On This Day in History: May 8

VE Day

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Once upon a time, there was a prevailing belief that Nazis were bad. People embraced the idea so vehemently, an entire world went to war to stop them.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 8, 1945--

In the 2014 film Fury, tanker Norman Ellison machine guns the shit out of the enemy while saying, “Fucking Nazis!” Those were the days. Well, those days were hell, but they got the job done, and on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. They called it VE Day: Victory in Europe.

By the way, when I say “they,” I mostly mean Russia. Russia led the way in getting the job done. If I was being fair, I’d say VE Day was May 9, because that’s when Russians celebrate it; the German surrender came after midnight, Russia time. But Stalin was a dick, so May 8 it is.

Russia takes VE Day—they just call it Victory Day—very seriously. It’s a national holiday. The 60^th and 70^thanniversaries in 2005 and 2015 were the largest holiday celebrations—complete with the big-ass military parade—in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union.

How come America doesn’t get a day off for VE Day? Well, maybe it’s because they didn’t lose in the neighborhood of 26 million people fighting the fucking Nazis. About 95% of Allied deaths dealt by Germans were Soviets. But the latter took their own toll; three-quarters of the German losses in World War II came at the hands of Soviet soldiers. They weren’t nice to the Germans after the war either.

Be nice to me and

The Russians don’t call it WWII. They call it The Great Patriotic War. And these soldiers were patriots. The opening scene of the 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates, showing only one rifle for every two Soviet soldiers, and depicting fleeing Soviets being gunned down by their officers, is about as faithful as Jude Law when a hot young nanny walks into the room.

Fleeing soldiers were more likely to be court-martialled and put in “penal battalions,” and those guys were used as cannon fodder. But the Soviets weren’t actively trying to lose the war by needlessly throwing lives away. It’s just that Hitler was dedicated to depopulating the east to make room for the expanding German empire, and therefore dedicated far more military resources to the eastern front.

Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.