Head-on | Who really beat Nazi Germany in World War II?

Since 1945, the popular narrative in global film, literature and media has credited the allied victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War to the United States, Britain and France.

The fact that troops from the Soviet Union captured Berlin on May 2, 1945, and planted the Soviet flag on the roof of the Berlin Reichstag is downplayed in Western media. Two days earlier, on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide with a gunshot to the head as Soviet troops stormed the outskirts of the German capital.

World leaders gathered in Moscow on May 8-9 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. There were several absentees from the victorious allies — notably Britain, France and the US.

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In prominent attendance though was China’s President Xi Jinping. China fought on the side of the allies in WWII. The West’s boycott of the commemoration is not surprising.

The 80th anniversary celebration in Moscow of the defeat of Nazi Germany exposed the false Western narrative of how the war was won. Without Germany’s erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, fighting on the side of the forces of the US, Britain and France the war would not have been won.

Germany made a fatal miscalculation on June 22, 1941 when Adolf Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union, till then his ally. That decision was the turning point in the war.

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On hearing the news of Germany’s invasion of its former Soviet ally, Britain’s embattled wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew he had been thrown a lifeline.

The Soviet Union would lose over 10 million soldiers during the war, dwarfing the losses of the US (4.07 lakh), Britain (3.83 lakh) and France (5.67 lakh).

The Moscow commemoration on May 8-9 will also reveal the role Indian soldiers played in the war. Over two million soldiers from colonial India fought on the front lines in Italy, North Africa and East Asia. Nearly 90,000 were killed.

The British and French Empires both used soldiers from their colonies. Many were pushed up front as fodder to absorb German and Italian fire.

Britain at the time was on its knees. It had survived the London Blitz from September 1940 to May 1941. The Royal Air Force (RAF) protected the island from waves of the German Luftwaffe. The Royal Navy too had kept the smaller German navy at bay. But Churchill knew that despite the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on the side of the allies, American manpower and weapons were critical for Britain’s survival.

The US, however, was not keen to enter yet another European war after the First World War in 1914-18. President Franklin Roosevelt believed that America had barely emerged from its worst ever economic depression between 1929 and 1939. The last thing it needed was to be drawn into a global conflict in which it had no stake.

Luck though was on Churchill’s side. Japan’s devastating air attack on the US naval base Pearl Harbour in Hawai on December 7, 1941 forced the US into the war.

Churchill was dining at his country retreat Chequers with the US ambassador Gil Winant and President Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe Averell Harriman.

Peter Grier described the scene in an article in the Christian Science Monitor: “A butler brought in a portable radio for the party to listen to the BBC Home Service. When the attack was confirmed Churchill leapt to his feet and said he must declare war on Japan at once. His guests dissuaded him from this impetuous act, historian Walter Reid recounts in Churchill 1940-1945, his book about wartime relations among the Allied leaders.

“The prime minister phoned Roosevelt, and asked, ‘Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?’ FDR responded that it was true, and they were all in the same boat now. To Churchill, this meant one thing above all: victory. Britain was no longer alone. Finally, the US would enter the war.”

Churchill wrote in his history of WWII: “Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

With four superpowers — the United States, the Soviet Union and the British and French Empires — now arrayed against Germany and Japan, the tide of the Second World War began to turn in 1942. By 1944 the Soviet army had intensified its assault on the Western front.

While Japan made lightning strikes in the East, defeating the British and capturing Singapore, Burma and the Andaman islands, America’s nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in the eastern theatre in August 1945.

1945-2025

For the world leaders gathered in Moscow, the Soviet victory 80 years ago marked the fracture of the world into two poles: the US-led West and NATO on the one hand and the Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact Powers, extending all the way to divided East Germany on the other.

Through the 40-year Cold War, the West was dismissive of the Soviet role in helping the allies win the Second World War. Popular films like The Guns of Navarone and The Longest Day focused on the heroics of American, British and other allied soldiers during the war. The Soviet Union was largely blacked out. So was the key part played by more than two million Indian soldiers from the British Empire.

The Russia-Ukraine war has revived memories of the brutalities of World War II – brutalities that gentrified Western Europe believed it had forever left behind. President Donald Trump’s dismissal of Europe as a military partner has served to heighten anxiety in London, Berlin and Paris. With Chinese President Xi Jinping in close proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow at last week’s Victory Day celebrations, those anxieties have sharpened.

The new world order is no longer driven by the West. With India set to emerge as the world’s third largest economy by 2027, two of the world’s three biggest economies will again soon be Asian — China and India.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.