former Soviet Republics for securing our victory at Normandy.

And why should they? For decades, Americans have been spoon-fed a version of history that placed American sacrifice, as considerable as it was, above all else. But let there be no doubt that if it weren’t for what transpired on June 23, 1944, the story of the great American victory that “saved civilization” would be much different in the telling, written in the blood of tens of thousands of soldiers whose lives would have been lost if not for the courage and sacrifice of their forgotten, unacknowledged Soviet allies.

While the landing at Normandy had gone well, the advance inland was a different matter. By June 23, 1941—a mere 17 days after the D-Day landings—the U.S. and U.K. forces were stuck in ferocious fighting with German troops dug in behind thick hedgerows that made movement of men and armored vehicles virtually impossible. The port of Cherbourg was still in German hands, which meant that desperately needed supplies were not getting to the troops doing the fighting and dying. Any serious reinforcement of the German position in France would have made the allied beachhead tenuous.

But there wouldn’t be any German troops moving into France, for the simple reason that they were all tied down fighting a life-or-death struggle on the Eastern front, trying to cope with a massive Soviet offensive known as Operation Bagration. The details of the fighting are irrelevant, but it made anything taking place in France pale by comparison. By the time Operation Bagration ground to a halt, in mid-August 1944, some 400,000 German soldiers from Army Group Center—the most highly trained, experienced men in the German army—were either dead, wounded or taken prisoner, and some 1,350 tanks destroyed. The Soviet offensive tore a gigantic hole in the German lines that had to be filled with troops and material that otherwise would have been available to contain the Normandy landings. The cost of this victory, however, was staggering—180,000 Soviet dead and 590,00 wounded, matching in a span of two months the total casualties suffered by the U.S. in the entire European theater of operations, including North Africa, from 1942 to 1945.

Shortly after Operation Bagration ground to a halt outside the gates of Warsaw, Operation Overlord officially came to an end. Denied reinforcements, the Germans were unable to contain the allied buildup at Normandy, and when the breakout from the beachhead began in earnest, in late July, the German forces were routed. Overall, the Germans lost some 240,000 men killed or wounded during Operation Overlord, while the combined allied casualties were around 210,000 men killed and wounded. But it could have been worse—much worse.

Operation Bagration saved D-Day, but you won’t hear any American presidents acknowledging that fact. Nor will any Americans pause and give thanks for the sacrifice of so many Soviet lives in the cause of defeating Nazi Germany. Let there be no doubt that the United States played an instrumental role in the defeat of Hitler—we were the arsenal of democracy, and our lend-lease support to the Soviet Union was critical in the success of the Soviet army.

But the simple fact is that we never faced the German A-team—those men had perished long ago on the Eastern front, fighting the Soviets. The German army we faced was an amalgam of old men, young boys, unmotivated foreigners (including thousands of captured Russian and Poles), and worn-out, wounded survivors of the fighting in the east. We beat the Germans, but because of the pressure brought to bear on Germany by the Soviet Union, the outcome in Western Europe was never in doubt.

Why does this matter? Because facts matter. History matters. The hubris and arrogance derived from our one-sided, exaggerated and highly inaccurate version of the Second World War, where American forces liberated Europe with the assistance of their North Atlantic allies, carries over to this day. It feeds a narrative that gives credence to the fictitious omnipotence of NATO and the total disregard for any Russian perspective regarding the future of a continent the Soviets liberated through the blood and sacrifice of tens of millions of their citizens. While we Americans continue to celebrate a version of events that is highly fictionalized, the Russians commemorate a reality anchored in fact. Given the current geopolitical trajectory in Europe, where the framework of security and prosperity the United States and its North Atlantic allies built in the aftermath of their “grand victory” against Nazi Germany teeters on the brink of collapse, there will come a time when fiction-based arrogance will clash with fact-based realism. If history tells us anything, those who more accurately remember the lessons of the past will fare far better than those who, by their ignorance, are condemned to repeat their mistakes.

truthdig.com

I sympathise with Russians (and the other former USSR nations) when they hear the puffing of D-Day and hyperbole calling it the decisive moment and so forth. It is true that the Soviet part of the war has been downplayed in Western popular thought. (But not always: vide this excellent and balanced piece, The month of two D-Days.) One reason is, of course, that each country plays up its own part (Canada being a conspicuous exception). Soviet accounts of the war were not much available in Western languages in the 1950s and 1960s. So we grew up reading about our guys and what they did and a host of German accounts which tended to promulgate what Dr Jonathon House has called the Three Alibis: Hitler didn’t listen to his generals, who knew Russia was so cold? the Soviets outnumbered us. My personal journey to understanding the 80-20 split began with Panzer Battles in which the author describes victory after victory, but always one river closer to Germany: clearly he’s leaving out something important. An account of a panzer-grenadier division which mentioned that only about one-tenth the trains that moved it in were needed to move it out a year later made me realise that German infantry casualties were ferocious. Chuikov’s book taught me that Stalingrad was just not a slog but that there was serious operational thinking behind it. Bit by bit I came to understand the size and complexity of Soviet operations: surely the largest and most complicated ever carried out. David Glantz taught me much. But most Westerners – who aren’t that interested – remain where I was at the age of 16 or so, Battle of Britain, Sink the Bismarck, Dambusters, D-Day, Battle of the Atlantic and the American equivalents. (Canadians have an almost boastful ignorance of what Canada did.)

Understandable, really. But irritating for Russians who feel their part is ignored. But their reaction can go too far in the other direction: D-Day was not some minor river crossing deferred until it was clear that the Germans were beaten. It was a very difficult and complicated operation, requiring an enormous amount of preparation and could not have been done sooner. The point of this essay is to explain all this.

I start by pointing out that the Western Allies did open several “Second Fronts” before June 1944.

• North Africa. Fighting began here in 1940 and continued until the surrender of 270,000 Axis troops in 1943.
• Italy. American, British and Canadian soldiers invaded Sicily in 1943, crossed onto the mainland and, joined by other nations, fought their way up Italy until the eventual German surrender in 1945.
• Bombing. The Western Allies carried out an extensive bombing campaign over Germany. Very controversial in its effects but it certainly reduced German war production and tied up large resources in air defence.
• Resistance in Occupied Europe, greatly assisted, armed and to a large extent directed by the Western Allies.

So, it is not true that the Western Allies did nothing before June 1944. (Again, I emphasise that all this is part of the 20%).

But, obviously, the invasion of France would be the main event. This essay discusses the planning process which began in earnest in March 1943. Here are some of the problems the planners had to take into account.

• The English Channel. It is not a big river, it’s the Ocean. That means that it is accessible to submarines, aircraft carriers, battleships and other major combat ships. It has tides and serious storms. Rivers, even big ones, do not.
• Atlantic Wall. The Germans knew that sooner or later the Western Allies would have to invade and, beginning in 1942, enormous efforts were made to create bunkers, obstacles, gun positions, beach obstacles and everything else human ingenuity could come up with. Defences were built even in Norway and I have seen bunkers in the very tip of Denmark. Previous Western Allied seaborne invasions – North Africa, Sicily and Italy – had been against almost undefended beaches. Attacking the Atlantic Wall was a different proposition.
• The Funnies. When the infantry got ashore they would have to assault powerful defences with only the weapons they could carry. To give them more punch a family of specialised armoured vehicles was created. In particular, if tanks could landed first, the infantry would be greatly helped. This idea produced the DD tank: floating Sherman While in no beach they were the first things ashore, on four beaches they were a help: at Omaha Beach they were launched too far out and most foundered. Other specialised armoured vehicles were generally effective on the day; the AVREs and Sherman Crabs especially.
• Harbour. The chosen site had no harbours. But the Allies had to put as many soldiers ashore on the first day as they could and follow them up with thousands more every day together with vehicles, ammunition, fuel and food in a continuous stream. Impossible over open beaches with small landing craft shuttling back and forth from the bigger ships offshore. A secure harbour was the sine qua non for an invasion. The disastrous Dieppe Raid of 1942 had shown that capturing an intact port was impossible. So here’s the dilemma: you can’t do it without a harbour but you can’t get a harbour. The solution was to bring the harbour with you: the “Mulberry”. This article describes them; note that it was only the autumn of 1943 that a prototype was successfully tested. The Mulberry harbour that survived the great storm of 19 June, “Port Winston”, landed 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies over the ten months it was used. This fact, alone, refutes the charge that the Western Allies could have invaded earlier if they had wanted to. Not without Mulberry; Mulberry wasn’t available until the winter of 1943; therefore no invasion before spring 1944. QED.
• Resistance. French resistance activities had to be coordinated to the operation. This required much careful planning, supply and dangerous movement of people back and forth. Their activities played a significant part in isolating the landing areas.
• Landing craft. D-Day involved nearly 4000 different kinds of landing craft. They were being built at the last moment: it was their shortage, once a five-division/five-beach assault had been agreed on, that forced the delay from the initial planning date of 1 May. The landing craft problem is another proof that the invasion could not have happened earlier.
• Timing. The landing had to be early enough to allow activity in the fighting season. Therefore April, May or early June were the likely days. The attack could not be made as the tide was going out. The weather had to be acceptable. A full moon was desirable in order to help the air-dropped troops get to their blocking positions and take key bridges. The Germans could have figured this out which is why the deception plan was so important.
• Deception. While the Atlantic Wall extended into Norway, no one seriously expected an invasion of Germany to start there. France, Belgium and the Netherlands was always the most likely. Again, the Germans knew that and that is where they put their strongest defences. Several locations were considered and the planners settled on Normandy because of its unconstrained space for the breakout. The Germans had to be convinced that the attack would come somewhere else and the planners hit on Calais, the closest place. A fake army under General Patton, whom the Germans respected as a hard-charger, was created. Lots of radio traffic, dummy guns and tanks to support the idea that Calais was the target and that any other attack was a diversion. For every bombing attack on a Normandy target, there were two on a Calais target. This deception tied down a number of German troops waiting for the “real” invasion. And, just to keep them guessing, other deceptions suggested Norway as a target and on the day, dummy paratroop assaults in other areas.
• No failure possible. Failure could not happen: the blow to Allied morale and the lift to German morale of a Dieppe-style repulse would have been incalculable. If D-Day had failed, it would be at least another year before another attempt could be made and, in the meantime, the preferred invasion site would have been revealed to say nothing of much technology and deception. Stalin, feeling let down by the West again, might as he had done in 1939, make a separate deal with Hitler. There could be no second chance. And it was near-run enough: none of the first day objectives was taken and the advance was much slower than planned: German resistance in Normandy only collapsed in August when the Falaise Gap was closed by the First Canadian Army from the north and the US Third Army from the south.

+ + +

I hope I have convinced the reader, especially the Russian reader, that the D-Day operation was extraordinarily complicated. Not something to be thrown together on a whim. Many many problems had to be solved in order to deal with the multitude of difficulties of landing over 150,000 soldiers, 11,000 vehicles and 3000 guns on strongly defended beaches and then following up the first day with day after day of more landings of men and materiel. It had to succeed the first time.

It is not true that the Second Front was delayed until the Soviets were obviously winning or anything like that: it happened as soon as it could – any earlier attempt would have failed. Maybe it’s been over-hyped but it was a remarkable event and one to be proud of.

As I wrote elsewhere:

In a word, The USSR, with significant help from the rest of us, defeated Hitler and changed the world away from that dark and horrible future. At enormous cost.

The Normandy Invasion and the campaign that followed were essential parts of that significant help.

I wish both sides would calm down and stop claiming either that D-Day won the war or that it was a very minor offstage event.

But that’s probably too much to hope for today.

US President Donald Trump called it the “greatest battle ever” while attending a 75th anniversary ceremony this week to mark the Western allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

Trump was joined by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and leaders from 15 other nations in the British harbor city of Portsmouth from where allied troops embarked for the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Looking back, Operation Overlord was indeed a huge military and logistical undertaking. Some 150,000 troops from the US, Britain and Canada, among others, crossed the narrow English Channel in 7,000 vessels. It is recorded as the biggest military land invasion from sea.

Allied forces were met by Nazi firepower as they stormed the Normandy beaches. But in truth the Nazi defenses were easily overwhelmed. That’s largely because Hitler had already shifted the best fighting units months before to the Eastern Front where the Third Reich was really in a war for its survival against the Soviet Red Army. The D-Day casualty figures would attest that American, British and German deaths from the brief battles in Normandy were of the order of 10,000. Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front the casualties on both the German and Soviet sides were hundred-fold more, in the millions.

When the D-Day invasion was launched in June 1944, the pivotal battle at Stalingrad was long over, 16 months before that. The Wehrmacht was already being rolled back to German homeland. Some 90 per cent of all German military casualties – nearly six million soldier deaths – were to be inflicted on the Eastern Front fighting the Red Army.

The question remains: why did Western allies not launch their offensive on Nazi-occupied France much sooner? Soviet leader Josef Stalin had pleaded over the previous year with his American and British counterparts to do so on several occasions in order to relieve the Soviets. Did the Western allies finally act on D-Day because they could see that the Red Army was on the way to conquering all of Nazi Germany singlehandedly, and thus were motivated to claw some of the spoils? It was the Red Army that vanquished the Third Reich’s last stand in Berlin in May 1945. But the Soviet Union entered into a postwar carve-up of Germany with the US and Britain.

So, when President Trump talks about D-Day being the “greatest battle ever” he is being prone to unfounded exaggeration, relying on Hollywood fabulation than historical record.

There is little dispute that the opening of the Western Front did indeed help accelerate the final defeat of Nazi Germany. But it also indisputable that the greatest battles and decisive victories were achieved by the Soviet forces for the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny.

What we see in today’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day is more dramatics than actual historical reality. Official Western conceit pretends that that event was the key to defeating Nazi Germany.

Part of the reason is to arrogate a moral authority for Western states, which is hardly deserved. By claiming to have emancipated Europe from the scourge of totalitarian fascism, Western states are thereby given a political and moral cover to conduct their own otherwise blatant policies of aggression and militarism.

How many illegal wars and subterfuges have the US and its NATO allies, particularly Britain, carried out since the end of the Second World War? Some historians like the late William Blum, author of ‘Killing Hope’, or Mark Curtis, author of ‘Web of Deceit’, put the number in the hundreds. These genocidal, supreme crimes of aggression, are afforded an audacious moral license largely because these same aggressors continually invoke their supposed victory against Nazi Germany. The truth is that the US and its NATO allies have in many ways continued the same aggression of Nazi Germany in countless wars and covert operations around the world over the past seven decades. The genocides in Korea, Kenya, Malaya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, are just a few among many other US-UK atrocities.

The present looming conflicts involve the US threatening war and destruction against Iran and Venezuela based on transparently spurious pretexts. And yet Trump has the brass neck to eulogize during the D-Day commemorations this week about American forces standing up for “freedom and liberty”.

The US and its NATO allies are using the past and its presumed glories as a shield for their own criminal imperialism.

Dramatizing D-Day as an event is also crucial for the discrediting and demonizing of Russia, as it was previously with regard to the Soviet Union. Wouldn’t it have been appropriate to invite Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the D-Day events this week in order to pay respect to the colossal sacrifices of the Soviet people in defeating Nazi Germany?

The US and its transatlantic allies are necessarily reviving the Cold War in a bid to cut Russia out of their global power ambitions. The Western propaganda war has involved every means to smear and criminalize Russia as a “malign actor” or a “rogue authoritarian regime”.

Contemporary Western vilification, typically on flimsy grounds lacking proof, has tried to isolate and undermine Moscow over allegations of Crimea annexation, invasion of Ukraine, shooting down a Malaysian airliner, supporting a “butcher-dictator” in Syria, the alleged assassination of journalists and lawyers as promulgated by the US Magnitsky Act, poisoning of double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in an English park, doping of Olympic athletes, meddling in Western elections, subverting the European Union and NATO, and so on and on.

It is simply not feasible to push this maelstrom of propaganda narratives without also re-writing the history of the Second World War. The actual heroic role of the Soviet Union in decisively defeating Nazi fascism in Europe must, by necessity, be buried under the dramatized account of how Western allies purportedly “won the war”.

It is not just this year’s commemoration of D-Day that sees historical revisionism. That has been going on since the end of the Second World War when the British leader Winston Churchill and American counterpart Harry Truman coined the “special relationship” between Britain and the US, and then promptly launched the Cold War against their former wartime ally, the Soviet Union.

Stealing the laurels of victory was a necessary act of treachery by the Western powers in order to facilitate their dreadful Cold War against the Soviet Union. The same treachery continues today as Washington and its NATO allies try to wage a new and unjustifiable Cold War against Russia.

Not one American or Briton in 100,000 today realizes or remembers that 90 percent of all Nazi soldiers killed in World War II were killed by the Red Army. Instead, as Tim Kirby noted in these pages, in Latvia today the wearing of SS uniforms is freely permitted by the government while the wearing of Red Army uniforms is heavily fined. Yet 320 million Americans live in heightened danger of needless nuclear war to defend such Nazi-lovers and Holocaust-deniers eager to exploit and pervert the protections of their NATO shield throughout Eastern Europe.

One would never guess from the relentless barrage of sneering and contempt towards Russia today that throughout World War II, Russians and the Soviet Union were vastly more popular in embattled Britain than the United States and the American people were.

Yet opinion polls from the beginning of 1942 through the war showed far more Briton admiring the victories and sacrifices of the Russian people and resenting the prosperity, ease, confidence and – to their eyes – arrogance of the US soldiers flooding into their country.

For the year of war from D-Day to victory, millions of US soldiers fought bravely and well across Continental Europe, but strategically even their greatest victories were no more than a sideshow compared to the titanic struggles in the East.

Ironically, today British historians remain far more balanced than US ones. Such excellent scholarly and popular historians as Richard Overy, Andrew Roberts and Max Hastings freely and repeatedly stress that the colossal struggle on the Eastern Front was the strategic pivot of the entire war and that everything else paled by comparison.

Yet in the United States, even supposedly acclaimed popular historians continue to have myopic vision and childishly reject the most self-evident of facts. Excellent specialist scholars write first class studies, but among popular historians and on television documentaries, the ignorance is embarrassing.

This is shameful and it has the gravest implications for world peace. Communism is long gone and the Russian people under President Vladimir Putin continue to work hard and impressively to rebuild their society. Yet every year, when Victory Day comes round, the leaders, scholars and opinion shapers in the West continue to steadfastly ignore it.

By doing so, they are not only dishonoring the memories of the millions of Red Army soldiers who died in the fight against the Nazis. They are also rejecting an opportunity to ease East/West tensions.

Yet, the Red Army stood virtually alone in the European fight against the Nazis from June 22, 1941 until the Normandy invasion, and the Soviet role in D-Day itself was enormous. The success of D-Day was only made possible by the extraordinary drive of the Red Army from Stalingrad to the Elbe River in the two years following victory at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943.

Only 11 Wehrmacht divisions fought the Allied armies in Normandy, yet at the same time 228 Nazi divisions were fighting the Red Army in the east. Simultaneous with the Battle of Normandy, the Red Army won the far greater victory of Operation Bagration, when Hitler’s last great concentration of armies Army Group Center was annihilated in what is now Belarus.

It was also the Red Army that liberated the greatest and worst of the  Nazi extermination camps, including Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibor. But Western leaders and NATO allies now remain unanimously silent about this crucial fact.

In 2015, the Polish government shamefully excluded President Putin from the 70^th anniversary ceremony in Auschwitz. Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk even once claimed that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded Ukraine (in fact, the Red Army liberated Kiev) and that Ukrainian forces liberated the death camps on their own. This was a Big Lie worthy of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

These spiteful and petty acts, enthusiastically embraced by American neoliberals and neoconservatives alike, have only served to further embitter Russians against the West.

A truthful and generous acknowledgement of the leading Soviet role in the victory of 1945 would serve as a reminder of how much the United States and the Soviet Union were able to accomplish together in their joint triumph over fascism. It would remind Americans and Russians how vital it is for the two nations to again be partners against terrorism, transnational crime, drug trafficking, sexual slavery, climate change and nuclear proliferation.

To honor the great and solemn anniversary of Victory Day is simply the right thing to do—historically, morally and politically. The Russian people and their allies paid the colossal price in lives and blood that victory in World War II required. To dishonor their memory is disgraceful.