On the occasion of the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the U.S.-British invasion of Nazi-occupied Western Europe on June 6, 1944, we’ll hear lies telling us how the U.S. won the Second World War. The decisive role of the Soviet Red Army and working class will be deliberately underplayed or ignored altogether to avoid recognizing the fact that it was the communist-led Soviet Union, under the leadership of Josef Stalin—not the U.S.—that defeated Hitler’s Nazi armies.
As Benjamin Schwarz, national editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote in the New York Times, “Military historians have always known that the main scene of the Nazis’ downfall was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war….The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly most ferocious ever fought,….arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history.”
During the entire war, more than 70 percent of the active fascist troops in Europe were fighting the Red Army. The British were engaging only four German divisions in North Africa. When the Allies landed in western France on the Normandy beaches, they faced only three German divisions. The main reason was that more than 100 divisions from all over Europe had to be rushed to the East where the Red Army was moving 40 miles a day westward, crushing the fascist forces. More than a million Nazi troops were destroyed just by Soviet partisan units behind enemy lines, more than all the U.S. and British forces had destroyed during the entire war.
Over 25 million Soviet workers and soldiers died fighting Hitler’s armies. The U.S. lost 400,000 all told, in Europe and the Pacific.
In the winter of 1941, when the Nazis approached Moscow, 25 miles from the Kremlin, the entire population rose up in defense. Men joined the militia units at the front. Women and youth spent weeks out in the bitter cold, digging anti-tank ditches. Then the Soviet forces counter-attacked, pushing the enemy more than 100 miles from the city. This was the first large-scale defeat suffered by the Nazis. It was the beginning of their annihilation, six months after they had invaded. The New York Times military editor, Hanson Baldwin, along with scores of Western “experts,” had predicted the Soviets would be defeated in six weeks.
The turning point came in the battle of Stalingrad, in the winter of 1942-43, which virtually all capitalist historians have called the turning point of World War II. Soviet defenders fought battles house-to-house. Women and men voluntarily remained at their machines making tanks for the battlefield just outside their factories while bombs fell all around them. Stalingrad stands as a shining example of the  communist spirit. The Soviets surrounded and destroyed three fascist armies, causing 1.5 million Nazi casualties. After Stalingrad, the battlefield moved  in only one direction — westward toward Germany.
From 1941 to the spring of 1944, U.S.-British strategy was to wait until the Nazis and Soviets were fatigued fighting each other and then enter the war to get quick victories. They had delayed opening a second front in France for two years, until mid-1944, when it became apparent that if they didn’t the Soviets would be able to liberate all of Europe from the Nazi yoke. The Second Front was opened to stop the communist advance beyond Berlin.
In A War to Be Won (Harvard, 2009) by historians Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, they called the Soviets’ brilliant use of encirclement and what they called “deep battle” — extremely far-reaching advances behind the enemy’s lines — the most innovative and devastating display of “operational art” in World War II. Col. David Glantz, of the U.S. War College, marveled that close to one-half of wartime Soviet operations involving hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers are simply “missing from history,” either neglected or covered up.
So when the imperialists praise the U.S “victors” in World War II, the workers of the world should salute the true heroes who defeated the Nazi armies, the communist-led Red Army and working class of the Soviet Union.