Forgotten WWII anniversary bigger than D-Day

Obama treated Putin with undisguised contempt. At times it looked as if he could only with difficulty resist the temptation to pat Putin on the head. Cameron refused to shake Putin’s hand.

At the same time all Western leaders present have been warmly greeting the new Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko, never mind that Ukrainian army at that time was indiscriminately shelling their own civilians from ground and air with the active participation of well armed neo-Nazi gangs.

One could easily have inferred that Putin was the odd man out or leper at the D-Day celebrations, representing the discredited heirs of the Third Reich. He was there, in fact, as the head of state of the great power that had done far more than the United States and Britain combined to destroy Nazi Germany, the most evil regime in modern history.

Nine out of 10 of all the Nazi soldiers killed in World War II were killed by the Soviet Red Army. At the time this was universally recognized. Winston Churchill paid tribute to the primary Soviet (and Russian) contribution to winning the greatest war in human history by publicly acknowledging, "It was the Red Army that tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht."

Many military historians fully recognized and publicly acknowledged this reality. For example, David Murphy pointed out in the Irish Times, that when D-Day took place, only 11 German divisions directly opposed it. Yet at the same time, the Nazis had 228 divisions fighting the Red Army full-time on the Eastern Front.

At the October 1943 Tehran Summit of the Big Three, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had promised Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that the Red Army would launch a major offensive to support the Allied landings in the West. He kept his word.

On June 22, 1944, the Rd Army launched Operation Bagration, revealing described by German historians as "The Destruction of Army Group Center."

It was the biggest and most decisive military victory of any land battle in World War II and in the words of the famous war correspondent Alexander Werth it was "bigger than Stalingrad."

We must add that it even dwarfed the Battle of Normandy in the destruction it caused to Wehrmacht. In two weeks, Hitler's last great concentration of armies was annihilated in multiple encirclements in Byelorussia or White Russia, today the nation of Belarus.

In a handful of blinding weeks the Red Army using masterful blitzkrieg armored penetration tactics drove from the forests of its heartland all the way to the Vistula River and the outskirts of Warsaw.

Yet the 70th anniversary of Bagration went virtually un-noticed in the American and British press and there was no reference to it in the D-Day celebrations.

The peoples of the Soviet Union, especially the Russians, paid an enormous price for this great victory. According to unbiased historian the casualties of this operation were equally staggering. The German historian Karl-Heinz Freiser has calculated German casualties at more than 399,000 killed, wounded, missing and POW. A conservative estimate of Russian casualties is more than 180,000. Total Russian wartime deaths still remain unclear with estimates ranging from 18 to 24 million, both military and civilian.

This summer is seeing a series of major commemorations and celebration ceremonies for the Bagration Operation, the Battle of Belorussia. The operation also included the liberation of Majdenek, a Nazi Holocaust extermination camp in Poland second only to Auschwitz in its grisly death toll on July 23, 1944 (Subsequently, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz too)

Yet currently not a single major US or British leader has attended or plans to attend any of these ceremonies for Bagration and the liberation of Majdenek.

This continued willful ignorance of the crucial Soviet and Russian contribution to victory in the greatest of all conflicts is shameful. It is also vastly detrimental to the rebuilding of mutual respect and understanding between the great allies of World War II still so crucial for world peace.

Edward Lozansky and Martin Sieff

Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow, Professor of Moscow State and National Research Nuclear Universities

Martin Sieff is a columnist for the Post-Examiner newspapers and a senior fellow of the American University in Moscow

Voice of Russia