Western Historiography, and the Nazi-Soviet War

As Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies argue in their book The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture it has long been conventional for Western recollections of the Second World War Two to valorize the military performance of German forces--and equally denigrate the Soviet performance. Indeed, they commonly go so far as to take the view of the Nazis fighting like supermen but being defeated by the vast distances, spaces, weather and primitiveness in infrastructure and other ways of Russia; the Soviets' bottomless reservoir of military manpower that permitted them to absorb losses that would have done in any other enemy; and the American Lend-Lease that enabled an industrially hapless Soviet Union to eventually equip the enormous masses of troops so that, even while using them forward as cannon fodder in the most spendthrift manner, they eventually crushed their superior opponent. However, those who actually bother to familiarize themselves with the basic facts of the conflict are likely to quickly notice that the narrative does not stand up to scrutiny.

Of course, considering the conflict no one denies that the vast distances and spaces of "Russia," the country's extreme weather, and the underdeveloped physical infrastructure made moving and sustaining an army presented the Nazis and their allies with enormous obstacles. However, these same factors were equally enormous obstacles for the Soviet defenders. Those distances and that infrastructural lack meant the Soviets could only more slowly and with greater difficulty mobilize and deploy their forces where they were wanted, with the result that at the war's outset they had to rely on a thinly stretched forward defense. That combination of wide, open spaces with the thinly stretched forward defense, and the difficulties the combination of distance with infrastructural limitations imposed on them (the more in as the further east one went the less developed the country was), may be said to have given the Nazis the advantage in the early part of the war by giving them ample room to maneuver their motorized-mechanized formations in the manner at which they were at this point so much more practiced than their opponents (Western as well as Soviet). Indeed, one may hypothesize that without those spaces, distances, weak infrastructure the Axis forces would not have achieved those dramatic advances and great encirclements of the early part of the war so central to their image of great prowess. (Putting it one way, the Soviets had room to fall back as the Poles and the French did not--but the same geography was why they were forced to fall back in the first place, while in the meantime all that territory from which they fell back, and everything on it, ended up in enemy hands, helping the Nazis' effort against their own in the fighting that followed.) Meanwhile the weather imposed the same restrictions on the Soviets' forces as it did those of their enemies. Those same spring and fall "mud seasons" (the rasputitsa) that made movement impossible for the invader put a stop to Soviet movement just as much, with all that meant for the limits of their initial ability to react against an invader exploiting an the openness of the ground to make headway, to move those forces forward, to try and push back an enemy already occupying their ground even when they had them where they wanted them. And the extreme cold took its toll on Soviet personnel and machinery just the same as it did the Germans in ways from physical efficiency to the durability of materials, General Winter showing no favoritism here. Additionally, even if one were to argue that all of these disadvantages still (somehow) conferred a net benefit on the defender, the fact remained that after 1941-1942 it was the Soviets on the offensive as they struggled to recover the territory taken from them in the early part of the war, and the Nazis now standing on the defensive the beneficiary of those factors, so that it was the Soviets who now got the worst of the situation.

The image of the Soviet Union being so demographically vast as to be able to absorb virtually infinite losses likewise does not stand up to scrutiny. Certainly in 1936 Nazi Germany was a country of 65 million, the Soviet Union one of 170 million, a not insignificant advantage in the Soviets' favor, but far from so overwhelming as to support the "bottomless reservoir of manpower" image. Moreover, as Soviet and Russian historians are much more prone to point out than their Western counterparts, the Soviets were not facing just Germany, let alone the Germany of 1936. By 1941 Nazi Germany had expanded significantly due to annexations (of Austria, Czechia, etc.) leaving it a nation of at least 80 million people. Meanwhile via occupation it was in direct control of countries containing at least as many more people as "Greater Germany" (Slovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece). The result was that by 1941 the total number of people under Nazi control compared with the pre-war Soviet population (or even the Soviet population after the territorial gains that followed the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact), while counting in their sympathetic and deferential allies (like the Romanians and Finns who sent a million soldiers east, and the Italian and Hungarian contingents that also traveled with them) shifts the balance in their favor.

And of course, even where their subjects and satellites were not equally fighting in the east those countries' production at home for their masters; their export of millions of their people to Nazi Germany as slave laborers; and the Nazis' vassals' own military efforts' covering the Nazi empire on other fronts (as Vichy French forces did); freed that many more German men to fight in the east. As if that were not enough the Soviets did not just face a Nazi-led Europe, but confronted significant threats that tied down the forces they had on other fronts, like the two hundred million of the Empire of Japan in the east. Additionally the Soviets had directly to their south a pro-Axis Iran and Turkey, the latter of which countries signed a "Non-Aggression Pact" with Germany mere days before Barbarossa (a fact Western historians almost completely ignore). Indeed, if it can seem that the Soviets' southern neighbors were minor concerns, Turkey's proximity to the Caspian basin fields on which the Soviets were so reliant for the oil on which their war effort ran, made it far from negligible. Altogether this left the Soviets outnumbered by their potential and even actual enemies--even before the Axis' early conquests of the western Soviet Union inflicted losses and transferred territories on a scale further shifting the balance in the Axis' favor. Indeed, given how those other threats tied down millions of troops on other fronts during Operation Barbarossa opened the Nazis and their allies had a two-to-one advantage over the Soviet forces in front of them, while those early losses of Soviet territory that put the land and their people in Axis hands, further reducing any advantage of Soviet "numbers" from the outset, and still more so as the war went on and the losses continued to mount.

Equally the reference to Lend-Lease to explain the Soviet Union's translation of the numbers it did have into a victorious military force is unsatisfactory. Certainly the U.S. provided the Soviets $11 billion in Lend-Lease aid. Still, one should acknowledge that this is about one-third of what the British Empire got, and less than half what it got "net" when one counts in the "Reverse Lend-Lease" that saw American aid recipients provide the U.S. with goods it needed and used itself. One may add that less of what was sent the Soviets actually got into Soviet hands because of the losses along the more hazardous Arctic route by which so much of it had to travel. (Without in any way disparaging the American support and the sacrifices it involved, the fact remains that one cannot explain Soviet successes on the basis of materiel they never actually received.) In any event the program was not even authorized before the Soviets' stand outside Moscow ended the Nazis' sole, longshot, hope of achieving their full war aims, all as very little such aid arrived in 1942, and the support only really began to tell in mid-1943 in Adam Tooze's account--not only after Moscow, but after Stalingrad. Moreover, even in the later phases of the conflict it amounted to only so much, Jacques Pauwels estimating that ultimately it equaled no more than "4 or 5 percent of the Soviet Union's total war production." Thus the Soviets weathered the deadliest and most dangerous and decisive part of the conflict and turned the tide without that Lend-Lease assistance, then while it was only ever a relatively small fraction of the material on which they relied, did far more to win the war in Europe than a Britain getting far more support, all as some credit Lend-Lease with an even smaller role in the Soviet victory than that. (Pauwels, writing of the extent to which American production in Germany and trade with Germany through third-countries kept the Nazi war effort afloat, argues that one could see American Lend-Lease as, at best, "neutralizing" the effect of American Big Business' never-punished, treasonous activity.)

With geography, demographics and Lend-Lease put into perspective it seems impossible for any reasonable observer to deny the reality of immense Soviet accomplishments in the "battle of production," and on the battlefield--as even a characteristically old, Soviet-slighting account of the war as the History of the Second World War by Basil Liddell-Hart concedes. Indeed, if disadvantaged in the early part of the war by Stalin's purging of the officer corps, and the ill-timing of Soviet rearmament, the Soviets, armed with an understanding, doctrine and organization in many ways superior to that of their German opponents, and practiced in the most unforgiving school imaginable, got much, much better operationally than they were in the fumbling early days of Barbarossa, such that as Colonel David Glantz argues in the now standard account of the conflict When Titans Clashed, "on an individual basis the average Red Army commander and soldier was probably as effective as his or her German counterpart in 1944-1945" (emphasis added). And altogether, considering all that the Soviets had against them from the outset (those disadvantages of geography, their encirclement by opponents, the limited outside assistance they got), and the horrific early losses of the conflict, it would seem that it was not the Nazis but the Soviets who fought like supermen--to which fact the Nazis, of course, gave the backhanded acknowledgment racists accord "inferiors" who have bested them. (Thus Jochen Hellbeck informs us that one German newspaper excused the German failure to take Stalingrad by saying that had it been defended by Britons or Americans rather than Asiatic Bolshevists displaying an "inhuman" toughness and indifference to death it would have fallen in days--treating what they would have honored or even celebrated as heroic endurance and courage had a people they did not so despise displayed it.)

When the terrain-weather-numbers-Lend-Lease explanation of the Soviet victory is so vulnerable intellectually, and Soviet military-industrial and military success so impossible to excise from explanations of the war's outcome, why does this understanding of the war and its outcome endure? The answer would seem to be the readiness of Western historians to believe the self-serving excuses of the defeated Wehrmacht generals, who amid the beginnings of the Cold War were far better able to tell their side of the story to a highly receptive Western audience, officers and historians alike, whose perceptions were colored by pretty much the same racist and Anti-Communist prejudices the Wehrmacht had than were the Soviets they were already treating as enemies. Meanwhile, minimizing the Soviet contribution has been convenient from a nationalistic and Anti-Communist perspective, especially in Britain and the United States. Beyond the ordinary patriotic desire to enlarge their nations' role in the conflict at the expense of other states, it was far more congenial to pay tribute to the American productivity that enabled Lend-Lease than to admit that Communists had their industrial accomplishments under very hard circumstances (the loss of much of their agricultural, mineral, labor resources to Nazi conquest, the hurried relocation of much of the industry they did save)--or to compare the contribution that Lend-Lease represented to the promise of help with which the Western Allies for so long led on the Soviets, the "Second Front" the Soviets so desperately needed, and only got after they turned the tide at enormous cost, in the middle of 1944, after which the Soviets still bore the brunt of the fighting in the east. At the same time given the American decision to restore Germany as an allied and conservative nationalist-led major military power for the sake of the Cold War it was far better for inter-allied relations, and German morale, to pay tribute to the genius of the officers to whom they gave the task of rebuilding the Federal Republic's army as they joined together in denigrating their collective enemy to the east. The result was a tendency to accept the myth of the Wehrmacht narrative, while slighting all that did not fit in with it.

Of course, the period of détente in the 1970s did see Western experts like John Erickson go "behind the Iron Curtain" to get the Soviet side of the story and produce a fuller, and more accurate, view of the conflict in the process. There were even attempts to bring the Soviet experience of the war prevailing to the general Western audience, as in PBS' The Unknown War. However the old reading of the war was pretty well-entrenched by that point, and the "Second Cold War" buried the effort under a doubling down on the old anti-Soviet prejudice. Meanwhile if the end of the Cold War saw some scholars take a more nuanced view the post-Cold War's end-of-history triumphalism and "Greatest Generation" nostalgia did nothing to diminish the old anti-Russian view, while the resurgence of anti-Russian hostility of the past decade has brought with it a reinforcement of credence in Cold War views--with all that implies for the view of the war today, and in turn, all that the view of the war implies for popular and even academic understanding of a good deal else.