June 6 marks the 75th anniversary of Anglo-American troops' landing in French Normandy, dubbed by the West as the D-Day or Operation Overlord. In Russian historiography, June 6, 1944 is often referred to as the opening of the second front in Europe. The operation itself has been perfectly well described in scientific works and popular literature, but the role of the Third Reich's military intelligence led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is yet to be comprehended.
Western historians and especially politicians prefer to avoid this term. Partly due to the long-drawn-out proceedings with the second front opening in Europe, which the USSR looked forward in 1942 and 1943. Then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, having arrived in Moscow in 1942, promised Stalin to positively open it next year. But this only happened in the summer of 1944, when the red army nearly sealed the fate of the Second World War. Apparently, our anti-Hitler coalition allies are not enthusiastic about recalling this even three-quarters of a century ago.
On the other hand, the term "second front" arouses a natural question as to where the first one was. The answer was obvious during the war — in the East, where three-quarters of German divisions were destroyed and where the fate of the Second World War was decided. However, the victory of the USSR was dearly bought, with losses amounting to almost 27 million people. While the United States lost a little more than 417 thousand people, and Britain — about 379 thousand in general.
Today everything has changed, unfortunately. The United States and Britain are now considered the powers to have decided the fate of that war in the West. Back in those days, the soldiers joked: "the Polish army took Berlin, and the Red Army helped". Then it was humor, albeit caustic, but now it has become sort of a reality, although invented by the western spin doctors.
Perhaps at least to the 75th anniversary of the Second World War victory, our former allies in the joint struggle against fascism will take a more careful look at the problem and face up to the facts. Here it is necessary to recall the serious threat our country encountered and all-out efforts required to divert Germany's destructive forces to the Eastern front, which was an undisguised benefit to the West back then.
Neither want Washington and London recall that the United States and Britain had been nurturing anti-Soviet plans almost from the very beginning of the war. Suffice it to mention Senator Harry Truman's statement of June 23, 1941: "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible."
Another "piece of work" was British leader Winston Churchill, who had been repeatedly delivering anti-Soviet and Russophobic statements. One of those was his call for not letting the Soviets to the Danube Valley and the Balkans. And at the October 1942 meeting of the military Cabinet, he demanded keeping the Russian barbarians back in the East, so that they were no threat to the free Europe.
In this regard, it is small wonder that when the war was about to end, the Western allies were actively looking for opportunities to make a bargain with Hitler's Germany. Therefore, the USSR was compelled not only to wage an open war with the Nazi coalition, but also to monitor and prevent the attempts of our "woeful allies" to harm us or to start a Third World War against us. And the Soviet intelligence which performed successfully and efficiently during the Second World War, played a pivotal role here.
This was largely attributable to the fact that the British MI6 intelligence and MI5 counterintelligence, as well as the US Foreign Ministry and the UK Foreign Office comprised a lot of Soviet agents, including the famous Cambridge Five led by Kim Philby. The agents extracted the most valuable secret information. So Stalin was in advance informed about many of Washington and London plans concerning the Soviet Union. Plans for Operation Overlord were no exception.
The recently declassified documents of the US and British intelligence services revealed that this operation, extensively advertised in the West, was pre-agreed by MI6 and the forerunner of the CIA — the Office of Strategic Services, OSS – with the German generals as part of the Operation Valkyrie. As it turns out, the mission was organized by OSS head William Joseph Donovan and MI6 head Stewart Graham Menzies, who used contacts in the German army circles by proxy of their agent of influence Admiral Canaris, the head of the Third Reich's military intelligence.
As it was then believed in London, by 1944 Hitler had already fulfilled his mission and was blocking the Western plans to establish a post-war world order and weaken the USSR as much as possible. Admiral Canaris, being an advocate of London's ideas, provided the necessary contacts between the German generals and MI6. The key figure promoted by the British intelligence inside the Wehrmacht was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was to replace Hitler and continue the war in the East allied with the armed forces of the Polish emigrant government in Britain.
In this regard, when it comes to the Normandy landing, it 's worth noting that in the landing zone the German troops were commanded by Rommel himself, whom MI6 considered the future German Napoleon. Therefore, some historians quite rationally hypothesize that the D-Day is one of the 20th century major fake news schemes, directed first and foremost against the Soviet Union.