All By Ourselves

“So you won WW2 eh . . . All by yourselves?” the critic asks. Sure, the man replies. Us and 30 million dead Russians.

Well, actually only 23,200,000, according to Wikipedia.

Here’s just one paragraph from my review of A Writer at War, a collection of reportage by the Soviet novelist and journalist Vasily Grossman:

A Writer at War is an important book not only because Grossman would go on to write Life and Fate, a 1960 novel about the siege of Stalingrad and an undisputed masterpiece of 20th-century Russian literature. It’s also important for the necessary emphasis it places on the barbarity of the Eastern Front. We Americans know or care little about this part of the Second World War. It exists for us as a vague threat hurled by Colonel Klink at Sergeant Schultz, not as the venue for perhaps the bloodiest battle in human history. In last year’s The War Complex: World War II in Our Time, Marianna Torgovnick asks her readers to estimate Allied and American losses on D-Day. Omaha Beach is where the war turned, we have always been taught, where so many brave GIs fell that Spielberg was forced to make a film. So how many? A hundred thousand? Fifty thousand? Try 3,581. By contrast, more than three-quarters of a million Soviets fell at Stalingrad, and many more Germans than that. Torgovnick is quick to add that it’s not a contest; it’s just that for reasons both cultural and political, D-Day looms much larger in our imagination. (For those of you who might object that D-Day—apart from the full Normandy campaign—was but 24 hours while Stalingrad lasted 199 days, here’s some quick math: At a rate of 3,581 casualties per day over 199 days, you still end up with 712,619 killed and wounded, or about ten days of slaughter short. But imagine it: 209 consecutive D-Days!)

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