As the scholar confesses, he was moved to offer it by the shame he felt as his country's President George W. Bush used recent celebrations in Normandy, France, to whitewash American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Operation Overlord started, June 6, 1944. Operation Bagration was launched three weeks later in the Eastern Front to commit 1,600,000 Soviet officers and men, 26,000 artillery pieces, and 4,000 tanks. Unfolded along a 500 kilometre front, this advance of an unheard-of scope forced Hitler to urgently transfer crack troops to the area from Western Europe, so American and British soldiers no longer had to clash with the best of Wehrmacht panzer divisions.
Facing a formidable nazi force, the Soviet Army destroyed 300,000 German officers and men to encircle a large army close to the Baltic coast. The advance reached as far as the gates of Warsaw.
Operation Bagration did a much greater damage to Germany than Operation Overlord-yet few Americans have an explicit idea of it. The Cold War did all it could to wipe "Private Ivan's" feat of valour off the Allied memory, says Professor Davis.
To play down the Allied martial glory of North Africa and Normandy is the last thing he wants. The Soviet war casualties of 27 million are not to be given to oblivion, either. In fact, there were forty Russian KIAs to every dead GI. The American calls to cherish grateful and reverent memory of the fallen soldiers.
Instead, as the West has been lately referring to Soviet WWII soldiers, they are presented as a barbarian horde, vengeful and driven by callous Russian nationalism. True, Stalin committed heinous crimes and made shocking bungles during the war. There were bloodcurdling secret police atrocities, too. Yet Russian soldiers were freedom fighters. The slaves they saved from the nazi yoke greeted them as liberators. The Soviet Army was to them the greatest liberation army the human race had ever known, says the scholar.
