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By Root 1413 0

if this conversation was apocryphal, the words reflected the reality that Stalin shrewdly judged the limits of his outrages against freedom in 1944–45, to avert an outright breach with the Western Allies, most importantly the United States. He kept just sufficient of his promises to Roosevelt and Churchill – for instance, by staying out of Greece and evacuating China – to secure his conquests in eastern Europe without precipitating a new conflict. But the Soviet Union was deluded by its military and diplomatic triumphs into a false perception of their significance. For more than forty years after 1945, it sustained an armed threat to the West at ruinous cost; the economic, social and political bankruptcy of the system Stalin had created was eventually laid bare.

The Russians emerged from the war conscious of their new power in the world, but also embittered by the colossal destruction and loss of life they had suffered. They believed, not mistakenly, that the Western Allies had purchased cheaply their share of victory, and this view reinforced their visceral sense of grievance towards Europe and the United States. They forgot their role as Hitler’s allies between 1939 and 1941. Modern Russia maintains a stubborn, defiant denial about the Red Army’s 1944–45 orgy of rape, pillage and murder: it is deemed insulting that foreigners make much of the issue, for it compromises both the nation’s cherished claims to victimhood, and the glory of its military triumph. In 2011, long after the Western Allies withdrew from almost all the territories they occupied in the wake of victory, Russia clings insistently to the national frontiers it claimed as war booty, embracing eastern Poland, eastern Finland and parts of East Prussia and Romania, together with Stalin’s Pacific coast conquests. It seems implausible that a nation ruled by Vladimir Putin will relinquish them.

The military course of the war was more strongly influenced by mass and the comparative institutional effectiveness of rival armies than by the performance of individual commanders, important though this was; any roll-call of warlords should thus include the great military managers of the United States and Britain, Marshall and Brooke, even though neither directed a campaign. Marshall showed greatness as a statesman as well as a warlord. Brooke handled Churchill superbly well, and made a notable contribution to Allied strategy between 1941 and 1943. Thereafter, however, he somewhat diminished his stature by condescension towards the Americans and stubborn enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations.

Western Allied generalship seldom displayed brilliance, though the US Army produced some outstanding corps and divisional commanders. Michael Howard has written:

There are two great difficulties with which the professional soldier, sailor or airman has to contend in equipping himself as a commander. First, his profession is almost unique in that he may have to exercise it only once in a lifetime, if indeed that often. It is as if a surgeon had to practise throughout his life on dummies for one real operation; or a barrister appeared only once or twice in court toward the end of his career; or a professional swimmer had to spend his life practising on dry land for an Olympic championship on which the fortunes of his entire nation depended. Second, the complex problem of running an army is liable to occupy his mind and skill so completely that it is very easy to forget what it is being run for. The difficulties encountered in the administration, discipline, maintenance and supply of an organization the size of a fair-sized town are enough to occupy the senior officer to the exclusion of his real business: the conduct of war.

The Germans and Russians proved more successful than the Western Allies in fulfilling the requirement identified by Howard: to empower commanders who fought rather than managed. For American, British, Canadian, Polish and French troops at the sharp end, the 1944–45 northwest Europe campaign seldom seemed less than horrific. But the casualty figures,