Soviets Won the Second World War?
Col Mike Walker, USMC, retired
All,
The “Soviets Won the Second World War” mythology is running around again.
We will put aside the cogent point that there never would have been a Second World War if Stalin had not allied himself with Hitler to invade Poland in September 1939 and move on the argument at hand.
Historian Norman Davies once wrote:
“The Soviet war effort was so overwhelming that impartial historians of the future are unlikely to rate the British and American contribution to the European theatre as much more than a sound supporting role.”
That is over-the-top silliness.
Indisputably, the Eastern Front was not just the largest and most dominant land campaign of the Second World War but in recorded history and was essential to the Allied victory.
However, the case is not at all clear that the war can be characterized as a “400 division clash” in the East versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the West as Davies further argued. That claim crumbles before serious and objective analysis.
A. The critic’s numbers do not add up
First, the war was global for the United States (US) and the British Commonwealth (UK) troops who made up of the bulk of the remaining anti-Axis combatants, save China.
The Soviets never had to build, equip, man and train the vast naval forces needed to defeat the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, battle the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific and simultaneously deploy and sustain large ground and air forces worldwide.
To put this in perspective, the U.S. Army comprised only 8.5 million of the 16 million Americans who served in uniform during the war.
Second, the “400 division clash in the east versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the west” argument is hard to follow. The 400 division number is true enough when counting the total forces on the front but when the Nazi armies peaked in the east during the 1942-1943 period, their 200 plus divisions included approximately:
10 Italian divisions
18 Romanian divisions
9 Hungarian, divisions
15 Finnish divisions
Not an insignificant portion of the Nazi order of battle.
The Allied ground campaign in the West was more extensive than the critics are willing to admit.
On the Nazi side, the rough disposition of their forces (to include other Axis armies) in mid-1944 (before D-Day) shows that the Eastern Front was still dominant:
Approximately 200 divisions on the Eastern Front
28 divisions in the Balkans
17 divisions in Italy
8 divisions in Norway
61 divisions in the West
As the war progressed after D-Day, the number of Nazi divisions sent to the West continually increased and the number in the East continually declined.
By January 1945, the numbers were:
Approximately 145 divisions on the Eastern Front
15 divisions in the Balkans
28 divisions in Italy
15 divisions in Norway
79 divisions in the West
There was net decrease in the number of Nazi divisions during this period due to losses suffered on the war fronts.
It would be wrong to down play the importance of the Western Allied onslaught during this period. Consider this statistic: After D-Day, the US Army alone captured on average the equivalent of one German division per week, every week throughout 1944. As the war on the Eastern front progressed, prisoners were often not taken which attributed to disparity in deaths and POWs taken.
When the Allies began the final 1945 offensive following the Battle of Bulge, Eisenhower had three Army Groups involved:
US 6th Army Group under Devers with 22 divisions
US 12th Army Group (main effort) under Bradley with 48 divisions
British 21st Army Group under Montgomery with 17 divisions
The 1st Allied Airborne Army with 1 division was in strategic reserve
The US/UK forces also had the British 8th Army and US 5th Army in Italy that together totaled another 16 divisions.
All in all, Eisenhower had 104 divisions in Europe by late 1944/early 1945. The “15 on 15” statement is nonsensical.
Fighting Japan, the US/UK ground forces had another 38 divisions deployed:
Six divisions with the British 14th Army in Burma plus 21 US Army, 6 US Marine and 5 Australian Divisions in the Pacific
B. Size Matters
Significantly, a US infantry division was manned at 13,700 soldiers compared with 10,400 for the Soviets and similar size difference existed for armored units (which had both more tanks and troops per unit) and Commonwealth units were larger still.
If we adjust for those differences, the Western Allies had the equivalent of 232 “Soviet size” divisions on the front lines by late 1944, extending from the Dutch-Belgian-French front to Italy to Burma and on to the Pacific.
C. Lend-Lease was vital to Red Army Success
Subtract out Lend-Lease and the power of the Red Army was significantly degraded.
The US provided over 7,000 tanks and the British another 5,000 as well as 11,000 US and 9,000 British aircraft. The overall amount of fuel and food supplies shipped to the Red Army was enough to keep 80 Russian divisions in the field.
Not surprisingly, putting in place the global logistics chain represented a major Allied commitment of resources and many Allied sailors lost their lives sailing through enemy laden artic waters to “deliver the goods.”
D. The role of the USAAF-RAF strategic bombing campaign on the Soviet war effort has been undervalued
After the failed German 1943 Kursk offensive, the Luftwaffe shifted the overwhelming majority of its fighter squadrons to Germany and other parts of Western Europe to battle RAF Bomber Command the emerging US Eighth Air Force. This eliminated the Luftwaffe as a major threat to the Red Army.
Between 1939 and 1945, the Luftwaffe added slightly more than 13,000 88-mm flak guns for air defense duty. The army only received 3,500 such guns in the same period, but they were effective anti-tank guns of the war.
Had those weapons been deployed in numbers to the Eastern Front, they would have turned Wehrmacht anti-tank defenses into vast killing fields for the Red Army’s armored forces.
Finally, the strategic bombing of German oil production largely grounded the Luftwaffe and went far in making the Soviet 1945 breakout at the Baranov bridgehead on the Vistula River a success when the 1,200 German panzers massed there were rendered useless for lack of fuel.
There was never a case where a Red Army offensive defeated a mobile panzer force of that size while operating on ideal tank terrain. Allied strategic bombers first forced the removal of the Luftwaffe fighters, then removed thousands of deadly tank-killer "88s" from the battlefield and finally turned a huge panzer army into a mass of expensive and largely static pillboxes. Those factors were arguably decisive.
Western air power indirectly played a major role on the Eastern Front in 1944 and 1945.
E. Conclusions
The Eastern Front surely dominated the ground war, but when looking at the combined size and scope of the Western Allies ground, sea, air and material efforts, it could be argued that the West’s aggregate commitment of people, machines and resources was greater.
Measuring war solely by buckets of blood spilt, however tragic, is a crude and misleading metric. No one played a “supporting role” in gaining the Allied victory. The real truth is that the Allies needed each other. All proved indispensable.
Semper Fi,
Mike
