Ukraine 2022: Echoes of 1939

Unlike the weekly current-events magazines, WWII Quarterly is edited, assembled, and sent off to the printer well in advance of the day you receive it in the mail or pick it up at the newsstand. Therefore, this editorial will be old news by the time you read it. As I write, Vladimir Putin’s Russian army is just a month into its invasion of Ukraine. The scenes of death and destruction are heartbreaking—burning buildings, whole towns leveled, refugees trying to escape, etc. If some of the images seen on the news were in black and white, you’d swear that they were taken some 80 years ago. Instead of German soldiers riding atop tanks into battle on the Eastern Front, now they’re Russians. And they aren’t Russians repelling the German invader but rather Russian invaders trying to crush and subjugate a former part of the old Soviet Union. Lebensraum, anyone? Yet, as of this writing, the Ukrainians are doing remarkably well—much better than the brave Poles of 1939—or the French, Belgians, Norwegians, etc., of 1939 and 1940. Instead of rolling over as many observers expected, the Ukrainians have put up a fierce resistance that has, at least as of this writing, stymied the aggressors. And for what? A “false-flag” operation with echoes of Hitler’s reasons for invading Poland (i.e., the faked Polish attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz in August 1939)? Putin’s self-vaunted Russian army is proving to be a faint echo of Stalin’s Red Army, which held of