The Battle of the Somme remains one of the bloodiest fights in history having caused approximately 57, casualties for the British Army on the very first day of the battle, blamed on the inexperience and patchy training of the British soldiers.
Must Read Strongest militaries in comparing global armed forces. About , soldiers of British and Commonwealth forces died, were wounded or went missing during the fight, while French losses were more than , On the other hand, the German Empire suffered about , casualties.
The Allied forces seized a strip of land just 20 miles wide and 6 miles long from German possession at the cost of a huge number of casualties. Operation Bagration With total casualties of over 1. The operation resulted in the devastation of 28 of 38 German Army divisions. About , to , men from the German Army were killed, wounded or captured. The Red Army suffered more than , casualties, of which , were killed or missing in the action, and over , men were wounded.
The Soviet forces liberated a large amount of their territory from Germany and significantly destroyed the German Army Group Centre. Fought on the Gallipoli peninsula, the World War I battle turned into a disaster when the Allied powers failed to control the sea route from Europe to Russia.
British and French vessels initiated naval attack on the Dardanelles Straits in February , while troops from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula on land in April of the same year.
The invasion ended unsuccessful as the Allied forces experienced fierce counter-attack from Ottoman troops. Bad weather, insufficient artillery, and inaccurate maps and intelligence also contributed to the failure of the Allied forces.
Battle of France The Battle of France, or the Fall of France as it is more popularly known, accounted for total casualties of more than , soldiers from Allied and Axis forces. About , men of the Allied armies were dead or wounded, while the Axis suffered over , casualties. The French military resistance ended when German forces occupied Paris in June and France was subsequently occupied by Germany under an armistice signed between the nations.
France remained under Axis occupation until liberated by the Allied forces in In the context of various reactionary ideological trends in recent years, which range from German historiography minimizing the horrors of the Nazi regime to Reagan's placing a wreath at Bitberg, Vilsmaier deserves applause.
However, the film did not receive a positive response, especially from critics in Great Britain and the United States who objected to any attempt to humanize German foot soldiers. They took exception particularly to several incidents that showed them taking mercy on Russian soldiers or civilians. Obviously they still adhere to the Manichean worldview of WWII in which "our" side never raped, plundered or murdered innocent civilians. Another possible factor was worry over the uncompromisingly antiwar vision of the movie.
If the new Germany was to take its place in helping to once again "civilize" the East, it would be necessary to instill a fighting mood among its youth. Alluding to the possibly subversive effect of the film, Peter Millar wrote in the January 31, London Times:. On a wet Friday night, an audience of noisy, mostly young, Berliners who had rolled in from the Kurfurstendamm, beers and popcorn in hand, filed out after the credits in stunned silence.
If, despite the international pressure to ''play a grown-up part'' in UN peacekeeping efforts, no German government can raise a majority for sending troops to Bosnia, Stalingrad will have played its part. Stalingrad is expected to open in London in late spring. Turning now to the importance of Stalingrad for the Soviet people, it would be useful first of all to consider the role of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music not only symbolizes the powerful will of the Soviet people to resist fascism, but the difficulties they faced in trying to build socialism under the rule of a capricious dictator.
In , when the Nazis were at the gates of Leningrad, Shostakovich was serving as a volunteer firefighter. Although he was the Soviet Union's most respected composer, he occasionally found himself on Stalin's wrong side.
Leningrad, considered an Old Bolshevik stronghold, had suffered from the purges more than any other city. Shostakovich, who had enjoyed the patronage of Marshal Tukhachevsky, had every reason to live in fear after his compatriot was executed.
While the Seventh Symphony was characterized by the sort of upbeat and optimistic mood found in most of Shostakovich's large-scale works, the Eighth Symphony was decidedly subdued, introspective and mournful--as befits a musical work composed in what appeared to be the final days of the socialist republic. The work was condemned as "formalist" after WWII and never received the kind of popular and critical acclaim of his other work.
However, it certainly is true to the spirit of as well as being one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. It is something that never fails to confound bourgeois musicology, how one of the great composers of the modern epoch could have attained such sublime levels while being forced to follow the rules of artistic commissars. Shostakovich's sphinx-like visage, always seen behind thick eyeglasses, was the perfect counterpart to his artistic psyche, one that resists superficial interpretations.
This, however, does not prevent them from being put forward. Turning to Elizabeth Wilson's "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered," we are startled to learn that the composer's main concern in was whether a possible Stalin victory would lead to "a return to the pre-war policies of lawlessness and terror.
A year of happiness, joy, and victory. This year will bring us much joy. I am convinced of this, and therefore experience the greatest joy. Now we are apart; how I miss you; would that together we could rejoice at the victories of the Red Army led by its Great Commander, comrade Stalin. Of course, for those of us not disoriented by anticommunist mythology, a much more straightforward explanation is possible.
While critical of Stalin, the composer continued to believe completely in the worth of the socialist project. In a society dominated by Byzantine tributes to the leader, it should come as no surprise that formulations such as these crop up in private correspondence.
In understanding the will of the Soviet people to fight fascism, it is necessary to dispense with one-dimensional explanations. Although there was genuine fear of Stalin and the NKVD, there was also a kind of patriotism that had never been present before. Superficial interpretations of the "Great Patriotic War" dismiss the social factor almost entirely. They claim that Stalin's appeal to defend "Mother Russia" was drawn from the repertory of the Tsarist empire. What this fails to explain, however, is the determination of the Soviets to fight against overwhelming odds, while the same exact patriotic call to arms fell upon deaf ears in This sort of complex interaction between patriotism, class consciousness and reverence for Stalin is found in abundant supply in "Two Hundred Days of Fire: Accounts by Participants and Witnesses of the Battle of Stalingrad," put out by Progress Publishers in Moscow in Levkin, we learn of the fate of a young shoemaker:.
He aroused no suspicion and the Germans admitted him to their HQ to repair boots. When the opportunity presented itself Sasha stole secret nazi documents and handed them to our troops.
Once as he was crossing the front line he was caught red-handed. He was inhumanly tortured and then hanged from a tree. This youth appears as a key figure in Vilsmaier's film, but is altered to serve the director's purpose. Instead of being a young Communist, he is turned into an innocent bystander who stumbles behind German lines into the squad whose fate we are tracking. Later in the film, when the German army is facing immanent defeat, civilians are being rounded up and executed on the flimsiest of charges.
Members of the squad are assigned to the firing squad that is about to shoot a group of Russian civilians, including the young shoemaker whom they had befriended earlier. When a lieutenant pleads for the boy's life, not only is he brushed aside by the Nazi commanding officer, he obeys the order to shoot him.
It is of course one of the crowning ironies of history that Anglo-American imperialism has achieved through economic and military pressure what Hitler failed to accomplish. What had nearly disappeared from the Soviet Union by the time of its collapse was the kind of elan that people like Shostakovich once felt. When you lose the commitment to socialism, it is very easy to be persuaded that the free market is a real alternative, especially when you are either a bureaucrat or member of the intelligentsia.
Despite the near unanimous acceptance of capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union, there are signs that those at the bottom are uneasy with the changes, especially since the new free market has meant nothing but ruin and degradation. Perhaps the most recalcitrant are those who sacrificed the greatest, during the Battle of Stalingrad and other horrific showdowns. An elderly colonel, who declined to give his name, bent stiffly to place three carnations.
He spoke for many veterans when he said curtly: 'I didn't fight in the second world war. I fought in the Great Patriotic War. The whole world lives because of the Soviet Union.
They failed. Later it found a way of doing it through our own leaders,' he said. Proudly bringing out his 50th anniversary medal, he said he emigrated to Israel last year. I will never spit on the country where I was born and for which I fought,' he added. Many feel this week's ceremonies are small compensation for the economic toughness of their current lives and for the disappearance of their country.
There is a tendency on the part of the anti-Stalinist left to look at the whole Soviet experience as a nightmare that is finally over. Now that the slate has been wiped clean, it is possible to create a new kind of socialism that will avoid all of the sins of the Stalinist past. Have they forgotten that Stalin and Mao made Hitler look like a bourgeois humanist?
Do they really miss the Ceaucescus and Pol Pots? It is impossible to resurrect Djugashvili's monster, so why join the Volkogonovs, Pipes, Figes and their chorus in trying to keep it alive?
Weissman's objection to "statist" containment seems oddly bereft of class content. Although some of Against the Current's editors are outspokenly "Third Campist," Weissman professes fairly orthodox Trotskyist views on the Soviet Union. However, her Stalinophobia simply prevents her from seeing the dialectical complexity of that society, one in which people fought against overwhelming odds to defend a system they viewed as socialist, no matter the character of the government sitting atop collectively owned property.
It is simply impossible to view the former Soviet Union as some kind of runaway monster with no connection to Marxism. The collective ownership of the means of production characterized the state from its inception in to its collapse at the hands of Yeltsin. The institutional roots of the Soviet regime explains not only the heroic resistance at Stalingrad, it also explains the help that the USSR gave to countries fighting against colonialism and imperialism, from Vietnam to Cuba. Although the aid was often doled out with an eyedropper, at least the Kremlin was the main obstacle of NATO's goals in contradistinction to the situation today, when Putin openly discusses Russian enrolment with his friends in the West.
Understanding the former Soviet Union dialectically means dispensing with obsessions over "evil" personalities. Has been underestimated by us…. At the start of the war we reckoned with about enemy divisions. Now we have already counted … When a dozen have been smashed, then the Russian puts up another dozen. But as the weather grew bitterly cold, the German offensive ground to a halt, and was pushed back by a Soviet counteroffensive. The front line froze in place some kilometers west of Moscow — and kilometers east of Berlin.
During the bitter winter months, the German High Command began planning for a renewed counter-offensive in the spring, hoping to achieve the decisive victory that had evaded them in Thus Operation Blue was born , an attack to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus and then drive on to the Volga. Launched in June , it caught the Red Army off-guard, as they had expected a renewed push towards Moscow.
Within two weeks, the Wehrmacht advanced more than miles. Hitler, increasingly directing military operations in Berlin, decided to shift his offensive in early August.
For both symbolic and strategic reasons, he ordered the Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus to advance towards the city of Stalingrad. By August 23, the Germans were in the suburbs, where fighting turned ferocious. Bombed into rubble by German aircraft and artillery, the city became impassable to tanks and an ideal terrain for defenders. Outnumbered and without air cover, the 62nd and 64th Soviet Armies suffered enormous losses: For example, the 13th Guards Division, entering the battle with over 10, men, suffered 80 percent casualties in its first week in the city alone.
In September, Stalin sent General Vasily Chuikov to take command of the embattled survivors of the 62nd Army in the city itself. They were tenaciously clinging to rubble on the west bank of the Volga, with only a few hundred meters between its front lines and the river to its back. When I got to army headquarters I was in a vile mood. Three of my deputies had fled … But the main thing was that we had no dependable combat units, and we needed to hold out for three or four days … We immediately began to take the harshest possible actions against cowardice.
On the 14th I shot the commander and commissar of one regiment, and a short while later, I shot two brigade commanders and their commissars. This caught everyone off guard. We made sure news of this got to the men. Despite his brutality, Chuikov earned the respect of his soldiers, taking the same risks they did.
He was buried alive several times by German bombardments and kept his headquarters in the city, less than meters from the German front line. By November, the German High Command had committed 1. As the fighting reached its fevered peak in the city itself, Gen.
Alexander Vasilevsky and Gen. Georgy Zhukov at Stavka the Red Army High Command came up with a master stroke to counter the enormous pressure on the city. They proposed a massive double encirclement of the entire German Sixth Army. Stalin approved their plan — Operation Uranus — on November Over a million Soviet soldiers struck on the snowy, foggy morning of November They drove into the weakly guarded flanks of the German Sixth Army.
Within four days, they had encircled , Axis soldiers, trapped in a frozen wasteland in and around Stalingrad. German attempts to break into the pocket failed.
Over the next three months, the Red Army began to squeeze the life out of them.
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