[adrian roberts]

laufer
Some interesting details in the article, but I wouldn't have said there was anything new in it.
Of course there has always been a populist view that the war was "England v Germany", as Davies says a precursor to the 1966 World Cup. But no reasonably well-informed person, either then or now, would have denied the more complex picture. The British Empire just about held its own until the USSR and USA entered the war, but it is virtually inconceivable that we could have won it on our own. If we had avoided being kicked out of France at Dunkirk we might have found it easier, but we wouldn't have been able to mount a seaborne invasion of Europe without US support and a massive commitment of German forces to the Eastern Front. We helped win the war militarily, but the effort bankrupted us (rationing got worse after the war) and we never recoverd economically.
The huge Soviet casualties, many of them self-inflicted, are well known. But it doesn't surprise me that the EU refused to pay tribute to those murdered by the NKVD: the Western liberal establishment has always tended to demonise the Nazis but to think of the Bolsheviks as quite decent chaps.
Adrian