The Great Patriotic War, still mostly the "unknown war" in the US

Robert Farley writes about the German-Soviet front of the Second World War in The Most Horrific War of All Time: Russia vs. Germany The National Interest 10/08/2015.

It is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. A jointly-made US-Soviet documentary during the detente years was called The Unknown War (1978) in its US release, The Great Patriotic War in the Soviet release. Burt Lancaster narrated the American version:

New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury did the English-language companion volume, The Unknown War (1978). The American title refers to the fact that the German's "eastern front," the war with the USSR, was little known in the US compared to the war in western Europe and the Pacific. That is still true today.

The script for the American version of the documentary reflects a sentimental view of the war. Salisbury's book conveys a more jaded Cold War version.

I'm not fond of sentimental histories. But understanding the sentiment and the propaganda are also part of understanding wars. And historical accounts also have to be read with a mind to the current and previous propaganda spins that might be reflected in them.

Farley sets the stage this way:

On June 22, 1941, the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe struck Soviet forces across a wide front along the German-Soviet frontier. Romanian forces attacked into Soviet-occupied Bessarabia on the same day. The Finnish armed forces joined the fight later that week, with Hungarian troops and aircraft entering combat at the beginning of July. By that time, a significant contribution of Italian troops was on its way to the Eastern Front. A Spanish volunteer division would eventually join the fight, along with large formations recruited from Soviet prisoners of war and from the local civilian population of occupied Soviet territories.

The course of the war is far too complicated to detail in this article. Suffice to say that the German enjoyed overwhelming success for the first five months of the war, before weather and stiffening Red Army resistance led to a Soviet victory in the Battle of Moscow. Germany resumed the offensive in 1942, only to suffer a major defeat at Stalingrad. The Battle of Kursk, in 1943, ended the Wehrmacht’s offensive ambitions. 1943, 1944, and 1945 saw the pace of Soviet conquest gradually accelerate, with the monumental offensives of late 1944 shattering the German armed forces. The war turned the Wehrmacht and the Red Army into finely honed fighting machines, while also draining both of equipment and manpower. The Soviets enjoyed the support of Western industry, while the Germans relied on the resources of occupied Europe.

That Battle of Kursk, by the way, was the largest tank battle in history. It took place in July and August, 1943. It was a massive German counterattack. The 2012 Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite article on the battle describes it this way: "The Battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in history, involving some 6,000 tanks, 2,000,000 troops, and 4,000 aircraft. It marked the decisive end of the German offensive capability on the Eastern Front and cleared the way for the great Soviet offensives of 1944–45."

It noteworthy that this was a summer battle. Something to keep in mind the next time you hear that it was the Russian winter that defeated the Germans on their eastern front.

The German invasion and occupation were gruesome business. The mass killing in the Holocaust began just after the invasion of the USSR. One of the horrifying aspects of the situation was that many Russian Jewish communities had regarded the treatment they had received from the Germans in occupied areas during the First World War as better than what they received from the Russians. So there were many cases in the Second World War of Russian Jews in contested areas fleeing to get behind German lines.

Salisbury wrote:

Hitler had incorporated into his Nazi ideology an old Neitszchian concept of the "superman." The superman in his definition was a German "aryan," blond, clean-cut, healthy, obedient. Hitler was waging war, he insisted, to provide lebensraum, living space, for this new breed of super-German. He proposed to clear the eastern spaces of untermenschen, that is, all subhuman species such as Russians, Ukranians, Poles, Jews, "Asiatics," etc., etc.

The German armies moved eastward with special orders, such as the "commissar" order under which every Communist official who was captured would automatically be shot. There was also the "kugel" order, a bullet in the head for any prisoner who attempted to escape or was believed to be thinking of escaping.

Under this philosophy millions of Russians, Jews and Poles died. There were six million Jewish victims in Europe including possibly two million in Russia. The Germans did not always bother with bullets or concentration camp furnaces. They simply starved their victims to death. The Germans captured about 5,754,000 Russian soldiers in the war. The number who survived' as prisoners of war was a little more than 1,000,000. That is, only one in five or six of the men and women who fell into German hands survived to the end of the war. (And, shameful to say, most survivors were sent straight from German prisoner camps to Soviet labor camps by Stalin.) Several million Russians were driven into Germany as forced labor. Probably half this total died of starvation and disease.

No one knows how many persons in Russia were killed by the Germans out of hand ... But there was no doubt that the number ran to millions.

It was very ugly stuff.

Farley gives this summary:

Towards the end of the war, the Soviets did their best to return the favor. Soviet depredations against the German civilian population of East and Central Europe do not generally received the same degree of attention as German actions, in no small part because of an enduring (if problematic) sense that the German deserved what they got. Other Eastern European populations were caught in the crossfire, suffering starvation and other depredations from both sides. Nevertheless, there is no question that the Soviets (and the peoples of Eastern Europe) suffered far more deeply from the war than the Germans.

The raw statistics of the war are nothing short of stunning. On the Soviet side, some seven million soldiers died in action, with another 3.6 million dying in German POW camps. The Germans lost four million soldiers in action, and another 370000 to the Soviet camp system. Some 600000 soldiers from other participants (mostly Eastern European) died as well. These numbers do not include soldiers lost on either side of the German-Polish War, or the Russo-Finnish War.

The civilian population of the territory in conflict suffered terribly from the war, in part because of the horrific occupation policies of the German (and the Soviets), and in part because of a lack of food and other necessities of life. Around 15 million Soviet civilians are thought to have been killed. Some three million ethnic Poles died (some before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but many after) along with around three million Jews of Polish and another two million of Soviet citizenship (included in the Soviet statistics). Somewhere between 500000 and 2 million German civilians died in the expulsions that followed the war.

Remembering wars: Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov

Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War

Shoot, if the press is going to swooning in Second World War nostalgia for the next two weeks as a result of the Ken Burns series The War, I may as well indulge a bit, too.

I'm glad to see that Burns has collected a new set of oral histories. But he's by no means the first to collect such stories. Not only Tom Brokaw's famous Greatest Generation books, but a number of others have been published.

One example is Remembering War: A U.S.-Soviet Dialogue (1990) by Helen Kyssar and Vladimir Pozner, which grew out of a 1985 documentary which presented a dialogue of Soviet and American participants in the Second World War. (For those who may have forgotten, the godless Commie Russians were on the same side as the US and Britain during that war.) Building on the ground laid by the documentary, the authors pursued the project in more detail for their book.

One Soviet participant whose memories are included in the book was a well-known writer Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov. He says:

I abhor reminiscing about the war. I have grown children, a son and a daughter, and I have almost never talked to them about the war. My growing grandson, who is in the second grade, once asked me, "Is the face of the enemy horrible?" I laughed. If the enemy's face were terrible, it would be easy to recognize him. But there are enemies with charming faces.

This is not unusual for combat veterans. Some of them like to tell their war stories, accurate and imaginative. Others would prefer not to think or talk about them any more than they have to.

He continues with the face-of-the-enemy motif in this part of his remembrance:

When I saw the first German POWs at the start of the war, I experienced true wonder, because we had been brought up with the naive notion that no fellow-worker, no proletarian, would ever fight against us. Yet their tank units, on the whole, were composed of German factory workers. At that time on the Northwest Front, I was nearly killed because of my curiosity and desire to understand, to understand who were these Germans fighting against us, because it in no way correlated with the prewar notions—including the time when I met Germans at the factory in Voronezh where I was working. Anyway, here's what happened. We were in a marsh on a reconnaissance foray, and we ambushed a bunch of Germans. There was a bright moon, so they were an easy target. So they fell down in the bushes, in the-water. And I, a young kid eighteen years old, out of stupidity decided I had to see what kind of faces they had. Who were these people? Because they couldn't be the same German workers I had known. And I just missed being killed, because one of them fired at me. ... He tried to kill me before dying. By then we were familiar with the terrible horrors; we listened to people's stories that chilled the soul; already by then the very word "German" evoked hatred. After the war, after much time, I was able to understand, first in my mind, then with my heart, that fascism was a tragedy not only for the Germans but for all of humanity. One people had suffered through this tragedy, and now they were carrying this terrible disaster to another people. I came to realize it was not a purely German phenomenon, it wasn't just a national feature. It was a tragedy that could happen to all mankind.

Baklonov mentions that he joined the Soviet Communist Party early in the war:

At the worst time, when the Germans were approaching Stalingrad, I joined the party. Communists were not taken into captivity; they were killed. But I didn't conceive of another life for myself. Nor did I really think I might die - as I said, youth is a most astonishing time of life, when we think we are immortal.

It's not surprising if his political perspective should color his memories of the event. That's part of how our memories work. And the victory of the Soviets in the Great Patriotic War - which is what it's called in Russia - was something emphasized by the Soviet regime, and by the Russian government today, as a point of national pride and as a method of legitimizing their own government. In itself, there's not wrong about that. There's certainly nothing unusual, because all countries do it.

This was also an eloquent piece of his contribution to the book:

There are people who, after the war, lived quite ordinary, commonplace lives. And for them, that time when they performed heroic feats or, as it seemed to them, made history, for them, of course, that time became their finest hour. Many others have gone on in life, achieved success, and so theirs is a more forward-looking view of things. But even I, a successful writer, must say that if there was ever something significant that I achieved, it was namely then, when I helped determine the fate of our homeland. That has remained a proud feeling in me. More than anything, it was with this knowledge that my son and even my grandson grew up. Grandpa fought in the war! Not because Grandpa killed anyone, no but because Grandpa fought in the war when it was to be decided whether or not our land and nation were going to exist. Of course, this feeling never disappears; one cannot escape it.

This sense of having been part of a larger cause together with others equally committed to it is a powerful memory for many veterans.

It's important to remember also the phenomenon that Robert Jay Lifton calls the survivor's mission". Whenever someone close to us dies, one thing that often happens is that the survivors channel some of their grief into some sort of survivor's mission which they connect with the one lost. This often becomes a way of reconnecting to life with a new perspective after tragedy. Something like this can also happen to those who lost members of their unit to whom they felt close.

Personal memories, especially ones of events decades past, are not simply factual replays of events. They are also interpretations and constructions which may have become a key part of a person's view of himself and the world.

Tags: great patriotic war, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war II