President Donald Trump has again demonstrated his less than impressive grasp of history with a statement on his Truth Social site on the 80th anniversary of VE Day – the end of the Second World War in Europe – claiming that the US ‘did more than any other country by far’ to win the global conflict.
In terms of cold statistics, it was the Soviet Union that did most to defeat Nazi Germany, suffering the colossal loss of 24 million military and civilian lives before the Red Army entered the ruins of Berlin to end the Third Reich.
The US lost a total of 418,500 dead in fighting Japan and Germany after Hitler unwisely declared war on America following his Japanese ally’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Morally, however, both the USA and the USSR only entered the war when they were attacked by the Axis powers. One country, however, was in the war from its beginning in 1939 to the bitter end in 1945. That country was Britain.
Trump’s typically grandiloquent mistelling of history has already been demolished by Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, who asked whether the president was so anti-European that he had ‘forgotten’ the US had remained neutral until it was attacked.
Trump’s Truth Social post added: ‘We won both wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery or military brilliance,’ before he announced that the US was renaming 8 May as Victory Day, and 11 November – the anniversary of the armistice ending the First World War, currently known in the US as Veterans Day – as Victory Day for the First World War.
Trump falsely and ludicrously claimed that the sacrifices made by the US in both world wars were greater than those made by its allies. In fact, the US only entered the First World War in April 1917, the year before the war ended, and its death toll of 116,516 was negligible compared with the millions who died fighting for Britain, France and Russia.
The reason why Trump feels it necessary to make America great again by falsifying the facts of history and denigrating the sacrifices of America’s allies and friends must be a matter between him and his psychiatrist, but his own less than glorious military record hardly gives him the moral authority to spout such blatant untruths.
Famously, in 1968, Trump avoided the draft to be sent to fight in the Vietnam War after a New York podiatrist diagnosed him with bone spurs in his feet. The podiatrist’s daughter later claimed that her father had made the diagnosis as a ‘favour’ to the future president’s father, Fred Trump.
Other witnesses claimed that Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne US military cemetery in France in November 2018 on the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War because he considered that the US Marines who lie there were ‘losers’ – one of the president’s favourite insults.
Although that claim – first made in The Atlantic and repeated by the admittedly anti-Trump broadcaster CNN – is denied by Trump loyalists, his contempt for the military is a matter of record. The real loser in this latest sorry affair is a man whose loose lips and outrageous lies have done so much to damage the western alliance and harm America’s global reputation.
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