I'm watching a Hulu Plus series called "The Unknown War." It is World War II from the Russian perspective. We only get WWII from the West's perspective in the media.. Russia took Germany down much more so than did the Western Armies. Hitler's goal was not just to conquer Russia. He planned to annihilate most of the Russian people.
It's definitely an interesting perspective. Horrifying really. The numbers alone are staggering, and when you start to imagine the scenarios that produced those numbers, it's mind blowing.
Here's a few numbers. Russia solders killed: 11 mil.. Civilians killed: between 7 mil and 20 mil. USA soldiers killed: 400,000. Civilians killed: 0.
The distance between Moscow and Berlin is about the same as that separating New York City and Atlanta. Imagine twenty million people being violently killed between those two American cities in four years. The Eastern Front in the war wound like a serpent from Sevastopol on the Black Sea to Leningrad on the Baltic. Including the twists, bulges and turns of the line of battle at the height of German penetration, November 1942, the line would have stretched from Baltimore to Cheyenne, Wyoming. In place of Leningrad, can you fathom Chicago under bitter siege and constant shelling for 900 days? Is it possible for us to mentally picture thousands of dead bodies lying on the frozen streets between Lake Shore Drive and Evanston? Could we endure seeing a million people die, mostly from starvation, during the Chicago siege or begin to fathom our own citizens engaging in cannibalism for profit? At the same time of the Chicago siege think of Cincinnati becoming a battleground such as Stalingrad where not a single structure was left habitable and several hundred thousand soldiers killed each other in the process of leveling the city. Mentally switch names such as Smolensk, Karkov, Minsk, Kiev and Rostov for American cities and picture them destroyed and silenced. If such images are possible for us to even conceive, we can begin to understand why Americans refer to the conflict as World War Two, but the Russians universally refer to it as the Great Patriotic War.
