… Bryukhov's Service During World War Two
"As a Senator and later President of the United States during the final months of the war, Truman was well aware of the fact that we needed our allies to win the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Allies such as Britain, the Soviet Union, and China suffered devastating attacks on their homelands. Then they combined their power with the United States to defeat the Axis. Without their help, the Freedom Wall at the World War Two Memorial would have honored a much larger number of American dead.
One of those allies was Vasily Bryukhov of the Soviet Army. He was born in 1924 in the Ural Mountains. The Soviet Union had just won a civil war against its opponents. Growing up on a farm prepared him for the privations of military service. The school system that Bryukhov entered in the 1920s taught basic military discipline, atheism, the need to rapidly industrialize the nation, and the goal of eliminating class differences between people. The state controlled media and a ruthless police force hid news of the Soviet labor camps, famines, and executions that claimed the lives of millions of "enemies of the state" from Bryukhov and many other citizens.
After Germany conquered Western Europe in the first years of World War Two, it unleashed a massive invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By December, the invaders had killed or captured over four million Soviet troops. Russia created new military units with remarkable speed and quickly replaced the units that the Germans destroyed. Vasily became an instructor for a detached ski destroyer battalion that was formed during this mobilization to combat saboteurs, spies, desertion, and other forms of public disorder. In November, a German air raid wounded Bryukhov while his unit unloaded from a train near Moscow, the nation's capital. While he recovered in the hospital, his battalion was one of many others that stopped the Germans from entering the city. Less than forty of the 360 enlisted men in his unit survived the battle…"
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