Former U.S.MC Intelligence Officer Scott Ritter posted a lengthy Substack article on May 9, entitled “The Margin of Victory.” In it, he addresses President Trump’s Truth Social Post about VE Day, which Ritter says has to do with Trump’s jealousy about the massive Moscow parade, and ignores the crucial role of the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler.
After describing the “slim margin of victory” at Waterloo and Little Round Top in Gettysburg, Ritter details the Soviet forces’ role in diverting a substantial part of the German operation during and just after the successful June 6, 1944 Normandy Landing with two massive offensives: Bagration and the “Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive which took place between December 1943 and May 1944. Here, the Soviets lost some 270,000 killed, and another 840,000 wounded—greater losses than the entire U.S. military suffered fighting against both the Germans and Japanese—while inflicting 380,000 casualties on the Germans. …
“The margin of victory for the U.S. and British forces in Normandy was slim and would have been even slimmer had the Soviets not carried out the twin offenses of Dnieper-Carpathian and Bagration. These two campaigns resulted in the Soviets losing more than twice the total number of casualties suffered by the United States for the entirety of World War II in both theaters of operations.”
Ritter continues, “As U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt noted in 1942, ‘Russian troops have destroyed—and continue to destroy—more manpower, planes, tanks and cannons of our common enemy than all the other United Nations combined.’
“It was the ‘skillful leadership, solid organization, appropriate training and, above all, determination to defeat the enemy, regardless of its own sacrifices’ of the Red Army which, Roosevelt noted in a 1943 letter to Joseph Stalin, ‘certainly forced Hitler’s armed forces to follow the path to final defeat and won the admiration of the people of the United States for a long time.’
