I think it's hard to find a person on earth who hasn't heard about World War II. Back in school years, we had to study a large number of textbooks, which told in detail about this sad period in the history of our country. But, no matter how detailed the Second World War in our textbooks, one question has consistently remained and remains controversial: how many people died in World War II.
How many people died in Russia
After I read and listened to a lot of information about World War II again, I realized that the exact amount no one has been able to count the dead.
It's no secret to anyone that Russia suffered huge losses in WWII. FROM Among the dead people were not only the military, but also the civilian population of the country. The war years were terrible and black. Everywhere there was death, hunger and poverty. Over time, very young boys (15-17 years old) began to be taken to the front, we all understand that at that age they were just children. Nonetheless, The Russian people fought for their freedom and independence with particular courage.
According to the latest official figures, the number of Russian people who died during World War II is 26 million 562 thousand people.
How many people died in Germany during WWII
Everyone knows that the German army also fought very hard for its victory. to the front was about 9 million mobilized human, about half of them died, respectively, 4.5 million. As for the losses among the civilian population of Germany during the Second World War, the numbers are 3 million. AT total amount It turns out that during the Second World War lost about 12 million people. Don't you think it's strange that this figure is much less than in Russia?
How many people died in World War II
As you already understood, every country during the Second World War suffered really serious losses both among the military and among the civilian population. Do not forget that in addition to Russia and Germany, many more countries took part in the war (Ukraine, Belarus, and so on), and each of them lost one or another number of people. I tried for a very long time to find exact figure the number of dead people in World War II, but I never succeeded, because this the number is so huge that hardly anyone will be able to recognize her. I can only say that according to the latest data, the number of deaths during the Second World War exceeds 100 million people.
I think that The Second World War will forever remain in our memory.. The main thing is that we never forget about those who gave us our bright future, and about the bitter price our ancestors paid for the victory.
The tragedy of the Great Patriotic War claimed many lives not only from the side of the Soviet Union and countries in the commonwealth, but also from Nazi Germany. In the Great Patriotic war, which began on June 22, 1941 at 4 o'clock in the morning Moscow time, according to the USSR, 6 million 329 thousand military personnel died - the figures include those killed and missing. 555 thousand died not as a result of violent death, but from diseases and incidents of a local nature. 4 million 559 thousand people were captured by enemy troops and are considered missing. 500 thousand people were mobilized, but not enlisted in the official military forces. Of these, 1 thousand 784 people were captured.
The military losses of Nazi Germany are two times less: 3 million 604 thousand people died during the hostilities, and the missing soldiers are also included in them. About 3 ml 576 thousand soldiers were captured by Soviet troops and 442 thousand of them died. On the first day of the military operation, both sides suffered losses. The USSR lost 1200 aircraft, 800 of which were blown up right on the airfields before the start of the flights. After the first setbacks, the government of the Soviet Union carried out an active military policy, as a result of which 120 thousand aircraft were produced, 870 units. military equipment, 90 thousand tanks, 300 thousand mortars and small artillery equipment.
Over the entire period of hostilities, which lasted 6 years (taking into account the outbreak of war in European countries), 32 million people died, and 35 million were injured, according to official figures. Forty countries were involved in the course of the war, where hostilities were directly fought, and sixty allied countries. The 1,700 million people of the world population - this is the amount of the population covered during the war - this is 80% of the total number of inhabitants by world indicators in those years. The Great Patriotic War covered the area with an area of 22 mil. sq. kilometers.
During four years of active hostilities in the USSR, 1700 cities and about 70 villages were allowed, 32 plants and factories were destroyed, 98 thousand collective farms were plundered. in terms of the amount of funds spent on restoration, the USSR occupies a leading position: 260 billion dollars were required to pay off military expenses and restore the destruction. Compared with the famous countries of Europe and Nazi Germany, the latter needed 48 billion dollars to restore their country, France and Poland, approximately the same amount - 20 billion, England the least - 6.9 billion dollars.
In 1990, alternative theories emerged as to how many people participated and died in the Great Patriotic War. Discrepancies were recorded with official data, referring to the fact that, allegedly, the country's government was trying to hide the true scale of the losses. B. Sokolov, candidate of science in history, believes that during the six years of the war (from 1939 to 1945) 26 million 400 thousand people died and 4 million were taken prisoner and are considered missing. In 2012, Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Zemskov published a paper in which he describes that real losses do not exceed 12.55 million military and 4.5 million citizens of the USSR, but these figures are already much higher than the official figure.
Download this material:
(1
rated, rating: 4,00
out of 5)
Estimates of the losses of Soviet citizens in the Great Patriotic War have a huge spread: from 19 to 36 million. The first detailed calculations were made by a Russian emigrant, demographer Timashev in 1948 - he got 19 million. B. Sokolov called the maximum figure - 46 million. The latest calculations show that only the military of the USSR lost 13.5 million people, while the total losses were over 27 million.
At the end of the war, long before any historical and demographic studies, Stalin gave a figure: 5.3 million people were killed in the war. He included in it the missing persons (obviously, in most cases - prisoners). In March 1946, in an interview with a correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, the generalissimo estimated the casualties at 7 million. The increase was due to civilians who died in the occupied territory or were driven to Germany.
In the West, this figure was perceived with skepticism. Already in the late 1940s, the first calculations of the demographic balance of the USSR for the war years, contradicting Soviet data, appeared. An illustrative example is the estimates of the Russian emigrant, demographer N.S. Timashev, published in the New York "New Journal" in 1948. Here is his methodology:
The all-Union census of the population of the USSR in 1939 determined its number at 170.5 million. The increase in 1937-1940 reached, according to his assumption, almost 2% per year. Consequently, the population of the USSR by the middle of 1941 should have reached 178.7 million. But in 1939-1940 Western Ukraine and Belarus, the three Baltic states, the Karelian lands of Finland were annexed to the USSR, and Romania returned Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Therefore, after subtracting the Karelian population who went to Finland, the Poles who fled to the west, and the Germans repatriated to Germany, these territorial acquisitions gave a population increase of 20.5 million. Considering that the birth rate in the annexed territories was no more than 1% per year, that is, lower than in the USSR, and also taking into account the short time interval between their entry into the USSR and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the author determined the population growth for these territories by mid-1941 at 300 thousand. Sequentially adding the above figures, he received 200 .7 million who lived in the USSR on the eve of June 22, 1941.
Further, Timashev divided 200 million into three age groups, again relying on the data of the All-Union Census of 1939: adults (over 18 years old) -117.2 million, teenagers (from 8 to 18 years old) - 44.5 million, children ( under 8 years old) - 38.8 million. At the same time, he took into account two important circumstances. First: in 1939-1940 from childhood two very weak annual flows, born in 1931-1932, during the famine, which covered large areas of the USSR and negatively affected the size of the adolescent group, passed into the group of teenagers. Second, there were more people over 20 in the former Polish lands and the Baltic states than in the USSR.
Timashev supplemented these three age groups with the number of Soviet prisoners. He did it in the following way. By the time of the elections of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937, the population of the USSR reached 167 million, of which voters made up 56.36% of the total figure, and the population over 18 years old, according to the All-Union Census of 1939, reached 58.3%. The resulting difference of 2%, or 3.3 million, in his opinion, was the population of the Gulag (including the number of those executed). This turned out to be close to the truth.
Next, Timashev moved on to post-war figures. The number of voters included in the voting lists for the elections of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the spring of 1946 amounted to 101.7 million. Adding to this figure 4 million prisoners of the Gulag calculated by him, he received 106 million of the adult population in the USSR at the beginning of 1946. Calculating the teenage group, he took as a basis 31.3 million students in primary and high school in 1947/48 academic year, compared with the data of 1939 (31.4 million schoolchildren within the borders of the USSR until September 17, 1939) and received a figure of 39 million. Calculating the children's group, he proceeded from the fact that by the beginning of the war the birth rate in the USSR was approximately 38 per thousand, the second quarter of 1942, it fell by 37.5%, and in 1943-1945 - by half.
Subtracting from each annual group the percentage due according to the normal mortality table for the USSR, he received 36 million children at the beginning of 1946. Thus, according to his statistical calculations, in the USSR at the beginning of 1946 there were 106 million adults, 39 million adolescents and 36 million children, and a total of 181 million. Timashev’s conclusion is as follows: the population of the USSR in 1946 was 19 million less than in 1941.
Approximately the same results were obtained by others. Western explorers. In 1946, under the auspices of the League of Nations, F. Lorimer's book "The Population of the USSR" was published. According to one of his hypotheses, during the war the population of the USSR decreased by 20 million people.
In an article published in 1953 "Casual losses in the Second World War", the German researcher G. Arntz concluded that "20 million people is the figure closest to the truth of the total losses of the Soviet Union in the Second World War." The collection, which includes this article, was translated and published in the USSR in 1957 under the title "Results of the Second World War". Thus, four years after Stalin's death, Soviet censorship let the figure of 20 million into the open press, thereby indirectly recognizing it as true and making it the property of at least specialists - historians, international affairs, etc.
Only in 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to the Swedish Prime Minister Erlander, admitted that the war against fascism "claimed two tens of millions of lives Soviet people". Thus, in comparison with Stalin, Khrushchev increased the Soviet human losses by almost 3 times.
In 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, Brezhnev spoke of "more than 20 million" human lives lost by the Soviet people in the war. In the 6th and final volume of the fundamental “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union” published at the same time, it was stated that out of the 20 million dead, almost half “are military and civilians killed and tortured by the Nazis in the occupied Soviet territory.” In fact, 20 years after the end of the war, the USSR Ministry of Defense recognized the death of 10 million Soviet servicemen.
Four decades later, the head of the Center military history Russian Institute Russian history RAS Professor G. Kumanev, in a footnote, told the truth about the calculations that military historians carried out in the early 1960s when preparing the “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”: “Our losses in the war were then determined at 26 million. But it turned out to be high authorities the accepted figure is "over 20 million".
As a result, "20 million" not only took root for decades in historical literature, but also became part of the national identity.
In 1990, M. Gorbachev published a new figure of losses, obtained as a result of research by demographic scientists, - "almost 27 million people."
In 1991, B. Sokolov's book “The Price of Victory. The Great Patriotic War: the unknown about the known. In it, direct military losses of the USSR were estimated at about 30 million, including 14.7 million military personnel, and "actual and potential losses" - at 46 million, including 16 million unborn children.
A little later, Sokolov clarified these figures (brought new losses). He received the loss figure as follows. From the size of the Soviet population at the end of June 1941, which he determined at 209.3 million, he subtracted 166 million who, in his opinion, lived in the USSR on January 1, 1946 and received 43.3 million dead. Then, from the resulting number, he subtracted the irretrievable losses of the armed forces (26.4 million) and received the irretrievable losses of the civilian population - 16.9 million.
“It is possible to name the number of killed Red Army soldiers during the entire war close to reality, if we determine that month of 1942, when the losses of the Red Army were taken into account most fully and when it had almost no losses as prisoners. For a number of reasons, we chose November 1942 as such a month and extended the ratio of the number of dead and wounded obtained for it to the entire period of the war. As a result, we came to a figure of 22.4 million killed in battle and died from wounds, illnesses, accidents and shot by the tribunals of Soviet military personnel.
To the 22.4 million received in this way, he added 4 million fighters and commanders of the Red Army who died in enemy captivity. And so it turned out 26.4 million irretrievable losses suffered by the armed forces.
In addition to B. Sokolov, similar calculations were made by L. Polyakov, A. Kvasha, V. Kozlov, and others. which is almost impossible to determine exactly. It was this difference that they considered the total loss of life.
In 1993, the statistical study “Secrecy Removed: Losses” was published. armed forces USSR in wars, military actions and military conflicts”, prepared by a team of authors headed by General G. Krivosheev. Previously secret archival documents became the main source of statistical data, primarily the reporting materials of the General Staff. However, the losses of entire fronts and armies in the first months, and the authors specifically stipulated this, were obtained by them by calculation. In addition, the reports of the General Staff did not include the losses of units that were organizationally not part of the Soviet armed forces (army, navy, border and internal troops NKVD of the USSR), but who took a direct part in the battles - the people's militia, partisan detachments, underground groups.
Finally, the number of prisoners of war and missing persons is clearly underestimated: this category of losses, according to the reports of the General Staff, totals 4.5 million, of which 2.8 million remained alive (were repatriated after the end of the war or re-conscripted into the ranks of the Red Army on the territory liberated from the occupiers), and, accordingly, total number those who did not return from captivity, including those who did not wish to return to the USSR, amounted to 1.7 million.
As a result, the statistical data of the handbook “The Classification Removed” were immediately perceived as requiring clarifications and additions. And in 1998, thanks to the publication of V. Litovkin “During the war years, our army lost 11 million 944 thousand 100 people”, these data were replenished by 500 thousand reserve reservists drafted into the army, but not yet included in the lists of military units and who died along the way to the front.
V. Litovkin's study states that from 1946 to 1968, a special commission of the General Staff, headed by General S. Shtemenko, prepared a statistical reference book on the losses of 1941-1945. At the end of the work of the commission, Shtemenko reported to the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal A. Grechko: “Taking into account that the statistical collection contains information of national importance, the publication of which in the press (including closed) or in any other way is currently not necessary and undesirable, the collection is supposed to be stored in the General Staff as a special document, to which a strictly limited circle of persons will be allowed to familiarize themselves. And the prepared collection was under seven seals until the team led by General G. Krivosheev made public his information.
V. Litovkin’s research sowed even greater doubts about the completeness of the information published in the collection “Secret Classification Removed”, because a natural question arose: were all the data contained in the “Statistical Collection of the Shtemenko Commission” declassified?
For example, according to the data given in the article, during the war years, military justice authorities convicted 994 thousand people, of which 422 thousand were sent to penal units, 436 thousand to places of detention. The remaining 136 thousand were apparently shot.
And yet, the handbook "Secrecy Removed" significantly expanded and supplemented the ideas not only of historians, but of all Russian society about the cost of Victory in 1945. It is enough to refer to the statistical calculation: from June to November 1941, the Armed Forces of the USSR lost 24 thousand people daily, of which 17 thousand were killed and up to 7 thousand were wounded, and from January 1944 to May 1945 -20 thousand people, of which 5.2 thousand killed and 14.8 thousand wounded.
In 2001, a significantly expanded statistical publication appeared - “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century. Losses of the armed forces. The authors supplemented the materials of the General Staff with reports from military headquarters about losses and notices from the military registration and enlistment offices about the dead and missing, which were sent to relatives at the place of residence. And the figure of losses received by him increased to 9 million 168 thousand 400 people. These data were reproduced in the 2nd volume of the collective work of the staff of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Population of Russia in the 20th century. Historical essays”, edited by Academician Y. Polyakov.
In 2004, the second, corrected and supplemented, edition of the book by the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, "Feat and forgery: Pages of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945", was published. It provides data on losses: about 27 million Soviet citizens. And in the footnotes to them, the same addition mentioned above appeared, explaining that the calculations of military historians back in the early 1960s gave a figure of 26 million, but the “high authorities” preferred to take something else for “historical truth”: “over 20 million."
Meanwhile, historians and demographers continued to look for new approaches to ascertaining the magnitude of the losses of the USSR in the war.
The historian Ilyenkov, who served in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, followed an interesting path. He tried to calculate the irretrievable losses of the personnel of the Red Army on the basis of card indexes of irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers. These file cabinets began to be created when, on July 9, 1941, a department for recording personal losses was organized as part of the Main Directorate for the Formation and Manning of the Red Army (GUFKKA). The duties of the department included personal accounting of losses and the compilation of an alphabetical file of losses.
Accounting was carried out according to the following categories: 1) dead - according to reports from military units, 2) dead - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 3) missing - according to reports from military units, 4) missing - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 5) those who died in German captivity , 6) those who died from diseases, 7) those who died from wounds - according to reports from military units, those who died from wounds - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices. At the same time, the following were taken into account: deserters; military personnel sentenced to imprisonment in forced labor camps; sentenced to the highest measure of punishment - execution; removed from the register of irretrievable losses as survivors; those who are suspected of having served with the Germans (the so-called "signals") and those who were captured, but survived. These soldiers were not included in the list of irretrievable losses.
After the war, the file cabinets were deposited in the Archive of the USSR Ministry of Defense (now the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation). Since the early 1990s, the archives have begun counting index cards by alphabetical letters and loss categories. As of November 1, 2000, 20 letters of the alphabet were processed, and a preliminary calculation was carried out on the remaining 6 letters that were not counted, which fluctuated up or down by 30-40 thousand personalities.
Calculated 20 letters in 8 categories of losses of privates and sergeants of the Red Army gave the following figures: 9 million 524 thousand 398 people. At the same time, 116 thousand 513 people were removed from the register of irretrievable losses, as they turned out to be alive according to the reports of the military registration and enlistment offices.
A preliminary calculation of 6 uncounted letters gave 2 million 910 thousand people of irretrievable losses. The result of the calculations was as follows: 12 million 434 thousand 398 Red Army soldiers and sergeants lost the Red Army in 1941-1945 (Recall that this is without loss Navy, internal and border troops of the NKVD of the USSR.)
The alphabetical card file of irretrievable losses of officers of the Red Army, which is also stored in the TsAMO RF, was calculated using the same methodology. They amounted to about 1 million 100 thousand people.
Thus, the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders in the dead, missing, dead from wounds, diseases and in captivity.
These data are 4 million 865 thousand 998 people higher than the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR (listed composition) according to the General Staff, which included the Red Army, sailors, border guards, internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR.
Finally, we note one more new trend in the study of the demographic results of the Great Patriotic War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to assess the human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century, L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate value of the human losses of the RSFSR within its then borders. According to his estimates, it amounted to approximately 13 million people - slightly less than half of the total losses of the USSR.
The killer, loved by people who are very sick in the head. And the war itself
the work of his hands, and the millions killed are the work of this serial killer
World War II was the most destructive war in the history of mankind. Its consequences are still debated to this day. 80% of the world's population took part in it.
Many questions arise about how many people died in World War II, as different sources of information give different figures for the loss of life between 1939 and 1945. The differences are due to where the original information was obtained, as well as to which method of calculation was used.
Total death toll
It is worth noting that many historians and professors have been studying this issue. The number of dead from the Soviet Union was calculated by the staff of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Russian Federation. According to new archival data, the information of which is given for 2001, the Great Patriotic War claimed the lives of 27 million people in total. Of these, more than seven million people are military personnel who were killed or died from their injuries.
Talk about how many people died from 1939 to 1945. as a result of hostilities, continue to this day, since it is almost impossible to calculate the losses. Various researchers and historians give their data: from 40 to 60 million people. After the war, the real data was hidden. During the reign of Stalin, it was said that the losses of the USSR amounted to 8 million people. During the Brezhnev era, this figure increased to 20 million, and during the period of perestroika - up to 36 million.
The free encyclopedia Wikipedia provides the following data: more than 25.5 million military personnel and about 47 million civilians (including all participating countries), i.e. in total, the number of losses exceeds 70 million people.
Read about other events in our history in the section.
In preparation for the 65th anniversary Great Victory the problem of military losses, which has never been removed from the agenda for all these decades, is being discussed with new acuteness in the media. And the Soviet component of losses is always highlighted. The most common ideologemem is this: the price of victory in World War II "turned out to be too high" for our country. When deciding to conduct major military operations, the leaders and generals of the United States and Great Britain, they say, took care of their people and, as a result, suffered minimum losses, but we did not spare the soldiers' blood.
In Soviet times, it was believed that the USSR lost 20 million people in the Great Patriotic War - both military and civilian. During the perestroika period, this figure increased to 46 million, while the rationale, to put it mildly, suffered from obvious ideologization. What are the true losses? For several years now, he has been clarifying them. Center for the History of Wars and Geopolitics of the Institute world history RAN.
- Historians have not yet come to a consensus on this issue, - told our correspondent Head of the Center Doctor of Historical Sciences Mikhail Myagkov. - Our Center, like most scientific institutions, adheres to the following estimates: Great Britain lost 370,000 servicemen killed, and the United States - 400,000. Our greatest losses are 11.3 million soldiers and officers who fell at the front and were tortured to death in captivity, as well as more than 15 million civilians who died in the occupied territories. The losses of the Nazi coalition amount to 8.6 million troops. That is, 1.3 times less than ours. This ratio was the result of the most difficult initial period of the war for the Red Army, as well as the genocide that the Nazis carried out against Soviet prisoners of war. It is known that more than 60 percent of our captured soldiers and officers were killed in Nazi camps.
"SP": - Some "advanced" historians put the question this way: wouldn't it be wiser to fight like the British and Americans in order to win like them - "with little blood"?
- That is not the right question to ask. When the Germans were developing the Barbarossa plan, they set the task of reaching Astrakhan and Arkhangelsk - that is, the conquest of living space. Naturally, this meant the "liberation" of this gigantic territory from most of the Slavic population, the total extermination of Jews and Gypsies. This cynical, misanthropic task was solved quite consistently.
Accordingly, the Red Army fought for the elementary survival of its people and simply could not use the principle of self-saving.
"SP": - There are also such "humane" proposals: should not Soviet Union how France, for example, capitulate after 40 days to save manpower?
- Of course, the French blitz capitulation saved lives, property, financial savings. But, according to the plans of the Nazis, the French were waiting, we note, not destruction, but Germanization. And France, or rather, its then leadership, in fact, agreed to this.
The situation in Great Britain was incomparable with ours. Take the so-called Battle of Britain in 1940. Churchill himself said that then "the few saved the many." This means that the small number of pilots who fought over London and the English Channel made it impossible for the Fuhrer's troops to land on the British Isles. It is clear to anyone that the losses of aviation and naval forces are always much less than the number of those killed in land battles, which mainly took place on the territory of the USSR.
By the way, before the attack on our country, Hitler conquered almost all Western Europe for 141 days. At the same time, the ratio of the losses of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany- on the other hand, it was 1:17 in favor of the Nazis. But in the West they don't talk about "the mediocrity" of their generals. And they like to teach us more, although the ratio of military losses of the USSR and the Nazi coalition was 1:1.3.
Member Association of Historians of World War II Academician Yury Rubtsov believes that our losses would have been less if the Allies had opened a second front in a timely manner.
“In the spring of 1942,” he said, “during the visits of the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Molotov to London and Washington, the Allies promised to land in continental Europe in a few months. But they did not do this either in 1942 or in 1943, when we suffered particularly heavy losses. From May 1942 to June 1944, while the Allies were delaying the opening of a second front, more than 5.5 million Soviet servicemen died in fierce battles. It is probably appropriate here to talk about the price of a certain selfishness of the allies. It is worth recalling that it was in 1942, after the collapse of the blitzkrieg, that mass executions and deportations of the Soviet population began. That is, the Germans began to actually carry out a plan to destroy the life force of the USSR. If the second front had been opened, as agreed, in 1942, of course, we could have avoided such terrible losses. Another nuance is also important. If for us the problem of the second front was a matter of life and death for many millions of Soviet people, then for the allies it was a problem of strategy: when is it more expedient to land? They landed in Europe, hoping to better determine the post-war map of the world. Moreover, it was already obvious that the Red Army could independently end the war and enter the English Channel coast, providing the USSR, as a winner, with a leading role in the process of post-war development of Europe. What the allies could not allow.
You can't discount a moment like this. After the landing of the Allies, the largest and best part of the fascist forces remained on the Eastern Front. And the Germans resisted our troops much more fiercely. In addition to political motives, fear was of great importance here. The Germans were afraid of retribution for the atrocities committed on the territory of the USSR. After all, it is well known that the Nazis surrendered entire cities to the allies without a shot, and on both sides the losses in sluggish battles were almost “symbolic”. With us, they laid down hundreds of their soldiers, clinging with their last strength to some village.
- Low at first glance, the losses of the allies have purely "arithmetic" explanations, - continues Mikhail Myagkov. - On the German front, they really fought for only 11 months - more than 4 times less than we did. Fight with ours, the combined losses of the British and Americans, according to some experts, can be predicted at the level of at least 3 million people. The Allies destroyed 176 enemy divisions. The Red Army - almost 4 times more - 607 enemy divisions. If Great Britain and the USA had to overcome the same forces, then we can expect that their losses would increase by about 4 times ... That is, it is possible that the losses would be even more serious than ours. This is about the ability to fight. Of course, the allies took care of themselves, and such tactics brought results: losses were reduced. If ours often continued to fight until the last bullet, even when surrounded, because they knew that they would not be spared, then the Americans and the British acted “more rationally” in similar situations.
Consider the Japanese siege of Singapore. The British garrison held the defense there. He was well armed. But a few days later, in order to avoid losses, he capitulated. Tens of thousands of English soldiers went into captivity. Ours also surrendered. But most often in conditions when it was impossible to continue the struggle, and there was nothing to do. And already in 1944, at the final stage of the war, it was incredible to imagine such a situation as in the Ardennes (where many allies were captured) on the Soviet-German front. Here we are talking not only about the fighting spirit, but also about the values that people directly defended.
I want to emphasize that if the USSR had fought Hitler as “cautiously” as our allies, the war would certainly have ended, I think, with the Germans reaching the Urals. Then Great Britain would inevitably fall, since even then it was limited in resources. And the English Channel would not have saved. Hitler, using the resource base of Europe and the USSR, would have strangled the British economically. As for the United States, at least they would not have acquired those real benefits which they received thanks to the selfless feat of the peoples of the USSR: access to raw materials markets, superpower status. Most likely, the United States would have to make an unpredictable compromise with Hitler. In any case, if the Red Army fought on the basis of "self-preservation" tactics, then this would put the world on the brink of disaster.
Summarizing the opinions of military scientists, I would like to suggest that the now-cited loss figures, or rather, the data on their ratio, require some correction. When counting, the formal division of the combatants into two camps is always taken into account: the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition and the allies Nazi Germany. Let me remind you that it is believed that the Nazis and their allies lost 8.6 million people. The fascist allies traditionally include Norway, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, Japan. But after all, large military contingents of France, Poland, Belgium, Albania, etc. fought against the USSR, which are classified as countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. Their losses are not taken into account. But, say, France lost 600,000 troops in the war. At the same time, 84 thousand were killed in hostilities in the defense of the national territory. 20 thousand - in the Resistance. Where about 500 thousand died? It becomes clear if we remember that almost the entire French Air Force and Navy, as well as about 20 land divisions, went over to Hitler's side. A similar situation with Poland, Belgium and other "fighters against fascism." Part of their losses must be attributed to the opposing side of the USSR. Then the ratio will be somewhat different. So let the “black” myths about corpse-throwing, which the Soviet military leaders allegedly sinned, remain on the conscience of too idiologized politicians.
