ANDREW PIERCE,
Madam, - We on this side of the former Iron Curtain tend to exaggerate the role played by the Western Allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany, and afford scant justice to the enormous sacrifice made by the Red Army and the former USSR, whose losses numbered around 25 million souls.
Toby Joyce (January 6th) contests the belief that following Stalingrad all that remained was a mopping-up operation in Europe. However, while this may seem flippant, it was indeed the case. The most recent study (Geoffrey Roberts's Victory at Stalingrad, 2002) asserts that not only did "more than 80 per cent of all combat during the second World War take place on the Eastern Front", but also that "the Germans suffered more than 90 per cent of their total war losses on the Eastern Front".
After Stalingrad, the Red Army was more than twice the size of the Wehrmacht, and it was only a matter of time before it routed Hitler, with or without the D-Day landings.
While the Western Allies floundered in the Bocage and attempted to tip-toe into Germany through Holland, millions of Red Army troops sacrificed themselves in enormous advances across a thousand-mile-wide front.
To underplay this contribution because of post-war differences is not befitting of those who perished in order to achieve it, and while we should recognise and be grateful for the heroism of those who died attempting to secure liberty on the Western front (including many Irish), we should not do so at the expense of those who truly cut short Hitler's thousand-year Reich. - Yours, etc.,
ANDREW PIERCE,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 14.