World War II: Myths and the Realities

The central claim of this book is true, and conceding it first is the only honest way to read the rest.

Rzheshevsky argues that the Soviet-German front was the decisive theatre of the Second World War and that Western popular history has systematically shrunk it. He states it in figures: the Eastern front tied down up to 70 per cent of German divisions; three of every four Wehrmacht soldiers were engaged there; the Western allies destroyed 176 divisions, under a third of the total routed; and German casualties in the east came to more than 73 per cent of all German losses in the war. These proportions are broadly right and remain right in the current literature.

So does the claim about lend-lease amounting to a small fraction of Soviet wartime production - and he supports it with Western witnesses rather than Soviet assertion, quoting Harry Hopkins in Moscow in 1945, Alan Clark's judgement that Western aid was marginal rather than critical, and an American popular history conceding that in the winter of 1941-42 the Russians alone bore the brunt.

He was a serious man: a professional military historian at the Academy of Sciences, a specialist in the wartime alliance and in Western writing about the war, who read Hillgruber and Weinberg in German and English and cited the British Cabinet papers. After 1991 he was among those who published Soviet diplomatic records that could not have been printed while he wrote this.

A Western reader who thought the war was won at El Alamein and Normandy needed this book, or something like it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.