Snake Featherston
Banned
One thing people forget is that this also applied in spades to the *Soviet* version of WWII just as much as it did the German. In the Soviet version Lend-Lease was given short-shrift (for understandable propaganda reasons. It's much less easy to convince people of the superiority of Communism if Communism rode to power on US-issue trucks and used US-model radios). Zhukov and company had their memoirs edited to reflect the ebb and flow of Soviet power politics, with Stalin's role being one day that of a living God Mode Sue, the next being that of the scapegoat.
The Soviets did a monstrous injustice to their own soldiers by refusing to write about some 40% of Eastern Front battles where their armies wound up in major flops. The most archetypal examples of this are Polar Star and Operation Mars. This is also why accounts of the Leningrad region focused on the horrors of the Siege and not the fighting, as with the exceptions of Tikhvin and Operation Spark most of the battles there are an inglorious example of the USSR having its own version of Monte Cassino in the Siniavo region and both the Nazis and Soviets squeezed by lousy terrain and logistics leading to a battle much more akin to WWI than WWII. Which of course would be complicated history and not propaganda.
This is why it took until 1991 for much of the real history of the Soviet war to come out, and why so much of what we know now about that is due to David Glantz: Moscow was very, very good at lying through its teeth about *its* war and having won it, it was in a much better position to get away with the blatant lies. I would also note that Guderian's record as a blatant liar on the Nazi side was rivaled only by some of the Soviet memoirs on *their* side. Ironically the original version of Zhukov's memoirs was as far as WWII memoirs went actually fairly more close to events than most. However that version had to wait until 1991 to come out.
Edit-And of course it should also be noted that *US* WWII memoirs aren't necessarily reliable or truthful, either. War memoirs should always be treated with a grain of salt, as they are almost invariably written with agendas. Never take any statements in them as 100% accurate, and trust, but verify is the bare minimum of standards to be applied to them, regardless of authors.
The Soviets did a monstrous injustice to their own soldiers by refusing to write about some 40% of Eastern Front battles where their armies wound up in major flops. The most archetypal examples of this are Polar Star and Operation Mars. This is also why accounts of the Leningrad region focused on the horrors of the Siege and not the fighting, as with the exceptions of Tikhvin and Operation Spark most of the battles there are an inglorious example of the USSR having its own version of Monte Cassino in the Siniavo region and both the Nazis and Soviets squeezed by lousy terrain and logistics leading to a battle much more akin to WWI than WWII. Which of course would be complicated history and not propaganda.
This is why it took until 1991 for much of the real history of the Soviet war to come out, and why so much of what we know now about that is due to David Glantz: Moscow was very, very good at lying through its teeth about *its* war and having won it, it was in a much better position to get away with the blatant lies. I would also note that Guderian's record as a blatant liar on the Nazi side was rivaled only by some of the Soviet memoirs on *their* side. Ironically the original version of Zhukov's memoirs was as far as WWII memoirs went actually fairly more close to events than most. However that version had to wait until 1991 to come out.
Edit-And of course it should also be noted that *US* WWII memoirs aren't necessarily reliable or truthful, either. War memoirs should always be treated with a grain of salt, as they are almost invariably written with agendas. Never take any statements in them as 100% accurate, and trust, but verify is the bare minimum of standards to be applied to them, regardless of authors.
