Russia at war 1941-1945

But whether the exact number of casualties that Russia suffered in the last war was

twenty million, or a little more or a little less, these appalling losses have left a deep mark on the Russian character, and have, whether we like it or not, been at the root of Soviet foreign policy since the war, both before and after Stalin's death. The Russian distrust of Germany, and of anyone helping Germany to become a great military power again,

remains acute. There is scarcely a Russian family which the German invasion did not

affect directly, and usually in the most tragic way, and if Germany remains divided in two, and we still have trouble over Berlin, it is partly due to the memories of 1941-5.

These are still fresh in every older Russian mind, and the young generation of Russians are constantly reminded by books, films, broadcasts and television shows of what Russia suffered and of how she had to fight, first for her survival, and then for victory.

It would be idle to speculate on what would have happened to Russia, Britain and the United States in 1941-5, if they had not been united in their determination to crush Nazi Germany. It may well have been a "strange alliance" (as it was described by General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow towards the end of the

war), and its breakdown after the job was done may have been inevitable, despite the formal twenty-year alliance that Russia and Britain had signed in 1942, and other good wartime resolutions. Whatever members of the John Birch Society and other politically certifiable people (to use rny friend Sir Denis Brogan's phrase) may say today about our having fought "on the wrong side", we must still say "Thank God for the Strange Alliance".

For a year, in 1940-1, Britain fought Hitler almost single-handed; and so, in a very large measure, did Russia between June 1941 and the end of 1942; and in both cases the danger of being destroyed by the Nazis was immense. Britain held out in 1940^1; Russia held out in 1941-2. But even several months after Stalingrad Stalin still declared that Nazi Germany could not be defeated except by the joint effort of the Big Three.

Perhaps the young generation in the West knows very little about those days. The French radio recently questioned some young people about World War II, and quite a number of them said: "Hitler? connais pas" When I taught at an American university a few years ago I found that many young students had only the haziest notion of Hitler, Stalin and even Winston Churchill. But do even most adults in the West have a clear idea of how victory over Nazi Germany was achieved? Not unnaturally, Britons have been interested chiefly in the British war effort, and Americans in the American war effort, and this interest has been kept up by the plethora of memoirs by British and American generals.

But these memoirs have, on the whole, tended to obscure the important fact that, in

Churchill's 1944 phrase, it was the Russians who "tore the guts out of the German Army".

It so happened, for historical and geographical reasons, that it was, indeed, the Russians who bore the main brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany, and that it was thanks to this that millions of British and American lives were saved. Not that the Russians chose to save these lives, and to sacrifice millions of their own people. But that is how it happened and, during the war, both America and Britain were acutely conscious of it. "A wave of national gratitude is sweeping England", Sir Bernard Pares said in 1942; and, even on the more official level, similar sentiments were freely expressed. Thus Ernest Bevin said on June 21, 1942:

All the aid we have been able to give has been small compared with the tremendous efforts of the Soviet people. Our children's children will look back, through their history books, with admiration and thanks for the heroism of the great Russian

people.

I doubt whether the children of Ernest Bevin's contemporaries, let alone the children's children, have any such feelings today; and I hope that this "history book" will remind them of a few of the things Ernest Bevin had in mind.

It should, of course, be added that the Russians were acutely conscious, throughout the war, of the "unequal sacrifices" made by the Big Three. The "little Second Front" (the landings in North Africa) did not materialise until the end of 1942, and the "big Second Front" not till the summer of 1944. The strangely mixed feelings towards the Allies among the Russian people during the war years are one of the recurring themes of this book.