On March 1st, 2024, Elon Musk tweeted on his social media platform ‘X’ referring to an ABC TV news report,
“People, who get their news from legacy TV, live in a fake alternate reality.” (‘legacy’ = the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past) For much of the past week, Western TV News has featured a Second World War anniversary ‘Glorious D-day’ celebration hailing the U.S., British Commonwealth and Canadian amphibious invasion of France on June 6, 1944 as leading to the defeat of Nazi Germany.Political leaders praised the veterans still alive as having successfully fought for ‘freedom!’ Estimated Allied Forces D-day casualties were about 10,000, with 4,000 confirmed dead. [1]
It is agonisingly sad to imagine those, who got killed on D-day following orders to wade forward into the firing line of German gun emplacements, but living in true reality would mean knowing that the Russians, (who were not invited to the D-day celebrations), had, at great human cost, already defeated Germany the year before D-day, during the cataclysmic battles of Stalingrad [2] and Kursk [3] in February and August of 1943, and were by D-day 1944 pushing toward Berlin liberating Nazi concentration camps on the way. [4]
In Western Legacy TV News Fake Alternate Reality:
Americans, with British Help, Defeated
Hitler’s Nazi German Armed Forces
IN REALITY
The Red Army won World War IIThe Red Army won World War II. The cost to the Soviets was between 9 million and 11 million military deaths. Adding in the Russian civilian deaths, the Soviet Union won the war at the cost of between 25 million and 27 million Soviet lives. By contrast total American military deaths in all of WWII were approximately 219,723 (2,715 in North Africa,183,588 in Europe, and 108,504 in Asia) [5]
On December 5, two days before, the United States entered World War Two, the Red Army had begun it’s successful enormous winter counter-offensive ending the Nazi siege of Moscow. As early as June 1942 the Soviet Union had urged its American and British allies to open a second front in Western Europe. It would take the US and UK another two years to finally launch the invasion of France. Meanwhile, the Red Army took the brunt of German military might and millions died in the genocidal race war waged by the Nazis on the Eastern Front.[6]
StalingradFrom 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943, Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in Southern Russia. With fierce close-quarters combat and heavy air raids, it was one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, with an estimated 2 million total casualties.
Soviet forces are estimated to have suffered 1,100,000 casualties, 478,000 to 478,741 killed and approximately 40,000 civilians died. [7]
The German defeat at Stalingrad was the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front, in the war against Nazi Germany overall, and of the entire Second World War. [8]
German and Axis casualties were enormous: 68 German, 19 Romanian, 10 Hungarian and 10 Italian divisions were mauled or destroyed. That represented 43% of Axis forces in the east. After Stalingrad, the Red Army had the initiative, and the Wehrmacht was in retreat. Germany’s Sixth Army had ceased to exist, and the armed forces of Germany’s European allies, except Finland, had been shattered. In a speech on 9 November 1944, Hitler himself blamed Stalingrad for Germany’s impending doom. The destruction of an entire army, the largest killed, captured, wounded figures for Axis soldiers, during the war, and the foiling of Germany’s grand strategy gave the battle at Stalingrad global significance.[9]
KURSKOn 4 July 1943, Germany attacked Soviet forces around the city of Kursk, which became the site of the largest tank battle in history involving some 6,000 tanks, 2,000,000 troops, and 4,000 aircraft. German forces exhausted themselves against the Soviets’ deeply echeloned and well-constructed defenses and then faced the Soviet counterattackThe Battle of Kursk marked the end of German offensive capability on the Eastern Front [10]
While at Kursk in Russia, 6,000 tanks and more than 2,000,000 men battled, on July 9, 1943, an American seaborne assault by the U.S. 7th Army, involving only 150,000 troops, 3,000 ships and 4,000 aircraft landed on the southern coast of Sicily.[11]
A Very Belated ‘D-Day’ (Operation Overlord) at Normandy June 6, 1944
A fleet of some 6,900 vessels landed the assault forces of slightly more than 156,000 men, Americans, British and Canadians on five beaches,
By the time the Allies did open this Western front in Normandy in June of 1944, the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany had already been established by the Red Army victories at Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943) and Kursk (July-August 1943) the year before. At Stalingrad Germany had lost its Sixth Army and four allied armies of over 400,000 men. Meanwhile, at Kursk Germany had lost thirty divisions (over 500,000 men) including seven Panzer divisions equipped with the new Panther and Tiger tanks, 1,500 tanks, 3,000 guns and 3,500 warplanes. (Thus, while the war was being won and whole German armies destroyed at great human cost to the Soviet Red Army during the month of July at Kursk, the Americans, British and Canadians in the same month had been invading a weakly defended Sicily.
Throughout most of World War II, the U.S. and the British faced 10 German divisions combined. The Soviets were facing more than 200 German divisions. The Germans lost approximately 1 million men on the Western front. They lost 6 million on the Eastern front. There is reason why Churchill said the Red Army tore the guts out of the German war machine. However, that’s not what Americans learn.[12]
The success of the Allies after Normandy was largely due to the Germans having been already weakened badly because of the pummeling they had taken from the Russian Army, and were at the time of the D Day landing in retreat across Europe ahead of the vast Red Army, which was then liberating the concentration camps. Majdanek on July 22–23, later that summer the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers.
By the time Allied troops came ashore on June 6, 1944 the Russians had already fought three years of devastating war on the Eastern Front, taking and inflicting appalling casualties. The enormous and pivotal battles of Stalingrad and Kursk had been fought and won.
In addition, the greatest Soviet campaign began 17 days after D-Day.
Following the defeat of Nazi Operation Zitadelle, the Soviets launched counter-offensives employing six million men along a 2,400-kilometre (1,500 mi) front as they drove the Germans westwards.
Operation Bagration, the Red Army offensive into Byelorussia from June 23 to August 19, 1944, resulted in the destruction of 28 of 34 divisions of the German Third Panzer, Fourth, and Ninth Armies of Army Group Center. The gutting of German forces in the East liberated the last parts of the Soviet Union and positioned the Red Army on the Vistula River, just across from Warsaw and within striking distance of Berlin. [13]Operation Bagration Was a Colossal Victory for the Red Army
– the Soviet destruction of German Army Group Centre – was, arguably, the single most successful military action of the entire war. This vital Soviet offensive was launched just after Allied troops had landed in Normandy, and it is symptomatic of the lack of public knowledge about the war in the East that whilst almost everyone has heard of D-Day, few people other than specialist historians know much about the Soviet Operation Bagration. Yet the sheer size of Bagration dwarfs that of D-Day. [14] Despite the recent Allied landing at Normandy, the German army retained over 235 divisions in the East, in comparison with roughly 85 in the West.[15]
On January 27, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz.
February 13-14, the U.S. continuously bombed Dresden killing 160,000 German civilians. RAF and USAF air raids devastated Dresden, By this period, Soviet forces had crossed the Oder River and were closing in on Berlin. [14]
Examples of Western Press Admissions of the Falsification of History
Newsweek, June 6, 2019
‘NORMANDY LANDING DID NOT HAVE A DECISIVE IMPACT ON THE OUTCOME OF WORLD WAR II’ BY DAVID BRENNAN [16] .]
Business Insider, 6/5/2019
Russia says D-Day memorials are part of a ‘false’ history of World War II meant to airbrush out the Soviet Union by Bill Bostock Jun 5, 2019 [17
Peoples World, 6/6/2019
“Let’s not leave the Soviet Union out of our D-Day history – On the 75th Anniversary of D-Day today, but who bore the brunt of the battles to defeat fascism in World War II? … Still another Soviet battle that surpassed D-Day happened after D-Day itself: Operation Bagration.” [18]
WHY DID THE SECOND WORLD WAR HAPPEN?IN REALITY
In reality it was America’s great corporations investing in, and joint venturing with, Hitler’s poor and totally disarmed Nazi Germany that made World War Two, Hitler’s invasion of Russia and the multi-nation Holocaust possible. [See Anthony Sutton’s ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler,’ 1976, available to read at https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/ ] [18A]
The true source of the Second World War was American industrial might empowering a rabid Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs in what had been a disarmed Germany. Hitler’s strident call for Germany to expand into the revolutionary communist Soviet Union was silently or tacitly approved as was much of Hitler’s rabid condemnation of Jews by America’s wealthy investing in and joint venturing with Nazi Germany. [19]
Reality in 1929A Colonial Powers Exploited World Mismanaged Into the Deeper Suffering of the Great Depression
The World Controlling Capitalist Colonial Powers Found Themselves In Dreadful Circumstances
With the world of the plundering Colonial Powers deep in the chaos of the Great Depression, a disastrous failure of rule by the banks of the capitalist countries, the United States internally threatened by local organisations of socialists, communists, anarchists, unionists and unpaid veterans, Nazi Germany was to be made into a loaded gun pointed, to be eventually fired, at the intolerably economically successful [20] socialist Soviet Union, which had become a beacon of light for those calling for the overthrow of failed capitalism and plundering colonialism.
Hitler’s uncompromisingly lethal condemnation of communism and his threatening the very existence of Wall Street’s archenemy, socialist Soviet Union, would have to have impressed many of the US and European wealthy, whose racist capitalist colonial rule of most of the world was threatened by socialist fervour and riots at home for its failure to have prevented the ongoing Great Depression with tens of millions suffering even from lack of food. Newsreels of massive and violent riots in many US cities can be seen on YouTube at ‘Riots Across America – The Great Depression.’ This author was really struck by the massive violence seen in these newsreels of that time.
The rearming of Germany made possible Hitler’s invasions of twenty-two countries and brought world war to Asia, for Japan would not have dared to attack and declare war on the United States of America without it being able to count on an alliance with an awesomely powerful rearmed Nazi Germany, plus Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania and Finland, which all declared war on the USA immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
The target of the Western sponsors of the Nazi war machine
The real target for the Western sponsors of the Nazi war machine was an attack on the Soviet Union in order to destroy, in their view, the source of international revolutionary socialism. In the 1930s, the very existence of capitalism was teetering on the edge amid the Great Depression, massive poverty and seething popular discontent in the US, Britain and other Western countries. The entire Western capitalist order was under imminent threat from its own masses. This is the historical context for the Western-backed rise of European fascism. [Quoted from ‘World War II Continues… Against Russia,’ Finian Cunningham PressTV, 5/10/2014]
The Second World War and the Holocaust, which made the rich speculators of Wall Street owned America the sole world superpower, is estimated to have taken the lives of 70 to 85 million men, women and children. Within this total were the 25 to 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union, which had been the obvious target in the rearming of Germany of a consensus among the wealthiest American and European capitalists. A further plus for Wall Street was the outcome that left half the cities of Wall Street’s designated archenemy, socialist model USSR, lying in ruins.
The beyond imagination great multi-nation genocide that included the Holocaust must be laid at the feet of wealthy profit scheming speculative investors in war headquartered mostly in lower Manhattan, New York City.
When we recall films and photos of skies filled with warplanes, of seas filled with warships and of thousands of tanks engaged in deadly conflict on land bringing death, destruction and misery to hundreds of innocent millions, we best remember that a lot of upper class people in business suits were elatedly counting their enormous blood-soaked profits from investments in the manufacture of weapons, munitions, uniforms, and coffins.
All War Crimes Committed Made Possible by the Rearming of Germany
All the monstrous beyond description inhuman Nazi German crimes, the crimes that have been attributed to Stalin and those committed by the US and Britain in fire bombing civilians in German and Japanese cities, happened during the world war that was made possible by the enthusiastic rearming of an insanely dangerous Nazi Germany.
This was done to protect and continue invested capital rule over most of humanity by the unjustly wealthy in the Western colonial empires then threatened by the economic calamity of the Great Depression that had been created by their own financial malfeasance.
SOLDIERS FOUGHT & DIED GM. FORD, ITT. GE. MADE $
Both at the Allied Normandy landing and three years earlier during the Nazi invasion of Russia, many, or often nearly most, disabled Nazi tanks were found to have GM motors. When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarisation programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel — a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary — and flying Opel-built warplanes. [See “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration,” Washington Post, Michael Dobbs, 11/30/1998.]
The following is excerpted from a report printed by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974:
“The activities of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler prior to and during World War II…are instructive. At that time, these three firms dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. Due to its mass production capabilities, automobile manufacturing is one of the most crucial industries with respect to national defense. As a result, these firms retained the economic and political power to affect the shape of governmental relations both within and between these nations in a manner which maximised corporate global profits. In short, they were private governments unaccountable to the citizens of any country yet possessing tremendous influence over the course of war and peace in the world. The substantial contribution of these firms to the American war effort in terms of tanks, aircraft components, and other military equipment is widely acknowledged.” Less well known are the simultaneous contributions of their foreign subsidiaries to the Axis Powers. In sum, they maximised profits by supplying both sides with the materiel needed to conduct the war.
After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing… Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne. “General Motors… was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants.”
During the post-WW II war era, the mega immense profits deriving from Wall Street’s dominance of the world’s crippled industry and commerce continued unabated for decades, while its military and clandestine CIA operations tore through innumerable unfortunate populations of non-Caucasian majority humanity in former colonies in maintenance of unjust predatory investments under the guise of anti-communism.
Through America’s formidable grip over international media, CIA overseen monopolised Western mainstream media[21]have inculcated such a heroism for America’s role in the defeat of Hitler (whose war Americans facilitated in the first place), that the world seems to have accepted all the US led post war neo-colonial genocide as somehow more or less forgivable, widely accepting capitalist media misrepresentation of communism as evil.
The media implanted deception that it was American soldiers, helped by the British, who defeated Hitler has so dramatically portrayed Americans as ‘good guys,’ that the neocolonial Western genocide they have led throughout the Third World has been somehow excusable, as if the mass murder taking the lives of many millions of innocent men, women and children was carried off with good intentions. US world reach propaganda has hailed the millions of American soldiers, who invaded Korea and the French colonies of Indochina and dozens of Third World nations, which had been colonies occupied by European or US military, as anti-communist heroes. ‘Better dead than red’ was a slogan repeated with bravado to counter demonstrations against these undeclared wars.
Best not to lose sight of the reason behind the arming of Hitler’s Nazi Wehrmacht having been anti-communism or anti Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in protection of colonial capitalism’s hegemony during its brutal wholesale systematic economic misadventure, the Great Depression.
In today’s world of instant global communication and the wide distribution of cell phone and social networking, The former militarily occupied colonies, recently still referred to as the ‘3rd World’ or ‘Developing Nations,’ previously as the ‘Underdeveloped World,’ and earlier as the ‘Undeveloped World,’ now show signs of slowly unifying themselves as a ‘Global South’ and ‘Majority Humanity.’*
A Global South Awakening Awareness of Reality?
Today’s hegemonic Western Colonial Powers had their powerful satellite powered U.S. monopolised media televise an effusive show of celebrating their second gigantic war between themselves, which had deadly involved, as had their first gigantic war between themselves, most all ‘their’ militarily colonised nations world-wide.
The former militarily occupied colonies, recently still referred to as the ‘3rd World’ or ‘Developing Nations,’ previously as the ‘Underdeveloped World,’ and earlier as the ‘Undeveloped World,’ now show signs of slowly unifying themselves as a ‘Global South’ and ‘Majority Humanity.’ *
Citizens of the nations of the Global South watch Western TV without forgetting the crimes against humanity suffered under the military of these European empires and their off shore descendent empires. * The media of their former colonial masters’ constantly remind viewers, listeners and readers, that the governments of most Europeans, of Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Israelis still appear to demand hegemony to go on exploiting peoples of Majority Humanity politically and economically when not militarily. *
This Global South must easily see through much of the racist West praising itself for having fought for freedom,* a freedom that excluded colonially enslaved and plundered peoples of Majority Humanity.*
- only a well traveled author’s observation
RECAP
U.S. D-Day Legacy TV News – Just Another Anti-Russian Ploy
U.S. Armed Hitler
U.S. Took Credit For Defeating the Germany it had armed
WWII Made U.S.A. Wealthy and the Single Superpower
Global South is Developing Fake Reality Awareness *
only a well traveled author’s observationJay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Greanville Post, Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, https://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations from 1945 thru 2012.
End Notes
Estimates of Soviet Russian military casualties at Stalingrad: 478,741 killled, 650,878 for a total of 1.13 million casualties and tens of thousands of Russian civilians were killed.
AP News, June 6, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/dday-wwii-france-invasion-military-b02d03fa11f66767a521a3b01357a89a 3. Approximate casualties at Kursk: Soviets 785,584; Germans between 50,000 and 200,000. Total Tanks and Self-Propelled Guns Lost : Russian 6,064, German 1,500; aircraft lost both sides total: 3,000. Post-war analyses by historians such as Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Eastern Front 1943-1944.3 Approximate casualties at Kursk: Soviets 785,584; Germans between 50,000 and 200,000. Total Tanks and Self-Propelled Guns Lost : Russian 6,064, German 1,500; aircraft lost both sides total: 3,000. Post-war analyses by historians such as Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Eastern Front 1943-1944.
- Germany and the Second World War: Volume VIII: The Eastern Front 1943-1944: The War in the East and on the Neighbouring Fronts: Volume VIII:
May 16, 2017 · by Karl-Heinz Frieser (Editor) 4.8 8 ratings.
5, U.S. Department of Defence Records
Website: National WWII Museum
Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Website: Britannica on Soviet Casualties
The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-45: A Documentary Reader by Alexander Hill: Routledge, June 13, 2008
- The Eastern Front during World War II was the site of immense brutality and loss of life. The conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union resulted in millions of deaths, both military and civilian. The Nazis waged a genocidal campaign, targeting not only Soviet soldiers but also civilians, including Jews, Roma, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime.
The Second World War on the Eastern Front – 1st Edition – Lee Baker – www.routledge.com
- “Battle-of-Stalingrad,” (brittanica.com)
- P.M.H. Bell, Twelve Turning Points of the Second World War,(Yale University Press, New Haven and London), 2011, p 104;
- Beevor, Antony (1998). Stalingrad. {London: Viking). ISBN 978-0-14-103240-5.
- David M. Glantz, (1986). “Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk, July 1943”. Combined Arms Research Library. CSI Report No. 11. Command and General Staff College, pp.149-59. OCLC 278029256. Archived from the original on 6 March 2008. Retrieved 15 July 2013.
11.“Invasionof Sicily”history.com, updated :August 21, 20original Nov. 18, 2009
- Peter Kuznick, “Mythology of America as Liberator,” The Real News Network, 6/9/2019)
- (“Operation Bagration And The Destruction Of The Army Group Center,” by Peter R. Mansoor, Hoover Institution)
- Peter Kuznick, D DAY: MYTHOLOGY OF AMERICA AS LIBERATOR FEEDS TRUMP’S MILITARISM, The Real News Network, June 9, 2019, (Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, DC. He and Oliver Stone co-authored The Untold History of the United States.)]
- Peter R. Mansoor Operation Bagration And The Destruction Of The Army Group Center (Hoover Institution) June 24, 2019 – Peter Mansoor, colonel, US Army (retired), is the General Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair of Military History at Ohio State University https://www.hoover.org/research/operation-bagration-and-destruction-army-group-center
- ”Russia Trolls West on D-Day: ‘Normandy Landing Did Not Have a Decisive Impact on the Outcome of World War II” BY DAVID BRENNAN 6/6/19 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-d-day-troll-normandy-anniversary-75-nazi-allies-victory-1442493
- ]https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-claims-d-day-memorials-effort-to-pretend-ussr-didnt-win-wwii-
- June 6, 2019 10:06 Am Cst BY JOHN WOJCIK https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/lets-not-leave-the-soviet-union-out-of-our-d-day-history/
18A. Anthony Sutton was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973.) and an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles.
- Nazi Party leader Adolph Hitler in his 1925 published autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf had emphasized Germany’s need for ‘Lebensraum’ (‘living space’), insisting that Germany’s 19th century motto ‘Drang Nach Osten’ (‘push to the East,’ a slogan designating German expansion into Slavic lands), must become a reality.
This was strikingly proclaimed by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, which by 1939 had sold 5.2 million copies in eleven languages. [3]
“The National-Socialist movement must attempt to remove the disproportion between the number of our population and the size of our territory to secure for the German people the soil that is due to them on this earth. And this action is the only one that can justify a sacrifice of blood before God and our German posterity. . . . “
- the prospering revolutionary Soviet Union had become an inspiration and model for revolutionary organizing against capitalism and colonialism across the world. Actually, though by 1928, the Soviet Union had made an amazingly rapid recovery from the ravages of the First World War and from a horrible civil war promoted by invasions of twelve capitalist nations, its agricultural production had not recovered from war’s devastation and there were still terrible famines throughout the 1930s.
- “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Time