“Europe At War” (2)
At last I’ve finished reading the 500-page work “Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory” written by the British historian Norman Davies. The main theme of this work is that the western nations have failed to comprehend and acknowledge the scale of the battles and the deaths on the Eastern Front which are such as to require a balanced judgement to conclude that “the Soviet role was enormous and the Western role was respectable but modest”.
For instance, consider this table which sets out estimates of deaths in the major individual battles and campaigns.
| Operation ‘Barbarossa’: battles of Byelorussia, Smolensk & Moscow 1941 | 1,582,000 |
| Stalingrad September 1942-31 January 1943 | 973,000 |
| Siege of Leningrad September 1941-27 January 1944 | 900,000 |
Kiev July-September 1941 | 657,000 |
| Operation Bagration 1944 | 450,000 |
| Kursk 1943 | 325,000 |
| Berlin 1945 | 250,000 |
| French campaign May-June 1940 | 185,000 |
| Operation Overlord 6 June-21 July 1944 | 132,000 |
| Budapest October 1944-February 1945 | 130,000 |
| Polish campaign September 1939 | 80,000 |
| Battle of the Bulge December 1944 | 38,000 |
| Warsaw Rising 1 August-1 October 1944 (exc civilians) | 30,000 |
| Operation Market Garden September 1944 | 16,000 |
Battle of El Alamein October-November 1942 | 4,650 |
The first seven of these campaigns were on the Eastern Front and, to give some kind of perspective, the death toll in Operation Barbarossa – the German invasion of the USSR – was 12 times that of the the opening phase of the invasion of Normandy by the Western allies. Controversially Davies opines: “All in all, the open-minded observer will be tempted to view the war effort of the Western powers as something of a sideshow.”
July 11th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Er, am I missing something here?
Did not Stalin have a pact with Hitler?
And were not the British left to fight alone for quite awhile.
Without the British sticking to their guns (albeit shakily) for that one year.
If we had not held out and had been invaded, would the Russians have come to our aid. I think not.
I have friends who lost their fathers, brothers etc on the convoys to assist the Russians when they eventually came into the war on the ‘Western’ side. We gave what we had and that was little but high in cost.
I am not an ‘open-minded’ observer and I am not tempted to view the war effort of the Western Powers as something of a sideshow.
July 11th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Wow Roger! You read a whole 500 page book. Just out of interest, how long did it take to complete the book??
July 11th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
About a month.