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Well that and the whole threatening nuclear war. And the gulags. And the Chernobyl coverup. And… the rest of it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 1945, most French people thought that the Soviet Union deserved the most credit for Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II — even though the Soviets didn’t play much of a role in France’s liberation, relative to the US and Britain.
They tend to devolve into comparisons of counterfactuals, and the truth is that nobody has any strong idea how the war would have turned out absent US involvement, or if the German-Soviet non-aggression pact had held, etc.
But the case is pretty strong that the Soviet Union’s successful resistance of Nazi invasion and subsequent reclamation of Eastern Europe was the most important of many crucial factors in defeating Germany.
Britain’s fight in Africa also deserves some credit; while the losses incurred by Germans there were nowhere near as large as those suffered on the Eastern Front, the second battle in El Alamein, Egypt was hugely important in preventing the Nazis from seizing much of the Middle East.
Overall, Charles’ analysis suggests that the Soviets took more German troops out of commission than the other Allies did, but the numbers are necessarily rough.
The US lost 418,500 military and civilians in all theaters of the war — still a staggering figure, but not on the same scale as Soviet losses.
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