9th May, 2011.
Today is the 66th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
Today,--- not yesterday, May 8th, not the day before yesterday, May 7th.
German capitulation took effect at 01:01 am Moscow time on 9th May, 1945. Considering that the clocks in Berlin at that exact time showed 23:01 of May 8th some have been arguing that the latter date has to be more accurate than the former. This is, of course, a much more curious argument than the bizarre squabble about whose signature on the capitulation papers carried more weight: that of Generaloberst Jodl who signed what amounted to an armistice, to be followed by actual surrender, with Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, on May 7th in Rheims/France; or of his superior officer Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, who unconditionally surrendered to Marshal Zhukov and RAF Marshal Arthur Tedder (the latter as General Eisenhower’s Deputy and on his authority) on May 8th in Berlin. This matter was sensibly settled back in 1945, giving unconditional precedence to the Berlin document, and only in the coldwar (and post-coldwar) years of historical revisionism this utterly silly controversy has been resurrected along the political lines. Ironically, for some time now, the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, has become a far more important date in the West than the actual date when Nazi Germany was forced to lay down arms.
Returning to the more subtle discrepancy of the two hours (of the time zone difference), raising the question of the precise date of the German capitulation, we may resolve it with a variation on the famous phrase “Vae victis!” Let this date be set by those who won the war, rather than by those who lost the war, or by those who joined the action after the outcome of the war had already become clear to all.
And by this criterion alone, Victory Day ought to be celebrated on Moscow’s time, that is, today, on the 9th of May.
Without minimizing or trivializing the overall Allied war effort, or the fact that for a whole brutal year from Dunkirk to Barbarossa, with the small exceptions of Greece and Yugoslavia, Britain stood virtually alone in her war against Hitler, history has long decided the question that it was the USSR who defeated the German war machine in World War II in a series of decisive large-scale victories, from the 1941 Battle of Moscow to Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943. At the time of the D-Day landings in 1944, the Soviet troops had in effect cleared the Russian territory of the German occupation forces and were poised to march across Europe with a manifestly guaranteed success. The Allied Invasion had no decisive effect on the outcome of the war in Europe.
It could have been a different story, though, had the Allied Invasion taken place in 1942 (as Stalin wanted, and insisted that it was promised to him in 1941), instead of 1944. It would certainly have cost many more American and British lives, but it would have saved millions of lives as well, including millions of Jewish lives lost between 1943 and 1945, in the tragedy known as the Holocaust. By all indications, the war might then have ended some time in 1943, and the world of the future wouldn’t have been shuddering ever since, on hearing the word Auschwitz.
Today is the 66th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
Today,--- not yesterday, May 8th, not the day before yesterday, May 7th.
German capitulation took effect at 01:01 am Moscow time on 9th May, 1945. Considering that the clocks in Berlin at that exact time showed 23:01 of May 8th some have been arguing that the latter date has to be more accurate than the former. This is, of course, a much more curious argument than the bizarre squabble about whose signature on the capitulation papers carried more weight: that of Generaloberst Jodl who signed what amounted to an armistice, to be followed by actual surrender, with Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, on May 7th in Rheims/France; or of his superior officer Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, who unconditionally surrendered to Marshal Zhukov and RAF Marshal Arthur Tedder (the latter as General Eisenhower’s Deputy and on his authority) on May 8th in Berlin. This matter was sensibly settled back in 1945, giving unconditional precedence to the Berlin document, and only in the coldwar (and post-coldwar) years of historical revisionism this utterly silly controversy has been resurrected along the political lines. Ironically, for some time now, the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, has become a far more important date in the West than the actual date when Nazi Germany was forced to lay down arms.
Returning to the more subtle discrepancy of the two hours (of the time zone difference), raising the question of the precise date of the German capitulation, we may resolve it with a variation on the famous phrase “Vae victis!” Let this date be set by those who won the war, rather than by those who lost the war, or by those who joined the action after the outcome of the war had already become clear to all.
And by this criterion alone, Victory Day ought to be celebrated on Moscow’s time, that is, today, on the 9th of May.
Without minimizing or trivializing the overall Allied war effort, or the fact that for a whole brutal year from Dunkirk to Barbarossa, with the small exceptions of Greece and Yugoslavia, Britain stood virtually alone in her war against Hitler, history has long decided the question that it was the USSR who defeated the German war machine in World War II in a series of decisive large-scale victories, from the 1941 Battle of Moscow to Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943. At the time of the D-Day landings in 1944, the Soviet troops had in effect cleared the Russian territory of the German occupation forces and were poised to march across Europe with a manifestly guaranteed success. The Allied Invasion had no decisive effect on the outcome of the war in Europe.
It could have been a different story, though, had the Allied Invasion taken place in 1942 (as Stalin wanted, and insisted that it was promised to him in 1941), instead of 1944. It would certainly have cost many more American and British lives, but it would have saved millions of lives as well, including millions of Jewish lives lost between 1943 and 1945, in the tragedy known as the Holocaust. By all indications, the war might then have ended some time in 1943, and the world of the future wouldn’t have been shuddering ever since, on hearing the word Auschwitz.
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