The Myth of "The Good War"

Americans are taught from an early age that "we" won WWII - The Good War - which pitted good against evil. Not only did American soldiers beat the evil Nazis, they rescued western civilization and brought Democracy to Europe.  Nothing could be further from the truth, according to British historian Norman Davies.  In a lecture delivered the other day at Harvard University, Davies exploded some of the myths of The Good War:

Among the Davies so-called myths:

That D-Day was big and decisive. (About 80 percent of German forces were lost on the Eastern Front, he said, where the biggest battles raged.)

That the West triumphed over the Third Reich. (Germany was all but defeated by the Soviets well before the Allies landed troops on the continent, he contended.)

In fact, asserted Davies, it was the Red Army that played the decisive role in defeating Germany, “and they were in the service of an evil tyranny.”

As for the myth that the war liberated Europe, said Davies: Most of Europe went from being under Hitler’s boot to being under Stalin’s.

Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other nations at the crossroads of combat were gobbled up by the Soviets in 1944 and early 1945, while the Red Army idled outside Berlin waiting for the Allies to creep toward the Rhine.

Winning a war means defeating an enemy, collapsing its economy, destroying its political structure — then replacing it with another. By those terms, Davies averred, the Soviets won the war in Europe.

Militarily, the Allies contributed less than the Soviets to the defeat of Germany, he said. Politically, they failed to restore democracy to most of Europe.

Will Americans ever revisit their own history? Unlikely, since that would also surface some uncomfortable questions about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the firebombing of German cities, targeting civilians.

Comments

[Axel]

In January, David A. Bell wrote about "Putting 9/11 into perspective" and made the following comparison:

"IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-bell28jan28,0,7267967.story

(According to the English Wikipedia, US causalities in WWII were roughly 400,000 or 0.32%)