5-24-05, 8:03am
From People's Democracy
BY the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War on June 22, 1941, twelve European countries – Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia – had been overrun by the fascist aggressors, their independence trampled and their people subjected to persecution and terror, while in some countries they were threatened with annihilation. The danger of a fascist invasion loomed over Britain.Aboard special “Asia” and “Africa” trains fascist staff officers charted strike arrows encircling the globe. In the autumn of 1941 the aggressors were ready to conquer Afghanistan, Iran Iraq, Egypt and later India where the German and Japanese troops were to join. Directive 32 and other German military documents show that having solved the British problem, the invaders intended to rid North America of the Anglo-Saxon influence, they were sure that a Blitzkrieg against the USSR would give them key positions to enslave the world. The Red Army’s offensive of the summer and autumn of 1944 has special significance to both Operation Overlord and the Allied actions that followed it. In the course of the Byelorussian Operation alone the German Command had to send 18 divisions and four brigades from the West to the Soviet-German Front. The Soviet offensive determined the general strategic situation in Europe and offered considerable freedom of action to the Western Allied armies. Addressing the Parliament on September 28, 1944, Sir Winston Chruchill had to admit that Russia contained and beaten much greater forces than those opposing the Allies in the West.
DISTORTIONS NAILED
One can only regret and wonder when today some American historian allege that indirectly Russians helped Hitler when they in no way demonstrated their intensions to facilitate the Allied landing.
The Soviet Union discharged its commitments strictly and consistently. When in December 1944 the Anglo-American troops found themselves in a difficult position after a sudden counter-attack by German divisions in the Arcennes, the Soviet Supreme Command, at the request of Britain and the USA, began a major offensive eight days before the planned time, on January 12, 1945, which helped the Western Allies to overcome the crisis.
That was how the Soviet Union acted. The Anglo-American allies, however, pursued quite a different policy.
The National Archives of the United States have minutes of a session of the Joint Anglo-American Staff held on August 20, 1943, to discuss the prospects of the policy pursued by the USA and Britain towards the USSR. Paragraph 9 of the minutes shows that the question was discussed whether Germans could help the Anglo-American troops to land in Europe to repulse Russians. So US and British military leaders discussed such a question in 1943 when the Soviet Union alone was fighting against the Third Reich thus paving the way to the liberation of peoples from the fascist yoke.
SOVIET SACRIFICES
The great liberating mission which the Red Army gloriously carried out at the last stage of the Great Patriotic War and of the Second World War is of intransient significance.
Eight-and-a-half million Soviet soldiers fought against fascist Germany and imperialist Japan outside Soviet frontiers and fully and partially liberated 13 European and Asian counties with a total population of nearly 150 million people.
More than a million courageous Soviet soldiers perished during this march of liberation. During the Second World War, the Soviet Union lost 20 million men and women.
The Soviet Union defeated the striking aggressive force of imperialism at that time and thereby made the decisive contribution to the consolidation of peace on earth and ensured the right of peoples to decide their own fate.
