esmith: When referencing Soviet casualties, you make my point for me. The Germans and Russians bled themselves white during fighting on the Eastern Front. The Soviets literally bludgeoned the Germans into submission in the final two and half years of the war, and suffered horrific losses as a result.
To say that the Western Front was “less” well defended than the Eastern Front isn’t exactly true, either. Units like 6th Panzer and 9th and 10th SS spent as much time in Europe as they did in Russia.
As to the brutality of the fighting, there is no doubt that the Eastern Front was a “war without mercy” and largely because of the larger ideological conflict between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, but the fighting in France, Belgium and Germany was just as brutal. The American Army that ended the war was very different from the one that began it, and I have no doubt that they would have held their own, especially against the vastly attenuated Soviet forces that ended the war in Germany.
Red Army documents indicate that it took the Soviets nearly ten years (until 1955) to rebuild the army, restore its elan and put it onto a solid war footing again. That’s a very far cry from an army that would have been wetting their boots in the English Channel had they decided to continue the war against the Americans and British.
