D-Day and Bagration – Lest We Forget…

This Thursday, many of us across these islands will pause and remember the brave men and women involved in the D-Day landings. At least 135,000 Irishmen fought in WW2 and thousands of Irish, including the Royal Ulster Rifles, took part in D-Day. The 80th Anniversary of Operation Overlord should, quite rightly, be about reflecting upon the huge sacrifices of our grandparents’ generation. But politics inevitably seep into commemoration, particularly given our troubled past, the recent turbulence of Brexit and Russia’s criminal invasion of the Ukraine.

Our Anglo-American slanted worldview will continue to accept the narrative that the West played the dominant role in defeating the Wehrmacht, and downplay the greater role of our Soviet allies. The Battle of Normandy was of course massively important. ‘Our’ boys had to land on and secure those beachheads, clear the approaches to Caen and help lead the infantry assault upon this festung. Some 200 RUR soldiers fell during the liberation of Caen (in a regiment that drew many volunteers from both sides of the border in De Valera’s Ireland). They deserve to be acknowledged.

But let’s be clear, what was unknown to those brave warriors on the ground was that the political objectives of Overlord were at least as important as the military. Churchill and Roosevelt would have quite liked Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia to liquidate one another in a relentless war of attrition. From Stalingrad onwards (February 1943) it was obvious that this was not going to happen and momentum swung rather alarmingly towards the Red Army. D-Day had to happen in June 1944 to stop the Soviets from overrunning most of Europe. If D-Day had not happened in June 1944, the Iron Curtain may have ended up on the Rhine rather than the Elbe.

Our overwhelming focus on Operation Overlord in Normandy sidesteps the “bigger D-Day” that began two weeks later, on the Eastern front. Few of us even know its name, but this June also marks the 80th anniversary of OPERATION BAGRATION, the massive Soviet Offensive in Belarus that annihilated German Army Group Centre. Where allied soldiers in the West faced 58 Axis divisions from the Cotentin to the Apennines, the Red Army confronted 228. The devastating Soviet blitzkrieg through Belarus, during the summer of 1944, pushed the Wehrmacht back another 400 miles and brought the Red Army to the outskirts of Warsaw. It was Germany’s greatest ever military defeat. German officers and men know where the war was lost, and it was in the East.

Operation Bagration was steeped in symbolism. It began almost exactly three years after the start of Barbarossa, the mammoth German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was appropriately named after the Russo-Georgian general Pyotr Bagration, who gave his life inflicting calamitous damage on Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812. It ultimately pushed the German invader out of the Soviet Union and back into Poland and East Prussia. But it lacked the central historical drama of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad or the encirclement of Paulus’ Sixth Army in the Stalingrad Kessel. It was a series of thrusts against a number of Wehrmacht festungen, as opposed to a sudden dramatic hammerblow.

The days and months after June 1944 helped birth the Cold War. It was always possible that the territories that were ‘liberated’ by the Red Army would be turned into Russian client states and those liberated by the western allies would coalesce with US hegemony. The political imperative of the D-Day landings was thus laid bare – the Soviet Union could not be allowed to win the war by itself (albeit heavily dependent upon US military hardware and USAF-RAF blanket bombing of German cities) because it would then gain mastery of Europe and this would seriously threaten Anglo-American interests.

We still struggle to comprehend that over 75% of the German soldiers who fell in WW2 were killed by the soldiers and partisans of the Red Army. Both the US and the UK lost about half a million combatants and civilians on all fronts during the conflict. Place this alongside the 27 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives in their Great Patriotic War (murdered by invaders who viewed them as untermenschen and internal apparatchiks who were guilty of criminal neglect and ineptitude). Bagration followed on from other battles of seismic proportion – Stalingrad, Kursk and the liberation of Leningrad after its defiant 900-day siege. The Red Army juggernaut had become unstoppable.

Centuries of Russophobia blind us to these irrefutable facts. Latin Catholic hostility towards Moscow as the new Orthodox Constantinople and British imperial paranoia about a Tsarist threat to the Raj are deeply embedded in our cultural subconscious. The excesses of Stalin’s megalomania and his murderous policies understandably inflated earlier prejudices. Add to this the Cold War, and more recently Putin’s oligarchic Russia with its brutal invasion of the Ukraine. We never seem to get Russia, a land far removed.

But something else is at play. There is that pervasive myth of British exceptionalism, of an island race that has heroically resisted all continental foes. WW2 is reduced to a select list of important events – the miracle of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the perilous Baltic convoys that helped supply the Russian war effort, El Alamein, the Battle of the Atlantic, the quirky Enigma code-breakers and the D-Day landings on Sword beach – that led inexorably to Victory in Europe. The unparalleled sacrifices of the Red Army, the Slavic partisans and Soviet civilians are peripheral to this script. And it is this historical imbalance that partly fuels that ugly and insular Euro-scepticism of recent times that helped to spawn Brexit.

We too, in Ireland, continue to engage in our own selective amnesia. 150,000 Southern Irishmen were involved in WW1 and about 70,000 Southern Irishmen were involved in WW2. They mostly fought in British uniforms; but their story is glossed over whilst that of the 1,600 volunteers of the Easter Rising is moved centre-stage. It is part of a bigger story in which several million Irishmen, for a multitude of reasons, swelled the ranks of the officers and men who conquered and defended the British Empire from the Transvaal to the Khyber Pass.

Consider too, how conflicted many Ukrainians are today when they remember what they no longer call ‘the Great Patriotic War’. 4.5 million men and women from Ukraine fought for the Soviet regime, not out of any love for Mother Russia but largely because they had witnessed the scorched Earth devastation wrought by the Wehrmacht on Kiev, Kharkiv and the Crimea. And yes, a significant number of Ukrainians also joined the Nazi invaders. They remembered the Holodomor Terror Famine of the 1930s when Stalin’s drive for collectivisation and Russification condemned millions of their kin. Some eagerly handed Jews over to the Einsatzgruppen; and some joined the partisans and took to the forests. Most just tried to stay alive. How will Ukraine remember Bagration? Its grandfathers mostly fought for Russia whilst its sons mostly fight against her. The only constant, the same cities are pulverised.

It does not do our brave past warriors, my grandfather included, a disservice for us to more fully acknowledge their Red Army brothers-in-arms. Overlord and Bagration very deliberately coincided to stretch Hitler’s depleted divisions to the point of no return. It is also important that we judge the 135,000 Irish who fought in WW2 and on D-Day on their terms and not on our own.

Overlord and Bagration – Lest We Forget.

Keith Williamson is a History and Politics teacher in County Down