6/9 August 1945 — Dropping the Atomic Bombs

Sixty-six years ago, B-29 bombers from the US Army-Airforce dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The first, codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August, while the second, ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August.

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000-166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000-80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefectural health department estimates that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In a US estimate of the total immediate and short term cause of death, 15-20% died from radiation sickness, 20-30% from flash burns, and 50-60% from other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.

The US government expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use in the third week of August, with three more in September and a further three in October!

The publicly-stated rationale for the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare so far was to end the war in such a way as to save lives, both US and Japanese, which would otherwise have been lost in occupying and ‘pacifying’ Japan. This was (and still is) one of the greatest LIES ever told.

US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Harry S Truman that he (Stimson) was fearful that the US air force would have Japan so bombed out that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength.” He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb.” His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.” General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified, “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, Truman (who, in typically sententious American fashion, had invoked the blessing of his invisible friend on the act) voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success of the experiment.” Dropping the atomic bomb was merely a war-crime, only one in a long line committed by the European-descended inhabitants of the United States, from the Pequot War of 1636, through My Lai in 1968 to Fallujah in 2004 — and if it hadn’t been for Philby, Burgess and McLean, the US would have been holding the rest of the world hostage for 66 years instead of just the past 20.

And one can make a good case that it was the USSR that was responsible for the final defeat of the Japanese Empire. The US had rebuffed Japanese offers to surrender from as early as 1943, and decided to fight it out. The US airforce had been bombing Japan around the clock for months before dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August and the second on 9 August

On 9 August 1945 a large Soviet army under General Afanasiy Pavlantevich Byeloborodov entered the war against Japan, launching several offensive operations simultaneously, in North-east China, North Korea, South Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Over a short period of time, the Russian armies with naval support cleared the Japanese forces from vast expanses of East Asia, leaving no alternative to Hitler’s Far Eastern ally. Between 9 August and 20 August about 80,000 men of the Kwangtung Army – Japan’s strongest — were killed and. 600,000 taken prisoner. Approximate Russian losses were 8,000 dead and 22,000 wounded. Twenty-two Japanese divisions were routed.

Japan waited five days before capitulating and eleven before signing the actual document of surrender. Tokyo’s leaders saw the impossibility of continuing the war only after Russia declared war on Japan. On the same day (9 August) that Russia entered the war in the Far East, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki said, “The entry into the war of the Soviet Union this morning puts us in an utterly hopeless situation and makes further continuation of the war impossible.”

22 June 1941 - The Real "Date That Will Live In Infamy"

Seventy years ago, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, in comparison to which the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i (to which Roosevelt’s quote refers) seems like a fart in a hurricane.

The world had for twenty years been sliding towards another World War. In Mein Kampf, published in the 1920s, Hitler formulated a programme for the future destruction of Soviet Russia. Capitalist (and pre-capitalist) ruling classes the world over supported the Nazis, recognizing in them a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’ — in the case of the US bourgeoisie this support was not only ideological (Joseph Kennedy, Prescott Bush) and financial (Henry Ford) but also practical (GM, Curtiss-Wright, Standard Oil, Chase National, IT&T).

In 1939, military talks between Britain, France and Russia to form an  alliance against the Third Reich failed and, in order to buy some time for the USSR, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Even after he seized Poland in 1939, setting off the Second World War, Hitler did not risk an immediate attack on the Soviet Union. Rather, he decided to wait until the Anglo-French bloc was defeated. But on 23 November 1939 Hitler told a military conference, “We have a treaty with Russia. However, treaties are observed only while they offer advantages.”

In September 1940 the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan was forged and in December Hitler signed a Directive containing instructions for the invasion of Russia. A series of ruses was put into effect to cover preparations for the invasion — only partially successful, since the Finnish aggression of November 1939 had alerted at least some in the Soviet military to possible future events (Finland was a German ally and its hostility to the USSR, silently underwritten by both the US and UK, went back to the days of the Revolution).

Finally, on Sunday, 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany threw men and equipment against the USSR in unprecedented numbers — 190 divisions, over 4,000 tanks, almost 5,000 aircraft and more than 200 warships. Joining the attack were forces from Italy, Hungary, Rumania and Finland. A total of five million men took part in the blitz attack along the entire Soviet frontier that stretched some 5,986 kilometres. Such an invasion force had never been seen before in human history.

Defining his war aims, Adolf Hitler told a conference of German generals, “Russia is to be abolished.” The war, he said, was to be one of “annihilation.” On the fate of Moscow he did not mince words — the city and every single person in it were to be destroyed, and the site turned into a lake! The Nazis spoke with contempt about “lower orders” of people, an estimation that included the entire Soviet population of Slavs, Jews, gypsies and others — this is a view which many in ‘the West’ still hold, openly or covertly (I will return to this topic in discussing ‘the epidemic of Soviet rape’ on the march to Berlin).

The Nazi generals, conscious of their advantages and their quick victories in Poland and Western Europe, based their plans on the concept of Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, which had already been so successful. Above all they counted on the shattering effect that a surprise strike by massed armoured, air and infantry forces would have, and banked on an easy thrust into the USSR’s vital centres. The generals hoped that the entire campaign would last no more than thirty or forty days. American and British experts sided with the German estimates — the US Army’s General Marshal gave the Red Army no chance of escaping “total defeat within six weeks” while the Imperial General Staff of the UK gave the Soviets three months.

At first it seemed that nothing could withstand the ferocity of the German onslaught. But it soon became clear that even if the German armies would ultimately win, they would not do so with impunity. The Russians began preparing for a massive defensive campaign. In Moscow more than 500,000 citizens began to build fortifications in and around the city. Up to a dozen volunteer divisions and almost ninety combat battalions were formed. As Hitler’s armies pushed towards Moscow, more than forty partisan groups taking their orders from Moscow operated behind enemy lines, disrupting enemy logistics and communications and sometimes tying up large bodies of German troops.

Many in the Soviet military and civilian bureaucracy had realized that sooner or later Hitler would attack but the more perceptive knew that preparations for it were pitifully incomplete — that the Soviet armies, strong though they were, were not equal to the most prepared and powerful army ever assembled. Stalin apparently believed he had at least six more months of peace to strengthen his nation’s defences. In the spring of 1941 the USSR was feverishly striving to fulfil its Third Five-Year Plan (1938—42), building up industrial and military capacity. By the end of that year, military production had increased by over 400%.

Hitler had statistical superiority in the beginning. In early 1941 Germany had the manpower resources of 290 million people and the raw materials and industrial capacity of nearly the whole of Europe at its disposal. The Third Reich was capable of producing twice the quantity of metal, electricity and coal as the Soviet Union — when the invading armies occupied the USSR’s western areas, which accounted for over 40 per cent of its population, and more than half of its industrial output and a third of its food production, Germany’s advantages were even more glaring.

If, as its enemies claim, the Soviet Union’s military forces were being “controlled by fear of punishment,” or Soviet citizens living under a “brutal totalitarian regime,” this would have been the time when they could have defected in droves. Yet none did — in fact, the heroism and self-sacrifice of Soviet military and civilian personnel from all walks of life and from every ethnic group remained at a high level until the final victory.

When I speak of heroism in this context, I am thinking of the ‘Night Witches’ — young women mostly in their late teens or early twenties who flew wood-and-paper biplanes on bombing missions (often in the depths of the winter) to disrupt the Axis armies, and the pilots who rammed German aircraft to bring them down, a tactic you didn’t see in Memphis Belle. I am thinking of the snipers like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Vasiliy Zaitsev and Nina Lobkovskaya, and of Tatyana Baramzina, who was captured, ‘interrogated’ (tortured and raped), then had her eyes gouged out with a bayonet before being shot in the stomach at close range with an anti-tank gun and left to die. I am thinking of the partisans (like Zoya Kosmodemyanska, who, moments before her execution at the age of nineteen, said, “There are 200 million of us — you can’t hang us all!”), the medics, the tankists, machine gunners, soldiers, sailors and air-force personnel, and the inhabitants of Leningr. I am thinking of the Karelians Mariya Smirnova, Mariya Melyentova and Anna Lisitsyna, the Kazakhs Manshuk Mametova and Aliya Moldagulova, the Tatar Maguba Syrtlanova, the Pole Anelia Kzhivon, the Estonian Yelena Kullman and the Lithuanian Marija Melnikaite, the Cossack Trofim Negoduko, of Nur Sadykov, Botabai Suleimenov, Akaky Shevardnadze and the dozens of unknown soldiers from over thirty ethnic groups who died at Brest in the first moths of the war, of Jews and Roma and of the millions of Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians who gave their lives to bring an end to Fascism. And I am thinking of  eleven-year old Tatyana Savicheva, the representative of half a million civilians who perished in the 900-day siege of Leningrad, keeping her diary until she no longer had the strength to do anything but die.

And yes, I am even thinking of Yakov Dzhugashvili — Stalin’s son — who threw himself onto the electrified fence of a POW camp rather than be a propaganda tool for the Nazis.

There were groups of disgruntled nationalists who fought for the Third Reich, but they soon learned that shifting their loyalties didn’t mean going up in the estimation of their new friends.

Taking advantage of their surprise attack and superior numbers — up to five to one in the sector of the main effort — Axis troops advanced up to 155 miles by the night of 25 June and 372 miles by 10 July. The leadership was triumphant. A little over a week later, Hitler endorsed a plan to reorganize the Wehrmacht for carrying out new tasks — future operations against Britain and (a vaunted target for the future) the USA.

There were however, some early bumps in the smooth German road. The stiff defence by the garrison of the frontierfortress of Brest — the ‘Hero Fortress’ — showed at the start that the USSR would not be an easy victim. German generals commented on the stubbornness and valour of the defenders, a circumstance that unsettled some who accepted the propaganda that Slavs were a “lower order” of species.

In a fierce battle at Smolensk (lasting from 10 July to 10 September) the Third Reich’s Army Group Centre — the force battering its way towards Moscow — suffered heavy losses. Greater losses were suffered by the Soviets — but at Smolensk for the first time since the war began the Wehrmacht was compelled, temporarily, to assume the defensive in its main line of advance. It was the first crack in the German armour.

By the beginning of the fourth month of the invasion the total losses in the invaders’ ranks exceeded 500,000 officers and men, whereas in the first two years of the Second World War the German armed forces had lost fewer than 300,000 troops in seizing nearly the whole of Europe. Although the Wehrmacht continued its successful drive in the summer of 1941, the Nazi High Command failed to reach its main objectives, failing to capture Leningrad and Moscow, or the oil resources of the Caucasus.

The fight-back gathered momentum until Victory Day on 9 May 1945.

In respect of the number of troops and weapons involved and the frontage of the attack, the Eastern Front was the main theatre of operations in World War II, the site of at least fifty major battles — Moscow (1941-42), Stalingrad (1942-43), Kursk (1943), Operation Bagration (1944), the Yassy-Kishinev Campaign (1944), the Vistula-Oder Operation (1945) and Berlin (1945). At different stages of the war the two sides had from eight to thirteen million troops, from 5,700 to 20,000 tanks and assault guns, from 6,500 to 18,000 aircraft and from 84,000 to 163,000 artillery pieces and mortars — at no time from the day of the invasion until the fall of Berlin did the armed forces of the USSR face less than 66% of the forces of the western members of the Axis.

So I mourn the US service personnel who died at Pearl Harbour (as I mourn all those who died in that horrendous conflict). But for the US to paint itself as the Ultimate Victim, for Hollywood to bombard the “Free World” with at least one movie/series per year telling us how much the US had suffered and dinning into us that the US had won WWII on its own, with the implication that the rest of us should be damned grateful? Bullshit!

9 May 1945 - Victory Over Fascism!

Today is the day on which, 66 years ago, the war in Europe ended for the people of the Soviet Union.

Why does this matter?

In an article published on Thursday, 30 April, 2009 by TomDispatch.com, bourgeois historian Andrew Bacevich of Boston University writes:

 For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2% [Australia suffered 0.57%] of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true “Greatest Generation” is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.

Between TWENTY-SEVEN AND TWENTY-EGHT MILLION Soviet citizens – soldiers and civilians, women, children and men — lost their lives in that epic struggle, five million of those in concentration camps. The German aim was to destroy the USSR and kill, deport or enslave its inhabitants — their fantasy was to turn the Soviet Union into a gigantic “theme park” with Teutonic Knights and their families hunting Russian “peasants.”  

Civilians and hostages were routinely massacred (the largest number of civilian deaths in a single city was 1.2 million citizens during the 900 day Siege of Leningrad). In three years of occupation, between one and two million Soviet Jews were killed. Other ethnic groups were also targeted for extermination, and even those nationalist groups who collaborated with the Germans (Ukrainians and Cossacks, for example) met short shrift from their new “liberators.”  Millions died from starvation as the Germans requisitioned food for their armies and fodder for their draft horses. As they retreated from Ukraine and Belarus in 1943–44, the German occupiers systematically applied a scorched earth policy, burning towns and cities, destroying infrastructure, and leaving civilians to starve or die of exposure

Prisoners of War were treated abominably — sixty percent died, starved, beaten, summarily executed, left to freeze to death or die of untreated wounds, or forced marched to be slave labourers in the Reich. And lest anyone try to excuse the Wehrmacht (the regular German Army) on the grounds that “it was all the work of the SS,” let me set you straight. Hitler’s “Commissar Order” — communicated to all ranks prior to the invasion —absolved in advance ANY soldier of the Reich who committed what would now be called “crimes against humanity.” Jewish PoWs were sent away for “special treatment,” soldiers from the Central Asian Republics were executed out of hand and on 29 June 1941, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge ordered, ‘Women in uniform are to be shot.’

Later, as their excesses ignited a protracted partisan war, the Germans reacted by issuing harsh orders calling for the execution of any Red Army personnel found in civilian clothing. An order to the 56th Infantry Division stated, ‘Soldiers in plain clothes, mostly recognizable by their short hair, are to be shot following their identification as Red Army soldiers.’ Villages were razed for sheltering Red Army soldiers, and prisoners were shot in retaliation for partisan attacks or for simply being soldiers. A field court-martial had sentenced a major to demotion for shooting PoWs for no particular reason. Hitler intervened and excused the major, stating, “We cannot blame lively spirits when they, convinced as they are that the German people are engaged in a unique battle of life and death, reject the Bolshevik world-enemy beyond all commandments of humanity.”

Wikipedia notes that, “According to a summary, presented by Lieutenant General Roman Rudenko at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the property damage in the Soviet Union inflicted by the Axis invasion was estimated to a value of 679 billion rubles. The combined damage consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 2,508 church buildings, 31,850 industrial establishments, 65,000 kilometres of railroad, 4100 railroad stations, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, and 43,000 public libraries. Seven million horses, and 17 million sheep and goats were also slaughtered or driven off.” (While Wikipedia can be “liberal” with the truth about Communism, these figures match those in my copy of the IMT’s transcripts).

I have many bones to pick with Comrade Stalin. Yet none of them would have stopped me from picking up a gun and marching with the Red Army all the way to Berlin!