I have a long list of people I will not abide moral lessons from. Swedes, for example, and the Swiss -- nations who maintained a lucrative neutrality while Nazi Germany attempted to drag Europe back into Teutonic barbarism. The United Church of Canada. The United Nations. Barbara Streisand, Tim Robbins, Michael Moore and Madonna. Today's example of insufferable carping comes from the Russians.
As the 60th anniversary of D-Day draws nigh, some fans of Russian military prowess have chosen to revive the old "Second Front Now!" controversy. Readers will remember that during World War II, left-wingers in Britain, the US and Canada pressured their governments to speedily invade western Europe to relieve pressure on our beleaguered allies in the USSR. After the war the brutal but highly successful Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov complained that the Allies had deliberately delayed their offensive so that the Germans and Russians would annihilate each other more thoroughly. Now comes another veteran of the eastern front, Marshal Dmitry Yazov, to announce that: "It would be wrong to say that the Allies weren't helping us, but it would be equally incorrect to say they were helping us very actively. They only opened the second front less than a year before the victory."
Forgive me if I shed no tears for bleeding Mother Russia but there are some other pertinent facts that should be taken into account:
1. There would have been no need for a European-wide war against fascist Germany if Stalin and Hitler had not conspired in 1939. The secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of that year allowed Germany a free hand to invade Poland in return for Russia being allowed to swallow up the Baltic republics and annex eastern Poland.
2. Under instructions from Stalin western European communists impeded the war against Hitler from 1939 to 1941. One important reason for the rapid fall of France in the spring of 1940 was French communist sabotage and defeatism.
3. Shortly after Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Russia, British possessions in Asia were attacked by Japan forcing the Allies into a second front in the Far East. Hundreds of thousands of British, Indian, Canadian and Australian troops were killed or captured and hundreds of thousands more were battling the Japanese in China, Burma and the Pacific.
4. Despite calls for a "Second Front", there was plenty of fighting in the west against the Germans and Italians. In 1942 a failed raid on Dieppe by Canadian forces suggested that an amphibious landing against a defended port was a bad idea but there were considerable victories in North Africa where the Rommel's Afrika Korps was shattered. In 1943 the Allies invaded Italy and knocked Mussolini out of the war. Tens of thousands of Allied airmen took part in the bombing of Nazi-held Europe; tens of thousands of sailors struggled to reinforce Britain, run supplies to northern Russian ports and defeat the U-boat threat in the Atlantic.
In short, long before D-Day there were plenty of other fronts on which western allies were dying to save Russia from the fate it had brought on itself.
Posted by Dexter at May 23, 2004 07:00 PM