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Until the Normandy invasion—from June of 1941 to June of 1944—nearly the whole Nazi war machine was concentrated in the East; even two months after D-Day 2.1 million Germans were fighting the Red Army while one million opposed Allied operations in France. Ambrose devotes more space in The Good Fight to D-Day than to any other event, and he clearly sees that operation as the pivot of the war and of his narrative. In fact the turning point of the war in Europe was not at Normandy or anywhere else Americans fought but either at Stalingrad, two years before D-Day, where the Red Army eradicated some fifty divisions from the Axis order of battle, or at Kursk, nearly a year before, where the Soviets smashed the Wehrmacht's strategic tank force, breaking the Nazis' capacity for large-scale attack. Ambrose lavishes a section of The Good Fight on the U.S.-British invasion of Sicily, which drove 60,000 Germans from the island, but completely ignores Kursk—the largest battle in history, in which at least 1.5 million Soviets and Germans fought, and which occurred at exactly the same time. Neither Ambrose nor we need honor Russia's war dead as we do our own, but simple honesty demands that we acknowledge the Red Army's awesome achievement. And as much as it may make us squirm, we must admit that the struggle against Nazi Germany (which Brokaw asserted was "testimony to America's collective and individual resistance to tyranny") was primarily, as the great military historian John Erickson called it, "Stalin's war."
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