Stalin apologist Rafael Poch has published an article in La Vanguardia which belittles, falsifies, misrepresents the Normandy landings. That’s a common line here, where quite large numbers of people still believe that Stalin (substitute Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Companys etc as you will) was a benevolent (although misunderstood) genius. All’s quiet on the domestic front this morning, so I just want to spend a short while correcting some of Poch’s errors of fact and interpretation.
Different accounting methods mean that it is still difficult to understand which Allied troops died where and when during the battle, but Poch is nowhere near the broad consensus on numbers (for which you may be able to cite more authoritative sources):
| poch | britannica online |
war cemetery graves |
|
| Canada | ] 4,300 ] killed |
5,000 killed 13,000 wounded/missing |
5,002 |
| UK | 11,000 killed 54,000 wounded/missing |
17,769 | |
| Poland | 650 | ||
| USA | 6,000 killed | 29,000 killed 106,000 wounded/missing |
9,386 [I believe that around 14,000 others were reinterred in the US] |
It is of course possible that he is confusing D-Day with the whole battle, but even then he’s off target.
Poch’s purpose is to show that Soviet suffering saved us from fascism, so, while western front figures are reduced, those on the eastern front are heavily exaggerated. For example, Poch claims that Third Reich suffered the loss of 10,000,000 troops and officials (killed/wounded/missing) on the Eastern Front. That is actually probably a slight exaggeration of European Axis losses in all theatres – see for example CUNY prof Joseph O’Brien’s estimate of 9,415,000.
However, Poch’s big claim is that the Soviet Union saved us from fascism. As he puts it:
Neither the course of the war nor the defeat of fascism were decided there. The principal heroes were neither John Wayne nor Private Ryan, but people with Slav names who died for a country which has ceased to exist.
Stalin slaughtered some one million of his own soldiers and perhaps two to four million Soviet civilians during the war (Mathew White’s estimates), so it seems to me reasonable to doubt whether Poch is correct in attributing to all those who fought the Nazis in the East a fervent devotion to the banner of the Stalinist-Leninist abattoir. A more conventional and more credible explanation would mention fear of the Soviet commissars, hatred of the Germans and their allies and, to some extent, the desire for mayhem that gave rose to well-documented atrocities during the Red Army’s westward advance. But let’s move on to this fascism business.
Fascism, The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition tells us, is:
The Soviet Union was clearly a fascist state during much, if not all, of its existence, and even Stalin wasn’t brazen enough to attempt to sell the conflict as an anti-fascist one. Poch is correct to note that the scale of suffering in Eastern Europe was far, far greater than anything experienced at this end of the continent, but the strategic goal of Stalin’s Great Patriotic War was not to end fascism but to maintain the Russ variant thereof (check, for example, this Great Patriotic War poster collection). That the Soviets defeated Hitler was of immense benefit to us, but shouldn’t serve to explain away the horrors that Moscow invented for its subjects or would have devised for us had the Red Army been allowed to proceed further.
So no, John Wayne and Private Ryan didn’t win the war on fascism in Europe – and in suggesting that anyone said they did, Poch is indulging in the laziest of journalism. But the D-Day that marked the beginning of the end of the systematic abuse of human rights in Europe was surely to a large extent the work of another actor, Ronald Reagan, who has just died.
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