alliance of the United Nations was born. After this there were two theatres of operations, in Europe and the Pacific, and in Europe there were two fronts, in the West and the East. Everywhere the war followed a common pattern: until the end of 1942 the Allies faced unremitting defeat; the turning points came simultaneously at Alamein in the West, Stalingrad in the East and Guadalcanal in the Pacific; after that the Allies were winning more or less continuously until the end in 1945.
The Soviet experience of warfare was very different from that of the British and American allies. The Soviet Union was the poorest and most populous of the three; its share in their pre-war population was one half but its share in their pre-war output was only one quarter.[25] Moreover it was on Soviet territory that Hitler had marked out his empire, and the Soviet Union suffered deep territorial losses in the first eighteen months of the war. Because of this and the great wartime expansion in the US economy, the Soviet share in total Allied output in the decisive years 1942-4 fell to only 15 per cent. Despite this, the Soviet Union contributed half of total Allied military manpower in the same period. More surprisingly Soviet industry also contributed one in four Allied combat aircraft, one in three artillery pieces and machine guns, two- fifths of armoured vehicles and infantry rifles, half the machine pistols and two-thirds of the mortars in the Allied armies. On the other hand, the Soviet contribution to Allied naval power was negligible; without navies Britain and America could not have invaded Europe or attacked Japan, and America could not have aided Britain or the Soviet Union.
The particular Soviet contribution to the Allied war effort was to engage the enemy on land from the first to the last day of the war. In Churchill's words, the Red Army 'tore the guts' out of the German military machine. For three years it faced approximately 90 per cent of the German army's fighting strength. After the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 two- thirds of the Wehrmacht remained on the eastern front. The scale of fighting on the eastern front exceeded that in the West by an order of magnitude. At Alamein in Egypt in the autumn of 1942 the Germans lost 50,000 men, 1,700 guns and 500 tanks; at Stalingrad they lost 800,000 men, 10,000 guns and 2,000 tanks.[26]
Unlike its campaign in the West, Germany's war in the East was one of annexation and extermination. Hitler planned to depopulate the Ukraine and European Russia to make room for German settlement and a food surplus for the German army. The urban population would have to migrate or starve. Soviet prisoners of war would be allowed to die; former Communist officials would be killed. Mass shootings behind the front line would clear the territory of Jews; this policy was eventually replaced by systematic deportations to mechanised death camps.
Our picture of Soviet war losses remains incomplete. We know that the Soviet Union suffered the vast majority of Allied war deaths, roughly 25 million. This figure could be too high or too low by one million; most Soviet war fatalities went unreported, so the total must be estimated statistically from the number of deaths that exceeded normal peacetime mortality.[27] In comparison, the United States suffered 400,000 war deaths and Britain 350,000.
Causes of death were many. A first distinction is between war deaths among soldiers and civilians.[28] Red Army records indicate 8.7 million known military deaths. Roughly 6.9 million died on the battlefield or behind the front line; this figure, spread over four years, suggests that Red Army losses on an average day ran at about twice the Allied losses on D-Day. In addition, 4.6 million soldiers were reported captured or missing, or killed and missing in units that were cut off and failed to report losses. Of these, 2.8 million were later repatriated or re-enlisted, suggesting a net total of 1.8 million deaths in captivity and 8.7 million Red Army deaths in all.
The figure of 8.7 million is actually a lower limit. The official figures leave out at least half a million deaths of men who went missing during mobilisation because they were caught up in the invasion before being registered in their units. But the true number may be higher. German records show a total of 5.8 million Soviet prisoners, of whom not 1.8 but 3.3 million had died by May 1944. If Germans were counting more thoroughly than Russians, as seems likely up to this point in the war, then a large gap remains in the Soviet records.Finally, the Red Army figures omit deaths among armed partisans, included in civilian deaths under German occupation.
Soviet civilian war deaths fall into two groups: some died under German occupation and the rest in the Soviet-controlled interior. Premature deaths under occupation have been estimated at 13.7 million, including 7.4 million killed in hot or cold blood, another 2.2 million taken to Germany and worked to death, and the remaining 4.1 million died of overwork, hunger or disease. Among the 7.4 million killed were more than two million Jews who vanished into the Holocaust; the rest died in partisan fighting, reprisals and so forth.11
How many were the war deaths in the Soviet interior? If we combine 8.7 million, the lower limit on military deaths, with 13.7 premature civilian deaths under German occupation, and subtract both from 25 million war deaths in the population as a whole, we find a 2.6 million residual. The scope for error in this number is very wide. It could be too high by a million or more extra prisoner-of-war deaths in the German records. It could be too high or too low by another million, being the margin of error around overall war deaths. But in fact war deaths in the Soviet interior cannot have been less than 2 million. Heightened mortality in Soviet labour camps killed three-quarters of a million inmates. Another quarter of a million died during the deportation of entire ethnic groups such as the Volga Germans and later the Chechens who, Stalin believed, had harboured collaborators with the German occupiers. The Leningrad district saw 800,000 hunger deaths during the terrible siege of 19414. These three categories alone make 1.8 million deaths. In addition, there were air raids and mass evacuations, the conditions of work, nutrition and public health declined, and recorded death rates rose.12
Were these all truly 'war' deaths? Was Hitler to blame, or Stalin? It is true that forced labour and deportations were part of the normal apparatus of Stalinist
11 Jewish deaths were up to one million from the Soviet Union within its 1939 frontiers, one million from eastern Poland, and two to three hundred thousand from the Baltic and other territories annexed in 1940. Israel Gutman and Robert Rozett, 'Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust', in Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. iv (New York: Macmillan, 1990).
25
On the Soviet economy in wartime see Susan J. Linz(ed.),
26
I. C. B. Dear (ed.),
27
Michael Ellman and Sergei Maksudov 'Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War',
28
The detailed breakdown in this and the following paragraph is from G. F. Krivosheev, V M. Andronikov, P. D. Burikov, V V Gurkin, A. I. Kruglov, E. I. Rodionov and M. V Filimoshin,