Who do you think is victorious in WWII?

By Thomas Keyes

June 28, 2005

After reading 8 books in English and Russian on the Second World War, including William L. Shirer鈥檚 鈥淭he Rise and Fall of the Third Reich鈥? I have concluded that the role of the USSR was what decided the victory of the Allies over the Axis. It may be the case that even without the USSR, the Allies would have triumphed ultimately, but, of course, this is something that can never be tested.

The only problem is that if you ask the average American who won the war, he will probably say, 鈥淭he US and its Allies did鈥? as if the great defender in the war had been the US. Even at useless-knowledge.com, a former contributor railed at someone from the Netherlands for not showing sufficient gratitude for American sacrifices in WWII on behalf of the Dutch, but I imagine that the same contributor (Hughes) would never berate Americans for not showing sufficient gratitude for the sacrifice made by millions upon millions of Russians and other Soviets. It may well be the case that those millions of dead were what kept Hitler too busy to win in the Western Europe and made the invasion of the US impossible for him. There鈥檚 no doubt that the US was the victor in the Pacific, however.

Even if someone should disagree that the Soviet effort was the keystone in the arch of triumph, from a strategic point of view, he certainly has no grounds to dispute the observation that the number of Soviet dead far exceeded that of any other nation.