Good @jststs essay on the historiographical wars over the second world war and the Soviet role in it. "It is increasingly hard to write anything of consequence about this war without potentially falling foul of the one or the other legal code." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443
Did the air war over Germany make a big difference? "At the height of the bomber war – in 1943–44 – German tanks deployed at the Eastern front nearly doubled" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443?scroll=top&needAccess=true
"Hitler shot himself when the Red Army came crashing down ... Berlin, not when strategic bombers showed themselves ... It were ground troops which took Berlin. And these ground troops were Soviet. Nobody else killed as many German soldiers as the Red Army" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443?scroll=top&needAccess=true
"In the Battle of Moscow in late 1941, between 30 and 40 percent of heavy tanks were of British origin, delivered via the incredibly hazardous ‘northern route’ by British mariners to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443?scroll=top&needAccess=true
"China...must not be forgotten among the Soviet Union’s allies: without Chinese perseverance and suffering in China & Burma, the Soviets might have had to face a two-front war ... most of the Soviet public chose to forget about this central fact" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443?scroll=top&needAccess=true
"The fate of deportees was horrible and often lethal, but not genocidal. Polish Jews could not know it at the time, but when they were forced by Stalin’s police to board cattle cars to the east, their survival chances increased dramatically" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443?scroll=top&needAccess=true
"In some places..the lesser evil was reversed: in Estonia, the Soviets killed more people than the Nazis, the Holocaust of Jews and Roma notwithstanding. For non-Jewish and non-Romani Estonians, Soviet rule was much more traumatic than the Nazi occupation" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1701443?scroll=top&needAccess=true