Last week, President Trump announced plans to officially designate May 8, the date when the Germans signed the articles of surrender to end World War II in Europe, as “Victory Day.” He further declared that the U.S. “did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result.” Almost immediately, this produced howls of outrage, above all from the Russians, whose celebrations on May 9 have become, under Putin, a massive political and cultural production, one recalling the triumphalism of the Stalin years.
Former Russian President (and longstanding Putin lackey) Dmitry Medvedev was quick to call out Trump, dismissing his statement as “pretentious nonsense.” Medvedev went further, writing that “Our people sacrificed 27 million lives of their sons and daughters in the name of destroying accursed fascism. Therefore, Victory Day is ours, and it is May 9. So it was, so it will always be.”
In the current political context, Medvedev’s comment is risible on its face. This year’s upcoming Russian celebration has been specifically designed to denigrate Ukraine’s role in defeating the Germans, despite the fact that Ukraine’s contribution and sacrifice, proportionally, may well have exceeded Russia’s. As far back as 2010, Putin insisted that Russia could have won World War II without Ukraine, ignoring outright the seven million Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army, Ukraine’s eight million military and civilian casualties, and the huge industrial and agricultural contribution made by Ukraine to the Soviet Union’s war effort.
The larger point, however, has nothing to do with Ukraine and everything to do with the longstanding narrative that it was the Soviet Union that made the greatest contribution to victory in World War II. This narrative began in Soviet propaganda even as the war was being fought, and it was echoed by leftists across the U.K. and the U.S. who denigrated their own countries’ war efforts with their insistent “Second Front Now” complaints. The “Russia won the war” narrative was cemented over the last 80 years by left-leaning academics.
But this narrative is wrong, profoundly wrong. Once and for all, it should be decisively challenged, and President Trump is right to challenge it. Unfortunately, his challenge stumbles with his proclamation that May 8 should become “Victory Day.” By all means, we should celebrate what we’ve long labelled as V-E, or “Victory in Europe” day, but the war wasn’t won on that day — far from it.
On the day victory was proclaimed in Europe, thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and Marines were locked in the land and naval battles of Okinawa, the most bitter battles of the Pacific War. Other Americans were heavily engaged in the final liberation of the Philippines. British and Indian soldiers faced more bitter fighting in Burma, while the Chinese, with U.S. help and at great cost, were struggling to hold the line after a massive Japanese offensive at the end of 1944. And no one doubted that the invasion of Japan, already being planned, would be anything less than an epic bloodbath.
If one recognizes, as one surely should, that victory in World War II only came with the defeat of Japan, then one should also invite the Russians to acknowledge that they did virtually nothing to enable that victory. The much-ballyhooed Red Army sweep into Manchuria made no meaningful difference to the defeat of Japan, and had been undertaken largely to establish a post-war stake in China.
But even this misses the much larger point, namely that Russia would likely have lost its war in Europe if Japan hadn’t been fully engaged with the U.S. The successful Russian defence of Moscow in the winter of 1941 relied heavily on troops transferred from Siberia, made available once Stalin knew that Japan meant to strike across the Pacific. Without these troops, Moscow would most assuredly have fallen, a practical and symbolic defeat from which Stalin would have struggled to recover. And what if Japan had chosen to seize the Russian far eastern provinces?
In recent years, Russian historiography, abetted by the usual progressive authors in the West, has also tried to minimize the impact of Lend-Lease, the provision of U.S. resources in support of the Red Army. We’re told that the Red Army’s tanks were all Russian-built T-34s or KVs, for example, and that their aircraft were Yaks and LaGGs. This itself is a stretch. Particularly during the critical phase in 1941 and 1942, when Russian factories were relocated out of the path of the German armies, Lend-Lease supplies played a vital role, filling the gaps until production could be resumed.
Over the course of the war, the U.S. shipped some 15,000 aircraft to the USSR, including thousands of P-39 and P-40 fighters, along with 7,000 tanks. But the real contribution to Russia’s survival and subsequent military success came in the form of logistical support. Huge quantities of food were shipped, vital when the granaries of Ukraine succumbed to German occupation. And those Yaks and LaGGs and all the other Soviet combat aircraft could scarcely have been produced in war-winning quantities without the huge amounts of aluminum provided by the U.S.
Above all, the U.S. provided the mobility through which the Red Army was supplied, thousands of locomotives and railroad cars, and approximately half a million military vehicles to Russia. If Red Army tanks led the way into Berlin, the fuel that moved them, the ammunition that enabled them, and the food their crews consumed came, overwhelmingly, in the load beds of Studebaker and GMC trucks. The full scale and significance of U.S. Lend-Lease aid to Russia is nicely summarized in a recent article published by the National World War II Museum. It makes for fascinating reading and offers a convincing rebuttal to those who would minimize the U.S. contribution to Russian success.
Finally, there’s the simple matter of how Germany was defeated. That the Red Army delivered crushing blows to the Wehrmacht should be undisputed. But the “Second Front” narrative, the contention that the U.S. and British armies, in effect, were sitting out the war until the D-Day invasion, is ludicrous. The end of the North African campaign came with an Axis surrender so vast that the Germans, echoing the earlier Stalingrad disaster, referred to it as “Tunisgrad.”
If the subsequent Italian campaign lacked the scale of the vast encounters on the Eastern Front, it nonetheless absorbed German resources that might have made a critical difference there. Hindsight has lent an inevitability to the Red Army’s successes, but, particularly in 1943, Russian victory in particular battles often teetered on a knife edge, one that might have tipped in the other direction with a few of the German divisions tied up at Monte Cassino or Anzio.
When the Red Army took the offensive in 1944, the Germans suffered repeatedly from a lack of defensive resources, resources expended massively in constructing the Atlantic Wall to guard against an Anglo-American invasion. What might have been made if the Germans had deployed the thousands of workers and the millions of tons of building materials to maintain and develop defensive works in the East? The Russian narrative ignores this.
Above all, the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign represented a “Second Front” all to itself. In recent years, it has become fashionable to minimize the impact of this campaign, based on Germany’s ability to maintain significant levels of industrial production. And certainly, the proponents of strategic bombing vastly overstated things when they asserted that they could win the war by themselves. Yet the relentless pounding of German cities did have a decisive effect, only not the one that the bombing advocates envisioned.
First, however inefficient the bombing may have been in destroying factories, the damage wrought absorbed vast amounts of organizational energy and resources to repair. Second, the targeting of energy production did ultimately exert a powerful effect on German military operations — the battles of 1944 and 1945 often hinged on German fuel shortages.
Finally, and vitally, by war’s end, the Germans had devoted a shocking proportion of their military effort to anti-aircraft artillery and interceptor aircraft, by some reckonings nearly a quarter of total war production, with a corresponding investment in personnel. “Total antiaircraft artillery personnel strength … grew to over one million, with hardware that included 9,000 heavy guns, 30,000 light guns, and 15,000 heavy searchlights.”
Economics, if it means anything at all, means understanding how scarce resources are allocated to accomplish specific ends. If we’re to understand how World War II was won, we need to give due attention to this. Both during the war and ever since, the Russian narrative has utterly failed to account for how the Eastern Front might have changed if the resources Germany devoted to the Atlantic Wall or to homeland air defense had been applied to the business of defeating the Red Army.
One can object to Trump’s assertion that the U.S. contributed the lion’s share to WWII victory; it’s a much more complicated argument. One can question a framing that focuses on May 8, when a better choice would have been August 15, “V-J Day,” when the war came to an end in a genuine triumph of American arms. One can — and one should — object to any narrative that unduly minimizes the contribution of our British allies, or that of Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, each of which contributed all out of proportion to their numbers and resources. One can recall that the French collapse in 1940 was in part redeemed by a revitalized French army in 1944 and 1945.
And surely, one can give due credit to Russia for playing a huge role in defeating Nazi Germany, even as one might wish that the Russians might give similar credit to Ukraine, or, indeed, their Western allies. Therein lies the rub. What the Soviets once did, and what Putin’s Russia now does, is harness the narrative of World War II victory to the service of a crass and aggressive nationalism. Tellingly, Dmitry Medvedev frames his rejoinder to Trump in terms of Russian sacrifice, the 27 million casualties claimed as the sole measure of victory.
But Trump framed things differently, not in terms of who suffered the most, but who did the most to defeat Germany and Japan. In this, he echoed General George S. Patton’s “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.” Trump didn’t claim that no other country contributed, but rather that the U.S. made the most meaningful contributions.
I happen to agree with him, while recognizing that no one will ever win this argument. But if his goal was simply to push back against the upcoming Putin extravaganza this week, then more power to him. If Dmitry Medvedev and his boss want to tell us that “Victory Day” belongs entirely to them, then they are the ones engaged in “pretentious nonsense.”
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
Are We on the Verge of World War III?
Wave of Attacks on Christian Communities in Nigeria
Matthew Parris is Wrong: America Is Much More Than Just a ‘Moral Idea’
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A soon-to-be-published sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges from West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.