A late Uncle of mine had been an officer serving in Britain in the U.S. Navy at the time of D-Day (code name, Operation Overlord). Though I don’t believe he was involved in the first wave of the invasion on June 6, 1944, he was there a few days later, in some support role. I never learned what he saw and experienced then, because he didn’t want to talk about it. Even the immediate aftermath of the initial landings was ghastly, and not something he cared to re-live.

The World War II Western Allies, the British, Canadians and Americans, are still rightly proud and grateful for what our countrymen began 80 years ago today. First of all, the awesome personal courage and sacrifice; most of the American troops who landed on the French beaches that day had never been in actual combat before, so their very first experience of it was being hurled against Hitler’s fearsome ‘Atlantic Wall,’ the grim fortifications built in Nazi held lands from Norway to the Pyrenees. They were faced with ‘the deep end of the pool’ – when that pool was a lake of fire.

Yet those American kids leaped into that lake, toward a storm of steel from German machine guns and artillery, because they believed they were fighting to help restore freedom to Humanity. As indeed they were, and for which France is still thankful.

And beyond that heroism, there was the epic planning for the invasion, thousands of logistical details from supplies procurement, to planning to transport troops in an orderly sequence, to ingenious deception to make the Nazis believe the invasion would come at the Pas de Calais, far from Normandy, to keep them diverting their strength there while the Allies solidified their toe-hold on the Norman beaches.

The place and timing of the landings of course, had been among the deepest secrets of the War, so the public had no idea it was coming. Thus on that day, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed America (including the anxious families of soldiers) by radio, extolling the valor and enterprise of the undertaking by America’s young men – ‘the pride of our nation’ – while asking for prayers for their deliverance and ultimate victory.

Only after acknowledging all of these facts does it seem appropriate to point out the following:

D-Day was an epic undertaking, unquestionably essential to the eventual destruction of Hitler and the Nazis. But – please forgive me, I do not use this term lightly – it was really something of a side-show to the main event. A very big and important ‘side-show,’ but still a lot smaller than the monstrous, and truly savage, War on the Eastern Front – Germany against the USSR – where Hitler, as a result of his unprovoked invasion, faced off with Stalinism; two forces of equally primitive ferocity. The statistical truth is that four out of five – Four out of Five – casualties the Nazis suffered in the course of the whole war were inflicted on the Eastern, Russian front.

So it isn’t strictly accurate to think of D-Day as the ‘turning of the tide’ against Nazi Germany’s wars of aggression, as the invasion is often now characterized from the American perspective. In hindsight, it is clear that the ‘turning’ was at Stalingrad, the titanic and hideous battle that lasted from Autumn of 1942 to well into 1943, between the German and Soviet armies. It was the first time Hitler’s Wehrmacht had been not just stopped, but definitively, undeniably thrashed. And it was stupendous.

Stalin, adamant to relieve the German pressure on his country, had been demanding a second front against Hitler in the west since 1942, and (suspicious bastard that he was), found it hard to accept the Anglo-Americans’ explanation for delaying invading western Europe until they were thoroughly prepared to do so successfully. He felt the Allies were stalling just so the Russians would sustain more losses, so as to weaken his Communist regime. And in view of how much Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister was known to loathe Communism, such suspicions were not wildly implausible.

Operation Overlord was of course, an essential nail in Hitler’s coffin; but it was far from the first, or most pivotal one. It was, arguably the beginning of the end, the point at which it became certain Germany would eventually be overwhelmed. But the agonizing reversal of her military juggernaut was at Stalingrad, where the tide that turned was on the Volga River there, crimson with Russian blood. Awful as Anglo-Canadian-American losses on D-Day were, the deaths on both sides at Stalingrad were spectacularly greater, in the hundreds of thousands.

And Hitler’s need to deploy the bulk and best of his forces in the East – those stationed in France were not just far fewer in number, but were of lesser quality – made the Overlord landings far less bloody than they might have been.

So we Americans, in particular, ought to recognize how misinterpreting the scope of our role in crushing Nazism has – justifiably, in my view – rankled Russian sensibilities for decades. And that resentment is still playing out today, in 2024, manifest in Vladimir Putin’s festering outrage at perceived Western ingratitude – and worse, ignorance – for what his own country paid to destroy Hitler.

Thus, I have put an image here of men at arms around water. It may call to mind the American assault of Omaha Beach – ‘Bloody Omaha’ – but is actually from eight months earlier, the Battle of the Dnieper, in Eastern Europe. The Dnieper is a vast river, and the Soviet Red Army was determined to cross it, to pursue the Nazis, whom they had been steadily driving out of conquered Soviet territory. This battle – though little-known or remarked in the West – was so huge and horrendous that the Dnieper at some points turned red with the blood of Russian soldiers, killed by the Nazis as they tried to cross it. Just as the Volga had been stained, at Stalingrad.

We may rightly pause to lament their fate; certainly, their own ruler Stalin, cared very little about individual Russian lives. (Sound familiar?)

Here is more about why I feel it is vital to point all this out:

No one is wrong all the time. Although Hitler’s response to Germany’s defeat in World War I was in every sense criminal, even he had a point, that the treaty of Versailles, dictated by the winners, had been unfair to his country. Especially in that it explicitly obliged her to accept the entire guilt for having started the war, which simply was not true, and much of the European public knew it. Prussian militarism had certainly been a crucial factor in starting ‘The Great War’ of 1914 – 1918, but was by no means the only one. Hitler’s reaction to the staggering blows of defeat followed by defamation was maniacal and monstrous, but the source of that resentment – unlike most of his others – was not entirely delusional.

And in the interest of accuracy, fairness and of redressing dangerous and harmful misunderstanding – much as I hate to admit it, as I utterly detest him – the same is true of Vladimir Putin, current faux Czar and heartless, spendthrift waster of the lives of ordinary Russians (and Ukrainians).

Putin has many false, delusional, cruel beliefs, but as noted above, he does have at least one legitimate grievance. He, and a great many Russians of his generation, feel that their erstwhile Western Allies have never fully grasped nor appreciated the unspeakable magnitude of their country’s suffering – set upon by the Nazis in a war of annihilation against the sub-human Slavs, and their noxious regime of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ (a Nazi definition) – in what the Russians refer to as ‘The Great Patriotic War,’ instead of World War II.

Also, about 2 weeks after the D-Day landings, the Soviet Red Army began ‘Operation Bagration,’ a colossal counterblow at the Germans, mostly in what is now Byelorussia. This obliged Hitler, still thrashing in Normandy, to confront an even more crucial threat in the East, which was, of course, just what was intended: to force the Nazis to fight on two fronts, in the East and West (at this time, they were also still fighting in Italy; ironically, the Americans had entered Rome on June 4, two days before D-Day).

So by all means, let us remember, honor – and learn from – the valor and sacrifice of D-Day. But Americans especially, who suffered no combat on our territory, as European Russia was barbarically ravaged, should never forget that for all we paid in money and material (much of it provided to the USSR, and critical to its war effort), the Russians paid on a Biblical scale in blood and lives.

Their losses are beyond reckoning – almost beyond imagining – but aside from the gargantuan, spiteful physical damage the Germans committed, the Russians are generally held to have had approximately 20 million dead – maybe more – military and civilians (in the occupied USSR the Nazis often killed civilians, Jewish and Gentile Russians, like rodents; Jews were explicitly targeted, but non-Jews were still subhuman Slavs, killed for the most minor infractions or even simply to reduce local food consumption).

The Soviet mortality of 1941-45 was so stupendous that it altered the demographics of the nation to this day. In the absence of millions of young men killed in the fighting, the birthrate of the USSR – and of today’s Russia – never fully recovered.

American deaths in the war were approximately 420,000. A terrible toll – one of whom was my own mother’s fiancé before she met my father, and I don’t think she ever fully got over her grief. But for context, one cemetery for the mass graves dug outside Leningrad for the dead of its horrifying siege by the Nazis holds just under 500,000 victims. There are more Russian war dead – most of them civilian residents of Leningrad – in that one cemetery than all the American losses, globally, in the entire conflict.

The Soviet Union sustained deaths (a great proportion of them non-combatants) in a ratio of more than 40 to 1, as opposed to those of the U.S. If one reflects on that, the seething anger of Putin and many of his countrymen – when they hear D-Day called the ‘turning of the tide’ for Nazism – gets easier to understand. And to acknowledge as proper.

So as you honor D-Day, please also register, and honor, the epic, heroic, and far more tragic sacrifices made then by our Russian Allies – ruled by Stalin, indifferent to spending the lives of his own citizens like pocket change, to grind Hitler’s war machine to a halt, and begin to reverse it.

Victory was paid for with a nightmarish trauma for the Russian people from which they will probably never recover, persisting in their folk memory after the last eye-witnesses are gone. They are right to expect that we, in the West, step outside our own historical reference ‘bubble’ and at the very least be aware of what they went through. And to appreciate it.

(Russians are not the only ones who notice, and abhor, the apparent American tendency to assume that anything in which we were not directly involved, cannot be very important. Our nearest neighbors, the Mexicans and Canadians, would almost certainly agree, even though their grievances are not as bitter as having a national calamity of apocalyptic proportions overlooked or disregarded. As many Russians feel we have done to them. But we are all citizens of the same world.)

Their suffering was incomparably worse than America’s, or even Britain, which endured the Blitz, but didn’t have millions of German troops rampaging on its soil, all indoctrinated to believe that the residents were essentially two-legged vermin, and acting accordingly, as they did with the Russians – Slavic and Jewish. No one in the West – not even the conquered French – had to endure anything like that at Hitler’s hands.

So today’s Russians have a right to our gratitude, and respect, for the unimaginably greater sorrows they endured and overcame.

The Nazis capitulated at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943; perhaps we should remember that date – with awestruck salutes for the resolute courage of those triumphant Russians, struggling in the jaws of Hell on Earth, as that battle surely was – just as we recall June 6, 1944. To do so might even help to calm the frenzy of East-West recriminations that still linger.