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In the East, we had an ally who had nothing like the same concern for human life. Eisenhower, to provide an obvious example, was criticized for failing to reach Berlin in the last weeks of the war. I think he was absolutely right. Berlin was designated inside the Soviet zone. What would Eisenhower have said to the mothers and wives of American or British soldiers who had died to achieve a symbolic triumph? Joseph Stalin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and Marshal Ivan Konev were perfectly happy to see 100,000 Soviet soldiers die to achieve the great symbolic triumph of taking Berlin.
Having said all this, we have to be humble about the relative role that the Western Allies had in the final defeat of the Germans. To be sure, the United States played an enormous part in providing the munitions and the transport that enabled the Soviets to reach Berlin as well as the British to keep fighting. But we must recognize that the Soviets paid the blood price, when one looks at the raw numbers. I don't mean that the war was a happy experience for British and American veterans; it was very terrible. But in ballpark terms, during the course of the war, American and British ground troops killed about 200,000 German soldiers, while the Russians killed about 3.5 million. The United States, Britain, and France together lost about 1 million dead in the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million dead. Although we can be grateful that on the whole—with some notable question marks around strategic bombing—the Western Allies did preserve civilized values through the war, we needed the help of some very uncivilized people in order to bring down the Nazi tyranny. Had it not been for the Soviets, who were prepared to lavish these huge quantities of blood, then an awful lot more American and British boys would have had to die to defeat Hitler.
You make a compelling case for the moral complexity of the end of the war in Europe. Have military writers tended to embrace simplistic or purist stances about the war (indeed, about war in general), either rendering it a triumphalist crusade or advancing such lofty moral standards that any resort to war would be almost unthinkable?
There are two types of military history. One is what we might call romantic military history. I was talking to the military historian Russell Weigley shortly before he died about a very well-known historian who had a lot of success writing books about the American fighting man. Weigley said that he was sad to see a respected historian raising monuments rather than writing history. In the same breath, Weigley noted that a veteran told him that these books make us feel good about ourselves. There is nothing wrong with this romantic military history as long as we recognize its limitations. It is a celebration. But we must also ask the hard questions.
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