I happened to watch Enemy at the Gates yesterday which, from my recollection of the book, was a fairly smarmy Hollywoodification of the original. Yet, it did remind me that the war we just recalled having won 60 years ago was in large part won in a tank factory in Stalingrad in a battle that took about 6 months and cost something like 2 million lives on both sides. Two million. This morning I read this on the CBC news:
The 1939-45 war took the lives of 27 million civilians and soldiers from the former Soviet Union, far more than the toll in all the other participating countries combined. Military marching bands and thousands of goose-stepping soldiers made their way through Moscow's Red Square as U.S. President George W. Bush, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and other dignitaries watched. The parade was the latest in a weeklong series of events in Europe designed to celebrate the Allied victory over Nazi Germany...Putin said May 9 is "a sacred day" in Russia, serving as a reminder of "what monstrous consequences violence and moral intolerance, genocide and persecution of others could lead to."Twenty-seven million. Where ever we are today and whatever the nature of totalitarianism has since proved itself to be, at that time the people who fought there in Stalingrad and the other battles under that red flag were, if the words of the remaining Soviet veterans today are to be believed, not coerced but were acts of patriotic fervour. And without that the world would be greatly different today. So thanks.
Comments
Mike - May 9, 2005 9:08 am
Well, you're absolutely right. I do believe that most fought first for their country. There would never have been the chance of an assault on the Normandy beaches had Russia not held out. Hitler would most certainly have then turned his attention back to Britain.
Still, even before the war, Soviet Russia was precisely what Putin claims they were fighting against. The poor Russian soldiers who did survive the fight against Germany were deemed to be tainted by the contact they had with the enemy and were sent off to rot in the gulags.
Alan - May 9, 2005 9:20 am
It is also the scale that is enormous on top of our debt owed. Weren't there thousands of tanks in the battle at Kursk? Wasn't the reason Stalingrad was cut off by the Soviets that they imagined the pincer move behind the Nazis at about five times the scale the Germans thought would happen? Fantastic stuff.
Alan - May 9, 2005 9:32 am
Interesting to note that the movie had an early scene where retreating Soviets were shot by their own as they retreated. When would the British army have stopped a similar practice? Certainly in WWI they got the same treatment after a more formal process. Certainly, in 1745 the Scots highlanders received a treatment not that different from collective responsibility of a totalitarian 200 years later. When did the shift occur? Is there any validity to the intergenerational comparison?
Arthur - May 9, 2005 10:29 am
In the Netherlands, I think the very last case of execution because of desertion happened in 1940 (note: Dutch).
Interestingly, (browsing through archives about this particular subject) I ended up here:
" Met de inwerkingtreding van de Rijkswet van 14 juni 1990 werd de doodstraf per 1 jan. 1991 volledig afgeschaft, zowel voor het militair strafrecht als voor het oorlogsrecht. Sinds 1983 bepaalt art. 114 van de Grondwet, dat de doodstraf niet kan worden opgelegd."
Meaning that, officially while the death penalty was (officially) abolished in 1983, only after 1990 the military law was changed accordingly. I haven't heard of people being executed in the mean time, but imagine if the Russians had invaded the Low lands and soldiers (conscription!) had deserted...