Madam, - Dr Stefan Auer (May 11th) presents the outcome of the second World War as a simple morality tale: in the west good triumphed over evil, while in the east Stalin's victory over Hitler substituted one brutal dictatorship for another.
But it was not a Soviet mass bombing campaign which killed 600,000 German civilians but a British and American one. It was not Stalin who ordered the fire-bombing of Japanese cities which killed another million civilians but Roosevelt. So who was more "evil" - Stalin, who defended his communist dictatorship by repressing and killing mainly his own people, or Roosevelt and Churchill who defended their democracies by killing hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians?
In truth, the second World War was an unprecedentedly brutal and bloody conflict in which both sides committed atrocities and conducted dubious actions. Both sides - the Allies and the Axis - proclaimed lofty war aims as their goals but in practice pursued their own power and interests. But that doesn't mean the two sides were equivalent. Even Stalin's cruel regime in Eastern Europe was preferable to Hitler's racist empire. None of Stalin's murderous acts bears any comparison to the attempted Nazi genocide of European Jewry.
People in the allied world in 1945 had a much more sophisticated view of the meaning of the war than Stefan Auer does 60 years later. They knew that Stalin presided over a terroristic regime but still welcomed the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany as by far the lesser of two evils.
They hoped that the continuation of the Grand Alliance after the war would see the evolution of the Soviet Union into a more benign regime - a hope thwarted by the outbreak of the Cold War.
They saw more clearly than Auer does that there had to be more to the Stalin regime than just repression - otherwise it would not have been able to survive the Nazi onslaught and then win the war.
Whether we like it or not, Stalin's defeat of Hitler was a great popular victory, at home as well as abroad.
Bad things happen in war and as a result of wars. Victories are tarnished, ideals remained unfulfilled, and there are losers on the winning side as well as among the defeated. But those complexities should not blind us to a simple truth about the second World War: the right side won and we should continue for evermore to mark and celebrate its significance. - Yours, etc,
Prof GEOFFREY ROBERTS, Department of History, University College Cork.
Madam, - The anniversary of the end of the second World War brings two misrepresentations of history into focus with annoying frequency. The first is the misrepresentation of the military effort of the French Third Republic and Free France.
The efforts of the Resistance were supplemented throughout the war by the efforts of Free French units. These operated from 1943 on a strength of many divisions, and by the end of the war at army strength. The efforts of these forces, and of the doomed armies of the Third Republic, led to France suffering military casualties almost equal to those of the United States (civilian casualties were, of course, vastly higher).
The other is the critique of Ireland's neutrality.
Eamon de Valera put the unity and the well-being of the Irish people above all other considerations, while helping the Allies to a very considerable degree. As a head of state in a democracy, this was his primary duty, and the Irish people supported him. - Yours, etc,
FRANK FITZPATRICK, St Kevin's Parade, South Circular Road, Dublin 8.