The US Mission to the Vienna OSCE today commemorates the end of the war 75 years ago and warns Russia not to present its “undoubtedly heroic and decisive contribution to the victory over Hitler’s Germany” in a one-sided way.
The US ambassador to the international organization, James S. Gilmore III, said in a statement “While the military and civilian population of the Soviet Union made tremendous sacrifices to defeat the Nazis, as our Russian colleague reminded us today – and we honor those sacrifices completely – we should also not forget that World War II began in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler agreed in a pact to divide Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi-controlled zones.” Gilmore continued: “I am sure that our Polish friends have not forgotten this fact for a second to this day. For many European nations, 1945 was not a return to freedom, but the beginning of almost 50 years of oppression by the Soviet Union. The road to true liberation is long, and in some cases societies are still moving along that road. We call on Russia to stop making self-aggrandizing claims based on deliberate misrepresentations of history. We stand in solidarity with our European partners and against Russia’s falsification of history.”
The US mission also reminds us in some tweets the immense deliveries of weapons and materiel under the Lend Lease Programwhich were transported to Murmansk from 1941 onwards by German submarines and aircraft via the Arctic Ocean route at great sacrifice (keyword convoy PQ17) and via Persia enabled the Red Army to march to Berlin and Vienna. The USA delivered around 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 13,000 locomotives and freight wagons, 90 cargo ships, 4,000 bombers, 10,000 fighter planes and more than 7,000 tanks to its Soviet allies. The British and Canadians supplied a further 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft. Two book tips for those interested: Soviet Lend-Lease Fighter Aces of World War 2 and Lend-Lease and Soviet Aviation in the Second World War.
By the way, in the picture above you can see a Panzer-V Panther behind the Russian Sherman tank. Such tanks were used after the last battles in Hungary (see book tip), the Panzer Regiment 11 of the 6th Panzer Division took over such tanks in Vienna in March 1945 – presumably from vehicles repaired in the arsenal (see picture gallery above) – and fought with an initial 68 units from Vienna (most recently Engelsplatz) to the end in the Brno area. According to various war diaries, the crews are said not to have coped so well with the tricky “Panthers” on the transmission side (see also picture gallery above) because they were used to Panzer IVs and only underwent a rudimentary training phase. In addition to combat losses, there were also a number of failures due to driving errors.
