There’s lots of fuss about D-Day, because today is the anniversary, and why we should remember and isn’t it terrible the Brits not insignificant contribution seems to be being glossed over by our French cousins and yada, yada, yada. I know that the Allied invasion of occupied Europe was amazing but we do have a tendency to overlook alternative experiences and contributions to the war.
Why don’t we make more of an effort to tell the story of nations that really suffered?
Case in point – last weekend I watched a BBC documentary on the experience at Omaha and whilst I accept that Omaha was a bloody and hard won victory I did feel they over-egged it.
Look: the losses at Omaha were bad (4500) but comparatively the US lost far more the previous winter at Monte Casino (90,000 from the 5th army alone). In fact, American losses during the war were much less than other participants. In the total run of the war the US lost less than half a million lives and, furthermore, they lost less than 2k of their civilian population. That’s right: more American civilians lost their lives during 9/11 than during the second world war, which may go some way to explaining the US reaction to 9/11.
I digress.
I am not having a pop at America, their entry into the war was critical and, if they hadn’t come in when they had, there’s a good chance I would not be here to thump on about those who suffered the most rarely getting any airtime at all. I’m not even saying don’t commemorate their contribution, more I’m asking what about the others?
No, I’m not talking about Britain. In point of fact, British casualties – like the Americans and others – weren’t actually as high as people like to imagine with total deaths still amounting to less than 1% of the population and half what they were during The Great War (British civilian deaths were actually higher during The Great War).
Now contrast, for a moment, with our occasional sparring partners: the Russians (or the Soviet Union as they were styling themselves at the time). Total military casualties during the Second World War were estimated at 10,700,000; to put that in perspective the British population circa 1939 stood at 47 million and change. Yet the true picture is worse: military casualties were actually lower than Russian civilian deaths that were estimated at 11, 400, 000. Yes, that’s right: during WW2 it was actually safer to be in the Russian army than to be a civilian. In total, the Soviet Union lost nearly 14% of the population during the war and suffered more casualties than any other nation on the planet.
And they still got to Berlin before the rest of us.
The Chinese, again overlooked, also lost a truly horrific number of people with 20 million casualties of which 16 million were civilian and therefore the highest number of civilian dead ever recorded in modern warfare if not history, courtesy of a hideous war related famine. Germany, Poland, the Dutch East Indies, Japan and Yugoslavia also took massive losses by comparison with the US, UK and even France.
The problem with the Second World War as a piece of history, and the thing that distinguished it from The Great War, is that it’s too easy to paint a black and white picture, too easy to draw a line from the war to a few belligerent countries, too easy to portray in terms of good and evil. The Soviet Union, however, doesn’t fit that model very well, after all: they sided with Hitler in the beginning, were just as nasty to their own population and only came over to the Allies when Germany turned on them. My enemy’s enemy may be my friend, if he helps me take my enemy out, but no one trusts a turncoat and Stalin – like Hitler – was that and more.
In the way the rest of the allies behaved towards Russia during and immediately after the end of the Second World War lies the seeds of the cold war. Yet that’s all in the past isn’t it? We’ve moved on now, there’s no need to rake over the past, we don’t care and neither do they. Well, remember that next time you shake your head at the news, wondering why Vladimir Putin is so anxious to control the countries that border Russia, or why China wants very little to do with the rest of us.
Remember that 43, 000,000 dead.
NB – I have focussed this post on nation state casualty figures, primarily because it is common in war documentaries to talk about the sacrifice made by the populations of nation states and I still feel there is a somewhat unfair bias towards the Western Allies. However, it is important to also note that 5.7 million Jewish people across occupied Europe lost their lives, that’s around 78% of the Jewish population of occupied Europe, in case you were wondering. It would be nice to think it would serve as a reminder to the world community on the horror of genocide but recent attempted genocides including the killing of 800,000-1 million Tutsis in Rwanda would suggest otherwise.