The Myth of America’s Defeat of the Third Reich

Biden and the US media keep the false narrative alive at Normandy

US soldiers (left) and Soviet Red Army soldiers meet on a destroyed bridge over the Elbe River in central Germany on April 25, two weeks before the surrender of Germany. (TASS and US Army archives)

It is the week of June 6-13, and the airwaves and newspaper front pages in the US are filled with stories glorifying the day the Allied forces of the US, UK, Canada (along with some French troops anxious to help liberate their occupied country) about how “the largest amphibious landing in history” stormed beaches along France’s western coast. on June 6, 1944.

Most if not all of those patriotic pieces declare that the the successful assault of some 150,000 Allied troops “turned the tide” of World War II against the Third Reich and Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht. 

The report on D-Day sent out to subscribers by the Associated Press for example, in its headline story, effusively called the landings along the French coast on June 6 1944 “The Invasion that Changed the Course  of World War II.”

CNN reported that the amphibious assault on Nazi-occupied France “laid the foundation for the defeat of Nazi Germany.”

None of the US reports celebrating the 80th anniversary of D-Day mentioned the heroic struggle of the soldiers and pilots of the Soviet Union’s Red Army, which by the end of 1942 had effectively defeated the Germans at Stalingrad and that by the fall of 1943, less than a year later, had driven the German army back from the outskirts Moscow, was driving it back along most of Germany’s Eastern Front from the Mediterranean and Black Seas to the Baltic Sea. 

The Germans had been defeated in Stalingrad, Ukraine had been liberated by the end of that year, and critically important, the Germans were defeated in Rumania, losing their only access to the oil needed by their highly mechanized war machine. Indeed, well before the US and the other allied forces finally opened a western front in the European war, the German army was already in retreat across the whole eastern front line.  

Essentially, Between June 1941 (six months before Pearl Harbor) when Hitler launched a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, it was the Soviet Red Army, on its own, though with significant US aid in the form of ammunition, planes and trucks, that was battling the Germans on the ground in Europe. It was a situation that endured all through 1942 and into June 1944 when the US finally joined the battle with the Normandy landings (with the exception of the US/British Invasion of Italy in July 1943).

The notion that the US-led invasion of the Normandy beaches somehow “won the war,” of even “turned the tide’ of World War II is a carefully constructed and coddled American myth. It is true that the US largely won the Pacific war against Japan, but it was the Soviets that won the European war against Germany. (The Italian people deserve the honors too for winning the war against Mussolini’s fascist government, toppling it and executing Il Duce — the only Axis country were that happened.)

When US and Russian troops met at the Elbe River in the middle of Germany on April 25, 1945, the enlisted men who had been doing all the fighting against German forces, greeted each other as comrades, sharing hugs and back slaps and trading gifts of cigarettes and alcoholic beverages.

US and Soviet soldier meeting as allies and comrades at the Elbe River. (TASS and US Army archives)

The truth was, the US and British governments and their military leaders had not rushed to open a Western front as the USSR’s Stalin was repeatedly urging them to do to take pressure on his hard-pressed Red Army during the brutal years of 1942, 1943 and early 1944. Their attitude was to let the Wehrmacht and Red Army batter each other as long as possible before joining battle.

It was only when the Red Army had finally broken the back of the German Eastern Front and had the Wehrmacht on the run that the plan “Operation Overlord,” the name of the Normandy landing, was launched. And that was because the Allies wanted to avoid what they sviewed as the nightmare of a Red Army sweep over all of Germany and perhaps further into  France where the Communist Party and French partisan fighters, many of them leftists, were popular.

If the US military played any role in “turning the tide” in World War II it was the US Air Corps, with its massive numbers of bombers which in mid-1943 joined the British in what was essentially a nonstop bombing campaign by heavy four-engine bombers hitting major urban industrial centers like Hamburg, Bremen, Essen, Cologne  and Dusseldorf as well as bridges, dams and rail centers. Among the early targets were facilities used to make oil from coal, particularly after the Reich had lost its access to Rumanian oil. 

President Biden, who chose to make his D-Day speech in Normandy a pep talk for aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia, could have cited the fact that Russia and the US were allies when those beaches were stormed. But of course that would have meant delving into why the US, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, quickly moved from the position of initially appearing to be a friend of the new non-Communist Russia to a position of encouraging NATO membership for former Soviet satellite countries and former member soviets (states) of the USSR. Since some of these new NATO members actually border the new Russian Federation, this had to have been viewed in Moscow as a hostile and threatening act.

So too of course was the development by the US and Britain of the atomic bomb, a project which both those governments sought mightily, if unsuccessfully to from its inception keep secret from the Soviet Union. Indeed as the Soviet Union was a critical ally in the war against Germany (as I document in my recent book )) the US was planning to use the as yet un proven weapon against its war-time ally the USSR as early as 1950. That was the year when the Truman administration hoped to have an arsenal of 400 Nagasaki-sized bombs available — enough to destroy every city in the USSR.

The only reason that horrific genocidal attack never happened was that on Aug. 29, 1949, when the US still only had 250 atom bombs, and not enough planes to deliver  them to targets the vast Soviet Union, the Soviets successfully detonated their own plutonium bomb — a carbon copy of the Nagasaki bomb.  

The plans for that weapon were provided to struggling and underfunded Soviet atomic scientists  by a young idealistic American volunteer spy at Los Alamos, Ted Hall. Only 18 when he was hired out of his junior year as a physics major at Harvard in late 1943, Hall rightly by mid-1944 realized Germany was losing the war and would never get a nuclear bomb of its own, and that the real danger was a post-war US with a monopoly on the bomb. Hall decided to volunteer his secret detailed knowledge of the bomb’s construction to the Soviets to prevent that from happening.  

It was a decision that many of the fraternizing US and Soviet troops meeting at the Elbe river at the end of the European part of WWII in early June of 1945 would at the time have probably heartily endorsed, especially if they’d known what dark plans the US had for its new super weapon (about which, of course, they and the rest of the world knew nothing until the dropping of the first a-bomb on Hiroshima two months later on Aug. 6, 1945).