Mike Davis: Remembering Bill and Ivan

By Mike Davis

The decisive battle for the liberation of Europe began
sixty years ago this month when a Soviet guerrilla army
emerged from the forests and swamps of Belorussia to
launch a bold surprise attack on the mighty Wehrmacht’s
rear. The partisan brigades, including thousands of
Jewish fighters and concentration-camp escapees,
devastated the rail lines linking the German Army Group
Center to its bases in Poland and Eastern Prussia.

Three days later, on 22 June — the third anniversary
of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union — Marshal
Zhukov gave the order for the main assault on German
front lines. Twenty-six thousand heavy guns and rocket
launchers pulverized German fortifications in a matter
of minutes. The banshee-like screams of the Katyusha
rockets were punctually followed by the roar of 4000
tanks and the battle cries (in more than 40 languages!)
of 1.6 million Soviet soldiers. Thus began Operation
Bagration, an assault launched over a 500 hundred mile
long front.

But what American has ever heard of Operation
Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach not the
crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer
offensive was almost an entire order of magnitude
larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of
Normandy) in both the scale of forces engaged and the
direct cost to the Germans.

By the end of summer, the Red Army (which included full
divisions of Poles and Czechs) had reached the gates of
Warsaw as well as the high passes of the Carpathians
which command the entrance to Slovakia as well as
Hungary. Soviet tanks, in a stunning reverse
blitzkrieg, had caught Army Group Center in steel
pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more
than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge
German army had been encircled and would soon be
annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin
had been opened.

Thank Ivan.

It is no disparagement of the brave men who died in the
sinister hedgerows of Normandy or in the cold forests
around Bastogne, to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is
buried on the Russian steppes not in French fields. In
the struggle against Nazism, approximately forty
"Ivans" died for every "Private Ryan."

Yet the ordinary Soviet soldier — the tractor mechanic
from Samara, the actor from Orel, the miner from the
Donetz, or even the high-school girl from Leningrad —
is invisible in the current celebration and
mythologization of the "Greatest Generation." It is as
if the "new American century" cannot be fully born
without exorcising the central Soviet role in the
epochal victory of the last century.

Indeed, most Americans are shockingly clueless about
the relative burdens of combat and death in the Second
World War. And even the minority who understand
something of the enormity of the Soviet sacrifice tend
to visualize it in terms of crude stereotypes of the
Red Army: a barbarian horde driven by feral revenge and
primitive Russian nationalism. Only G.I. Joe and Tommy
are envisioned as truly fighting for civilized ideals
of freedom and democracy.

It is thus all the more important to recall that —
despite Stalin, the NKVD, and the massacre of an entire
generation of Bolshevik leaders — the Red Army still
retained powerful elements of revolutionary fraternity.
In its own eyes, and that of the slaves it freed from
Hitler, it was the greatest army of liberation in
history.

Moreover, the Red Army of 1944 was still a Soviet Army.
The generals who led the brilliant breakthrough on the
Dvina included a Jew (Chernyakovskii), an Armenian
(Bagramyan), and a Pole (Rokossovskii). In contrast to
the class-divided and racially segregated American
forces, command in the Red Army was an open, if
ruthless, ladder of opportunity.

Anyone who doubts the revolutionary élan and rank-and-
file humanity of the Red Army should consult the
extraordinary memoirs by Primo Levi (The Reawakening)
and K.S. Karol (Between Two Worlds). Both hated
Stalinism but loved the ordinary Soviet soldier and saw
in her/him the seeds of socialist renewal.

So, as George W. Bush demeans the memory of D-Day to
solicit support for his war crimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan, I’ve decided to hold my own private
commemoration.

I will recall, first, my kindhearted Uncle Bill, the
salesman from Columbus, although it is hard to imagine
such a gentle soul as a hell-for-leather teenage GI in
Normandy. Second — as I’m sure my Uncle Bill would’ve
wished — I will remember his comrade Ivan. The Ivan
who drove his tank through the gates of Auschwitz and
battled his way into Hitler’s bunker.

Two ordinary heroes: Bill and Ivan. Obscene to
celebrate the first without also commemorating the
second.

Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities: And Other
Tales, Ecology of Fear, and co-author of Under the
Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists Never See, among
other books.

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