D Day

It's interesting and sad that two countries are not participating in the D Day ceremonies - Russia and China. I think if you look at history objectively you'll agree with me that it was the Soviets, in fact, who actually turned the tide on Germany and allowed the victory on the Western front.

SunFan

Some Wiki facts;

Total Deaths caused by WWII:  
70 to 85 Million
 .Military Deaths:  21 to 25 Million
 .Civilian Deaths:  50 to 56 Million (killed)
 .Civilian Deaths:  19 to 28 Million (Died through Famine and Disease)

USA:
.Military Deaths:  408 Thousand
.Civilian Deaths:  12 Thousand

Soviet Union:
.Military Deaths:  8.7 to 11.4 Million
.Civilian Deaths:  4 to 10 Million (killed directly in the conflict)
.Civilian Deaths:  8 to 9 Million (Died from Famine and Disease)

Eastern Front:
.Total (military and civilian deaths)  37 to 45 Million
 (includes China, Korea, Malaya, Indonesia, Philippines, IndoChina     Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, plus others.

Japan:
.Total Military Deaths:  2.12 Million
.Total Military and Civilian Deaths:  2.6 to 3.1 Million

The numbers are mind-boggling. I wonder if the concentration camp deaths are part of the civilian death stats.

Carry Bean wrote:The numbers are mind-boggling.  I wonder if the concentration camp deaths are part of the civilian death stats.

I would think they are.

I don't mean to take anything away from the sheer heroism of the D Day invasion but we Westerners tend to think it was the British and Americans that saved the day in WWII.

SunFan

Just read some or the accounts of Stalingrad in 1943, the real turning point of the war, to know what the Russians went through, suffered, and gave to make that happen.
They weren´t angels but they paid the big price for that to happen.

Neither the Russians nor the Chinese lost soldiers in D Day .. D Day honors the people who died that day which were Americans, Canadians Brits and French civilians, 3000 of them died that day and 20 000 dies by Sept 44 due to the heavy bombing on the area .. plenty more died as the Germans retriated and the Resstance got into the action blowing up roads a, bridges etc..
D Day is not about the war in general but about a specific event on a specific date.

People were eating rats in Stalingrad but that has nothing to do with D Day, We had friends who survived it and they told us horror stories ..

The Russians soldiers were horrible as well and they committed plenty of war crimes when they got to Berlin. One of my math teachers was a retired general and it told us a few har rasing stories about the Russians..

D Day is to honor the soldiers and civilians who died there .. US, Canadians, Brits and French and Germans . The allies have the white markers and the Germans the black ones.. 3000 civilians died that day as well and 20 000 died before September.44 The area was blown to pieces and the people living there paid the price.
The beaches are an awsome sight.. I was there a few years ago in June and Omaha beach is amazing,, It is mindblowing to see what the soldiers had to do when they landed. They were helped by the weather eventually when the fog rolled in ...but the Germans were on top of a steep hill and they could pick out the soldiers as they came to the beach.. Eventually the fog came in and helped them but God that had to be awful..

The area is really worth a visit if you are interested in history.

Sun Fan and look at the death of the first war as well to put everything in context...In Francealone we lost I believe some 500 000 people mostly civilians and lost one million on World War I & II and 25 year before that we lost another bunch in the Franco Prussian War. and our population was less than 30 millions in those day ..Every town has a monument  to the dead of the wars.. down to the tiniest little village , nobody was spared and towns were blown to pieces..and that is true throughout Europe.. I had to spend a month at school in Germany as a kid in the 50 iesand 60´s and everywhere you could see towns being rebuilt..

I was reading an account by a veteran who went through D Day.  He said he saw so many of the boys, when they jumped from the boats their packs were so heavy that they immediately drowned.

And we complain about traffic.  

Nothing that a little bit of Public Relations can't fix.

The question referred to 1945, then the polls moved directly to 1994, 2004 and 2015.  Explanation for the difference?

Polls don’t matter to those who lost sons, brothers or husbands. To them, no matter the nationality it’s 100%.

I think we were very aware of the number of Russians who died during the war and hence the answer in 45, after that the US propaganda took over, The Russians are not making movies after movies on their heroism in WWII or if they are , they are not widely diffused... There was also a large resentment over the destruction caused by the US and the Brits by some people in France most of the civilians who were killed were killed by bombng and that was mostly US and Brits..As you went away from the areas destroyed by the allies, the resentment went down and the gratefulness went up.
My mother ´s life was saved by German soldiers in Bordeaux who grabbed her and but her in one of their trench as boms were falling around.
Her family had a very large house and the Nazi places two officers to live there . One of them shot himself towards the end of the war when he learned his whole family had been killed in the Hamburg bombing. The whole family freaked when they found him because that meant 10 of them ere going to be killed but he had written a letter saying he had commited suicide..Thank God. There was a strange bond between the German and the French that was not true with the allies who were trying to get the Germans who were hidding amongst the population.. so ut was a really warped situation and the good guys were not always the allies in the eyes of the people. The Russians were far away and people in France had no contact in them but if you speak wit people in the east, who did they will all tell you , they were animals.
I France they were the romantic slavic guys blond and blue eyes..

The situation was not black and white like it is in the movies.

Carry you ae so right.. I was born in 46 so in 56 we had to elect a language to learn and in Paris and northern part of France the government  had a big campaign  and wanted the kids to learn German as the first language and would sent the kids to school in Germany for a month every year. We lived with German families and were taken around the towns that had been destroyed during the war . The government felt that if all spoke the same language maybe we woud not want to go to war again.. As kids I remember being kicked out of shops when I went ther ewith my German friends. The baker was Polish, had lost all of hs family and refused to sell us bread because we were with German kids, it was common to get insulted in the street and one day my heart sand wuen we were at the beach with my parents friends and my German pal and saw the tatoos on the arms of my parents friends who had been in concentration camps  and here I was with an enemy.. They did not say anything to us but as a kid , it was really confusing because the war was just stories we heard and yet people held us responsable for being friends with German kids and going to Germany.
Many people had lost family and friends and just the sounf of German was a horrible thing to them.
In Germany we did not get the same treatment , most people were ashamed of what had happened and most were friendly except for the die hard pro Nazi but very few admited to have been Nazis.

No matter what D Day was an incredible feat by the US soldiers and it is hard to fathom that they took the cliff the German were shooting at them from... It is really aplace to see.. On top of the cliff are the cemetary as far as the eye can see, white graves on one side , black on the other and then when you start reading the inscriptio you realize how young these soldiers were.. .. That is really heartbreaking..

There used to be the same reaction to anything Japanese by those who fought in that part of WWII. And I can remember some bad reactions to both German and Japanese cars when they started being popular. I had some Jewish friends who wanted a VW when I got my shiny new one in the early ‘60’s. Their parents wouldn’t hear of it. Understandable looking at it from the parents’ perspective. Another friend wasn’t allowed to have the German Shepherd puppy she was offered.

AND yet in post war newly independent Israel....there were GERMAN cars everywhere because they were part of the reparations that were paid after Germany began to recover.

benjji wrote:AND yet in post war newly independent Israel....there were GERMAN cars everywhere because they were part of the reparations that were paid after Germany began to recover.

I didn't know this. It caught my eye because I could never understand or compute why my Jewish Israeli via Germany Stepfather always had a Mercedes. So, of course, I went googling... good article and story...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/why-im-ending-my-boycott-of-german-cars/379310/

brigitte wrote:I think we were very aware of the number of Russians who died  during the war and hence the answer  in 45, after that the US propaganda took over, The Russians are not making movies after movies on their heroism in WWII or if they are , they are not widely diffused... There was also a large resentment over the destruction caused by the US and the Brits by some people in France  most of the civilians who were killed were killed by bombng and that was mostly US and Brits..As you went away from the areas destroyed by the allies, the resentment went down and the gratefulness went up.
My mother ´s life was saved by German soldiers in Bordeaux who grabbed her and but her in one of their trench as boms were falling around.
Her family had a very large house and the Nazi places two officers to live there . One of them shot himself towards the end of the war when he learned his whole family had been killed in the Hamburg bombing. The whole family freaked when they found him because that meant 10 of them ere going to be killed but he had written a letter saying he had commited suicide..Thank God. There was a strange bond between the German and the French that was not true with the allies who were trying to get the Germans who were hidding amongst the population.. so ut was a really warped situation and the good guys were not always the allies in the eyes of the people. The Russians were far away and people in France had no contact in them but if you speak wit people in the east, who did they will all tell you , they were animals.
I France they were the romantic slavic guys blond and blue eyes..

The situation was not black and white like it is in the movies.

Seriously? Do god bothering bobble-heads actually think, even for a second, before they write such vacuous nonsense? BTW, the question is rhetorical. I know the answer.

gringal wrote:The question referred to 1945, then the polls moved directly to 1994, 2004 and 2015.  Explanation for the difference?

 

If you are referring to the differences in percentages, I would say, obviously 50 years of "Cold War". with the French being a member of NATO.

slainte39 wrote:

gringal wrote:The question referred to 1945, then the polls moved directly to 1994, 2004 and 2015.  Explanation for the difference?

 

If you are referring to the differences in percentages, I would say, obviously 50 years of "Cold War". with the French being a member of NATO.

Probably correct; like the propaganda we are inundated with in school re American history.

Like freeing Texas from Mexico to save all the anglo immigrants who had moved there.
Hitler didn´t have much over Polk, when it came to conquest for expansion or territorial gain.

gringal wrote:

slainte39 wrote:

gringal wrote:The question referred to 1945, then the polls moved directly to 1994, 2004 and 2015.  Explanation for the difference?

 

If you are referring to the differences in percentages, I would say, obviously 50 years of "Cold War". with the French being a member of NATO.

Probably correct; like the propaganda we are inundated with in school re American history.

I think The Marshall Plan may have played a role in this skewed perception.

I do not think so, most people in France do not even know now what the Marshall plan was and think that t US rebuilt Germany and Japan but nowhere else.. ..I am not even sure they know they rebuilt Germany. The war isancient hstory and there has been huge emphasis on Europe versus the US so what people know s mostly from movies or hearsay from their parent and grand parents.

Marshall Plan funds went to both Allied and Axis nations. And yes, France received some as well. This is not to insist, however,  that the plan altered anyone's perceptions on who played what role in the war: it was just an observation. I think what you're saying is that popular culture has had a greater influence on the matter and I think that's reasonable.

In Europe .the brits go the most then France then Germany and the other.s ot that is what I remeber .. so t could be fuzzy..

and the countries of the Eastern block received nothing thanks to Russia..