SEAN MCMEEKIN: THE STORY BEHIND “STALIN’S WAR”

[PeteS in CA]

SEAN MCMEEKIN: THE STORY BEHIND “STALIN’S WAR”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/04/sean-mcmeekin-the-story-behind-stalins-war.php

Like many Americans with a love for history, I was weaned on popular chronicles of World War II, from glossy secondary works and novels to Hollywood blockbusters, from Casablanca and The Dirty Dozen to Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. The “Good War” always gives Americans a satisfactory conclusion, with Hitler and Nazi evil defeated, Holocaust horrors brought to an end, and the USA emerging on the world stage as a righteous superpower.

Over the years, however, doubts began to creep in about just how righteous the war’s outcome was for millions of Europeans and Asians less fortunate in geography than Americans are. Coming of age in the late Cold War years, I learned to appreciate the wisdom of Churchill’s famous warning about the “Iron Curtain” which had descended on eastern Europe in 1945, not to mention the war’s unfinished business in Asia, from the Korean and Vietnam wars and the fallout resulting from them to the rise of Communist China as a strategic adversary every bit as formidable as the Soviet Union had been, if not more so.
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Some of this neglect reflects Stalin’s own cunning. Aside from the Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939, which did at least warrant condemnation at the time (though it was largely forgotten later), many key Soviet moves were camouflaged by high-profile German actions, from Stalin’s invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 piggybacking on Hitler’s invasion two weeks earlier, to the Soviet invasion of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania launched on June 17, 1940 – the very day a beaten France sued Germany for peace. Few people outside Romania even remember that the Red Army invaded that country, too, on June 28, 1940, giving Bucharest cause to join Barbarossa in 1941.

A less obvious, but no less revealing example, is Stalin’s pledge at the Teheran conference of November 1943 to launch a diversionary offensive on the eastern front simultaneously with Overlord – the planned US-British amphibious assault on the French Channel coast. Since Roosevelt and Churchill themselves forgot to remind Stalin about this in the lead-up to Overlord, allowing the Soviet dictator to betray his promise (the Soviet offensive “Bagration” was launched only 16 days after D-Day, which allowed the Germans to transfer armored divisions westward, opening the field for “Bagration” and ensuring the western Allies were badly bloodied in France), historians can perhaps be forgiven for forgetting all about it, too.
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In the end, it is up to historians to do the legwork and investigate the questions governments such as Russia’s – or that of the United States, for that matter – do not want them to ask. This is what I have tried to do in Stalin’s War, and I hope that interested readers will learn to see the Second World War in a new way.

The commonly accepted views of WW2's Eastern Front significantly mix the real and the airbrushed. As the author pointed out, when the information one has is from the official, sole source, one may "know" airbrushing has been done, but not where and how much. It sounds like this book looks under at least some of the mythic knowledge.