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An interesting article on an obscure subject.
================================================== ====================
In article <[email protected]>, United Press
International wrote:
WASHINGTON, June 23 (UPI) -- Two war anniversaries were
celebrated in Russia Sunday. The first is well known in the West,
the second not at all.
But the second was a consequence of the first, and has
profound lessons for U.S. foreign policy and the great issues of war
and peace in the 21st century.
When the late Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was asked to
compile a list of military blunders and elementary disasters to
avoid, he put at the very top of the list, "Invading Russia. It is
always a bad idea."
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler carried out that
bad idea. He launched Operation Barbarossa and in doing so unleashed
the greatest, most epic and easily the bloodiest war in the history
of the world.
In just under four years, 27 million Russian soldiers and
civilians and around 5 million German soldiers died, along with at
least a million European troops allied to the Nazis, in a single
campaign on the flanks of the city of Stalingrad in 1942. The 62nd
anniversary of that conflict, still little appreciated or understood
in the West, was noted by Western military history buffs this past
weekend though outside Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, by few others.
What was even more overlooked were the events that began on
June 22, 1944. On that date, 59 years ago, and three years to the
day after Hitler unleashed Barbarossa, the Red Army launched the
most-crucial single military campaign of its revenge.
Named Operation Bagration, after the great military hero of
the 1812 war against Napoleon Bonaparte, it has gone down in history
as the Battle of Belorussia. And more than Stalingrad, more than
Kursk, it was the battle that broke the back of the German army in
the East.
Wehrmacht staff officers at their operational headquarters
in Minsk watched in disbelief as the Russians used the very tactical
concepts they had used with such effectiveness from June 22, 1941,
for 15 months to conquer vast swathes of European Russia.
In the space of a month, Army Group Center, the great center
of gravity and hard strategic rock on which German domination of
Russia's heartland had rested for three years, was annihilated.
Sweeping Red Army tank columns surrounded 100,000 of the best troops
Nazi Germany still had. In all, the Germans lost 350,000 men. It was
a cataclysmic defeat on an even bigger scale than Stalingrad.
In German military history, the campaign was named "The
Destruction of Army Group Center." It came at the same time, and in
large part made possible, the great Allied victory in the West at
the Battle of Normandy. The scale of destruction visited upon Army
Group Center dwarfed that visited within the Falaise Pocket upon
Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt's formations in the West.
The military achievement of the Soviet armies was far
greater, too. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower gave the green light for
Operation Overlord, the climactic Allied operation of World War II
in the West, some 53 or so Wehrmacht divisions were assembled
throughout Western Europe to meet it. But at the same time, Hitler
had to keep more than 180 Wehrmacht divisions of much greater
operational strength simultaneously fully engaged against the Red
Army alone in the East.
The Battle of Belorussia did more than annihilate the German
army in the East. It also established the Soviet Union as the
dominant Eurasian military power for almost half a century right
down to the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Because of the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that
all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of
Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American
armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there.
That was why the American Republican criticisms of the dying
Franklin Roosevelt for "selling out" Central Europe at the 1945
Yalta conference were so unfair. There was nothing in practical
terms FDR could have done otherwise.
And in any case, FDR did not make the key concessions to
Soviet leader Josef Stalin on Central Europe at all. It was Winston
Churchill, the British statesman who has become the icon-hero of
American internationalist conservatives, who made them.
For it was Churchill, at his meeting in Moscow with Stalin
many months before Yalta, who initialed the famous agreement on the
back of a scrap of paper that acknowledged the Soviet dominant role
in all of the Balkans except Greece. By then, Churchill knew that
Poland, Hungary and most of the rest of Central Europe would fall to
the Soviet armies, too. The Battle of Belorussia had ensured that.
Following the collapse of communism, all of that is history.
But the Battle of Belorussia also holds a crucial lesson on the
strength, endurance and resilience of the Russian people that
policymakers of the Bush administration would do well to ponder
today.
In the three years following June 22, 1941, more than 25
million Russians died at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Not since
the Mongol heirs of Genghis Khan conquered China in the 13th
century, had so much loss of life been visited upon a single nation.
Even a limited nuclear strike upon Russia or the United States today
would not produce such comparable casualties and human suffering.
Yet on June 22, 1944 -- a date very pointedly chosen for the
third anniversary of the terrible invasion -- the Russians struck
back. And, unlike the Germans, they won.
The devastation the Russian people suffered during those
three years from June 1941 to June 1944 dwarfed in scale even the
impoverishment and national humiliation they have experienced over
the past decade since the collapse of the Soviet system. Yet they
surged back from adversity to win the decisive battle of World War
II and became one of the two dominant global superpowers thereafter.
If the Russian people could come back so spectacularly from
the catastrophes inflicted on them by the Nazis in Barbarossa, it
would be a grave mistake to assume they will remain a marginal, let
alone insignificant, power in the years ahead.
That is especially the case when their present president,
Vladimir Putin, has been pushing ahead with remarkable success to
re-establish a powerful, authoritarian centralized governing
structure, and has so far succeeded in stabilizing Russian living
standards after their cataclysmic decline during most of the past
decade. Russia today runs a hefty balance of payments surplus and
its oil exports are soaring. Anyone who predicted these developments
as recently as four years ago within the Washington Beltway would
have been laughed at.
"Do not count Russia out. Do not assume she is a power that
can be ignored or defied in imposing unilateral U.S. policies around
the world in the years ahead." Those are two lessons that President
George W. Bush and his advisers would do well to remember in the
months and years ahead.
So far they have not.
================================================== ====================
In article <[email protected]>, United Press
International wrote:
WASHINGTON, June 23 (UPI) -- Two war anniversaries were
celebrated in Russia Sunday. The first is well known in the West,
the second not at all.
But the second was a consequence of the first, and has
profound lessons for U.S. foreign policy and the great issues of war
and peace in the 21st century.
When the late Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was asked to
compile a list of military blunders and elementary disasters to
avoid, he put at the very top of the list, "Invading Russia. It is
always a bad idea."
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler carried out that
bad idea. He launched Operation Barbarossa and in doing so unleashed
the greatest, most epic and easily the bloodiest war in the history
of the world.
In just under four years, 27 million Russian soldiers and
civilians and around 5 million German soldiers died, along with at
least a million European troops allied to the Nazis, in a single
campaign on the flanks of the city of Stalingrad in 1942. The 62nd
anniversary of that conflict, still little appreciated or understood
in the West, was noted by Western military history buffs this past
weekend though outside Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, by few others.
What was even more overlooked were the events that began on
June 22, 1944. On that date, 59 years ago, and three years to the
day after Hitler unleashed Barbarossa, the Red Army launched the
most-crucial single military campaign of its revenge.
Named Operation Bagration, after the great military hero of
the 1812 war against Napoleon Bonaparte, it has gone down in history
as the Battle of Belorussia. And more than Stalingrad, more than
Kursk, it was the battle that broke the back of the German army in
the East.
Wehrmacht staff officers at their operational headquarters
in Minsk watched in disbelief as the Russians used the very tactical
concepts they had used with such effectiveness from June 22, 1941,
for 15 months to conquer vast swathes of European Russia.
In the space of a month, Army Group Center, the great center
of gravity and hard strategic rock on which German domination of
Russia's heartland had rested for three years, was annihilated.
Sweeping Red Army tank columns surrounded 100,000 of the best troops
Nazi Germany still had. In all, the Germans lost 350,000 men. It was
a cataclysmic defeat on an even bigger scale than Stalingrad.
In German military history, the campaign was named "The
Destruction of Army Group Center." It came at the same time, and in
large part made possible, the great Allied victory in the West at
the Battle of Normandy. The scale of destruction visited upon Army
Group Center dwarfed that visited within the Falaise Pocket upon
Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt's formations in the West.
The military achievement of the Soviet armies was far
greater, too. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower gave the green light for
Operation Overlord, the climactic Allied operation of World War II
in the West, some 53 or so Wehrmacht divisions were assembled
throughout Western Europe to meet it. But at the same time, Hitler
had to keep more than 180 Wehrmacht divisions of much greater
operational strength simultaneously fully engaged against the Red
Army alone in the East.
The Battle of Belorussia did more than annihilate the German
army in the East. It also established the Soviet Union as the
dominant Eurasian military power for almost half a century right
down to the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Because of the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that
all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of
Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American
armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there.
That was why the American Republican criticisms of the dying
Franklin Roosevelt for "selling out" Central Europe at the 1945
Yalta conference were so unfair. There was nothing in practical
terms FDR could have done otherwise.
And in any case, FDR did not make the key concessions to
Soviet leader Josef Stalin on Central Europe at all. It was Winston
Churchill, the British statesman who has become the icon-hero of
American internationalist conservatives, who made them.
For it was Churchill, at his meeting in Moscow with Stalin
many months before Yalta, who initialed the famous agreement on the
back of a scrap of paper that acknowledged the Soviet dominant role
in all of the Balkans except Greece. By then, Churchill knew that
Poland, Hungary and most of the rest of Central Europe would fall to
the Soviet armies, too. The Battle of Belorussia had ensured that.
Following the collapse of communism, all of that is history.
But the Battle of Belorussia also holds a crucial lesson on the
strength, endurance and resilience of the Russian people that
policymakers of the Bush administration would do well to ponder
today.
In the three years following June 22, 1941, more than 25
million Russians died at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Not since
the Mongol heirs of Genghis Khan conquered China in the 13th
century, had so much loss of life been visited upon a single nation.
Even a limited nuclear strike upon Russia or the United States today
would not produce such comparable casualties and human suffering.
Yet on June 22, 1944 -- a date very pointedly chosen for the
third anniversary of the terrible invasion -- the Russians struck
back. And, unlike the Germans, they won.
The devastation the Russian people suffered during those
three years from June 1941 to June 1944 dwarfed in scale even the
impoverishment and national humiliation they have experienced over
the past decade since the collapse of the Soviet system. Yet they
surged back from adversity to win the decisive battle of World War
II and became one of the two dominant global superpowers thereafter.
If the Russian people could come back so spectacularly from
the catastrophes inflicted on them by the Nazis in Barbarossa, it
would be a grave mistake to assume they will remain a marginal, let
alone insignificant, power in the years ahead.
That is especially the case when their present president,
Vladimir Putin, has been pushing ahead with remarkable success to
re-establish a powerful, authoritarian centralized governing
structure, and has so far succeeded in stabilizing Russian living
standards after their cataclysmic decline during most of the past
decade. Russia today runs a hefty balance of payments surplus and
its oil exports are soaring. Anyone who predicted these developments
as recently as four years ago within the Washington Beltway would
have been laughed at.
"Do not count Russia out. Do not assume she is a power that
can be ignored or defied in imposing unilateral U.S. policies around
the world in the years ahead." Those are two lessons that President
George W. Bush and his advisers would do well to remember in the
months and years ahead.
So far they have not.
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