Edwin Morris, historian and biographer on Charlie Rose 6/7/04 (you may remember him as the writer that decided to add a fictional character into his biography of Ronald Reagan called
Dutch. How fitting for a president whose legacy is mostly fiction):
(paraphrased)
"...Gorbachev was going on about the suffering of the Russian people in WWII. Reagan surreptitiously reached to his voice box and turned off the sound."
[laughter all around the table]
From
Empire Notes:
Why was D-Day so late? June 6, 1944, is a mere 11 months before V-E Day (May 8, 1945). And yet Western Europe had been occupied as of May 1940, four years earlier.
The basic answer is extremely simple, although it is almost entirely unknown in the United States except by war buffs. The United States was happy to let Europe remain under Nazi occupation while the Nazis bled the Soviet Union. Almost the entire brunt of fighting the Nazis was borne by the Soviet Union. The Americans and British, before D-Day, deliberately engaged primarily in comparatively small battles in North Africa and southern Italy, fighting the Italians as often as the Germans (of course, it was more complicated than this, because World War 2 was much more truly a world war than the first, but for the purposes of analysis this isn't far wrong).
Even with the eventual opening of a Western front and heavy fighting first at Normandy and later at the Battle of the Bulge, a common estimate is that 80% of German military casualties were sustained on the Eastern front with the Soviet Union (and virtually all of the casualties of the "satellites" like Romania). And current estimates of the number of Soviet dead put it in the neighborhood of 27 million.
