A russian friend of mine believes that no U.S. soldiers died inside of germany
during ww2.
Ignoring all that died elsewhere, how many U.S. and russians soldiers were killed or
wounded just in germany alone?
That’s ridiculous. The Battle of Hurtgen Forest alone had over 30,000 American casualties.
Also the siege of Aachen, and the Operation Varsity paradrops across the Rhine. Fighting in Alsace-Lorraine, such as the battle of Metz, might also be considered “in Germany” though that and other German territorial claims weren’t recognized by the Allies.
Of course, all those casualties would be dwarfed by those sustained by the Soviets. The Germans fought them more tenaciously until the very end, while resistance in the West kind of petered out.
I’d guestimate US casualties on German soil to have been in the neighborhood of 50-75,000, while Soviet losses were greater than that in the siege of Berlin alone. Overall they’d have to have topped 200,000.
what do you count as Germany, though? The present borders? Especially for the one’s in the East, this can radically change your answer. Also, why does it matter? What difference does it make whether someone died in the battle of Stalingrad or that of Berlin, or when storming the beaches of Normandy: they presumably died fighting the Nazis.
Does “U.S. and Russia” suddenly summarize all the countries fighting for the Allies in World War II?
The Russians have long maintained that the “Great Patriotic War” was essentially the Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany with, at most, some minor distractions for the Germans to the west. Based on casualty figures, it’s not an absurd claim.
Many, many Allied troops died just to get Germany proper softened to the point of making that late push into Germany viable. It took an extended two front war together with the Allied strategic bombing campaigns to bring Germany down.
And there is a bit of karma in play in terms of Russia’s losses, given the ample enabling of Germany during the non-aggression years.
Having your own guys killed isn’t how you win a war.
80% of German casualties were on the eastern front. To put it another way, four fifths of the war against the Nazis happened in/around the Soviet Union and eastern Germany.
Who said anything about that? I’d say that the German casualties inflicted by the Soviets versus those inflicted by everyone else makes a convincing argument. Of (per wikipedia) 5.5 million military deaths, about 4 million were on the eastern front.
I’d argue that one of the greatest historical holes in a country full of historical ignorance is that most of World War II in Europe was between Germany and the USSR. That doesn’t denigrate the Western front, its sacrifices, or the people who served there. And D-Day was remarkably heroic. But Americans generally have no idea that there was an Eastern front, except as comedic threat in movies and TV shows. More’s the pity.
Even if someone didn’t know which side of the border battles took place, they should realize there were casualties from the bombing campaigns over Germany.
Yes, but.
The Allied effort managed to divert a good number of troops from being free to kill RUssians. Norway was occupied due to constant Allied feints there. In the same way, Greece. Units in France were unavailable during the period they were just waiting for the invasion. Add to this the Allied air campaign that destroyed and diverted men and materiel from the East. In the same way, the German U-boats were resources not available in front of Moscow.
What makes the US/Canadian* effort in Europe great is not that so many died, but that they died in a conflict on another continent, in a conflict that they could conceivably have stayed out of. By any count, the Soviet effort and contribution to defeating the Nazis was far greater, as was Soviet suffering, and we owe them gratitude for that just like we owe it to the Canadians and the Americans - but the Soviets *were *fighting their own war, defending their own country that had been invaded. I believe that makes a radical difference.
*actually, there’s some other non-European forces that could be mentioned but that is beyond the purview of this debate (although it has rightly been pointed out that the European fronts were by no means restricted to the Germans, the US, and the USSR)
Nobody says the United Nations did nothing. The UN did a great job. But the Soviets did more. That’s unarguable.
It’s an American thing, which (as another poster mentioned above) seems to come from a diet of Hollywood war films with little or no historical accuracy. The US was a great help, but there is no way in the world the US can make any realistic claim to have achieved the defeat of Nazi Germany by itself.
It’s no insult to the great contribution made by the US to say that the US didn’t defeat the Nazis by itself, and that the US was not the biggest contributor to the defeat of the Nazis. It was a group effort, and the USSR was the biggest contributor in every way.
Also, would people please stop referring to Soviet forces as “Russians”. The majority of the troops of the USSR were not ethnic Russians. Stalin himself wasn’t Russian, and neither were most of his Marshals. Russia was a part of the USSR, but in terms of population it was never a majority. So please, for the sake of getting at least one fact right, call them “Soviets” and call the state “the USSR”.
You mean the United States right? The UN did not exist during the Second World War.
You’re point is well taken, but ethnic Russians were a majority, if only barely, and I presume the same might be true for the soldiers in the Red Army. From wikipedia:
It is - according to (again) wikipedia, 5,756,000 out of the total estimated number of 8,668,400 casualties were Russians - roughly 2 in every 3.
No, I meant the United Nations, which is what the allies called themselves during WW2. You think they just called themselves “The Allies”? The official name of the allies was “The United Nations”, and it was widely used both popularly and in official statements. Even the Nazis called them “The United Nations”.
The post-war United Nations was meant to be a continuation of the same organisation, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.
Hardly. Sure US History plays up what the USA did- and British History plays up what they did, and so forth. But that’s not ignorance.
Even if that’s correct - and it contradicts other things I’ve read - that doesn’t mean anyone should be calling Soviet troops “Russians”. Hopefully we agree that “Russians” as a general word for the peoples of the USSR is wrong.