Well, Eisenhower contributed 100 000 men to a joint British-American force in .... North Africa! >>
And that is supposed to be historical analysis which one takes seriously, as if it was not chapter one, verse one of every history of the war that American efforts were initially focused almost exclusively on the Pacific Theater. It was a great imperialist crime, no doubt, to have as a priority the protection of your own national territory against invasion.
In his first post Heartfield announced how Europe was about to fall before Tito's partisans; now, he wants to add every partisan in Europe, and pretend that his original formulation wasn't as ludicrous as he made it -- it is just my making "light of the partisan struggle" against Fascism. But lost in this attempt to rescue Trotskyist dogma is any sense of the close cooperation between the Allied forces and the various partisans, or the fairly obvious way in which engagements with the Allied forces kept the German Nazis and Italian Fascists from focusing on and disposing of partisan forces which were no match for their superior firepower. It also neglects to deal with all of the Nazi and Fascist collaborators which sprung up at the same time as the resistance, or to recognize the great unevenness among national resistance, such that the German or Belgium resistance was completely insignificant beside the French or Italian resistance.
What exactly is demonstrated by comparing the number of American armed forces killed with the total number killed in the Soviet Union, when it is certainly obvious that civilians will die in great numbers in countries where the war is fought, and not at all in countries where it is not? You could get the same results by comparing German dead to American soldiers who died. That is supposed to prove that the US played a minor role in the defeat of fascism, only rushing in at the last moment to keep Europe from falling to partisans. And they say that Stalinists know how to rewrite history.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --