COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
America always believes it did everything worth doing, so it
is true to form for it to think it won WWII. I once caught the most abysmally
ignorant error in a major American newspaper. It had an article about how the
Battle of the Bulge was the greatest battle of the war.
In fact the Battle of the Bulge, though sizable, was almost
insignificant compared to the size and horrors of Stalingrad, the greatest
battle in all of human history.
And just ask any American about Kursk, the greatest tank
battle in history, and you will get a complete lack of recognition of the name.
America's total losses, on all fronts, in WWII were about
300,000.
Compared with the Soviet losses of 27,000,000 in a grisly
total war for survival, American losses seem blessedly light. Even a century
before, in the American Civil war, America lost twice that number.
The truth is Americans have never experienced the horrors of
total war, yet they like to think they have been incomparably brave and met
challenges no one else could have met.
It is a fantasy mentality which prevails in America and this
helps the government in its many ugly colonial wars and dark operations because
the public largely simply can’t even imagine what is happening. In Vietnam,
America lost over 60,000, a pretty small number over ten years, but those
losses at their height are what instigated all the riots in the streets of
America in the late 1960s. No one knew, or cared, that America killed an
estimated 3,000,000 Vietnamese, a true modern holocaust.
I do believe in WWII that there was a tacit agreement to let
Russia and Germany bleed each other. The U.S. has followed that concept a
number of times including in the 1980s with the Iran-Iraq War.
America avoided starting the important second front in Europe
until very late, and I do believe even then, when Russia was clearly defeating
Germany, the motivation had to do with fear of Russia rolling through Europe.
In the Asian Theater, America used the most horrific methods
to bring the Japanese to their knees. First, there was endless firebombing and
then the only actual use, against civilians, of nuclear weapons.
It is an established fact that the Japanese were ready to
surrender before the atrocity of Nagasaki. They had put out feelers through
third parties. All they wanted was to keep their emperor. But the U.S. wanted
absolutely unconditional surrender, an attitude reflecting the same kind of
triumphalism we see from America today.
The final decision on the atomic bombs also related to
Russia. America was sending a message to Russia that it not only had a working
nuclear bomb and a number of them, but it was very willing to use them,
American thinking again being to stop the victorious Russian Army from going
too far. The original plan for the atomic bombing of Japan included the
dropping of twelve bombs at intervals on different cities. These were not
military targets. The plan was utterly cynical and immoral.
