80 Years Since the Biggest Blow to the Nazis:  The One You Never Hear About in the United States

A few weeks ago, Joe Biden along with Emmanuel Macron and a cameo-performing Rishi Sunak commemorated the Eightieth Anniversary of D-Day. 

In his speech, Biden said,

The war in Europe didn’t end for another 11 months.  But here the tide turned in our favor.  Here we proved the forces of liberty are stronger than the forces of conquest.  Here we proved that the ideals of our democracy are stronger than any army or combination of armies in the entire world.  

What might appear to be anodyne comments are in fact more interesting for what they miss than what they contain.  Still, this story of elision is the one that has become “truth” to the generations of Americans who believe that *they* beat the Nazis.

What Biden and his elite counterparts did not say might surprise even educated people in the West who believe they know a lot about the war (The people who read Steven Ambrose and tout the brilliance of that noted plagiarist).

What he did not say:

1.       During the War, 80 percent of the Wehrmacht was deployed on the Eastern Front- fighting the Soviets.

2.       Stalin has asked for the Western Allies to open a Western Front for more than 2 years before the Western Allies complied.

3.       Even during D-day, 70% of the Wehrmacht was on the Eastern Front.

4.       The largest, by far, operation of the war- the one that dealt the largest blow to the Nazis, started two weeks after D-day- Operation Bagration.

Operation Bagration kicked off on June 22, 1944, on the three-year anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 

According to Professor Geoffrey Wawro,

“You had ten times as many Russians fighting in Bagration as you had Anglo/American/Canadian troops landing on the Normandy beaches. And you had three times as many Germans in action fighting to hold up the Russian advance as you had defending the Atlantic Wall.”

You can read David Stahel, David Glantz, Craig Luther, or any one of a hundred Soviet historians if you want to learn more.

But to understand that Operation Bagration did more to defeat the Nazis than D-Day, The Bulge, or anything the Western Allies did is to refute the self-serving history of the war written by a group of Nazis (yes, Nazis like Halder) that the Americans imported after the war to essentially slander the Soviet Union.

That is what Americans grew up on- propaganda, written by Nazis.