“Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid”, Ernest Hemingway, 1942

There were no bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, there never were, just occasional forays by German bombers. The country was emerging from the Blitz, the Luftwaffe had been defeated in the Battle of Britain, and the country was now building up defences, restocking aircraft and pilots, reforming regiments from the more than 300,000 British soldiers who had somehow been rescued from the fields of France at Dunkirk.

The popular song was written about the heroic resistance, by two Americans who didn’t know the bird was not indigenous to the UK – although some claim it was a reference to the undercarriage colour of the Spitfires – and Vera Lynn was yet to record it. When she did, although it seemed the darkest of times, the war was on the way to being won, although those fighting it didn’t know it then.

While Britain awaited the expected invasion, Hitler had instead turned his attention to the east and the then Soviet Union, ignoring history and fated to replay it. Britain could wait.

On the 75th anniversary of VE Day there were no flags for Russia I could see – or for the late entrant. the United States – in the celebrations on Friday. Even a brief flutter would have marked some appreciation of the decisive part the Red Army played, the casualties they and the civilian population took, turning the tide of the war and sparing us the onslaught.

In June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia and its satellites, with its prime target the capture of Moscow, domination and total victory. Around the time Vera Lynn recorded the song, 10 months later, the Wehrmacht had been turned back less than 20 miles from Moscow.

There is a memorial which marks the spot the German retreat began, giant tank traps, now surrounded by shops and arterial roads, where in April 1942 the second great historical retreat from Moscow began.

In the 10 months of the initial blitzkrieg the Axis armies had destroyed almost all of the Soviet Air Force on the ground as well as entire armies. Ukraine fell and as Russian soldiers tried to stem the advance, whole factories were uprooted and moved eastwards to prevent them falling into enemy hands.

In September 1941, after a bitter and bloody 72-day siege, Ukraine’s capital Kiev fell. More than 600,000 Soviet soldiers were captured and thousands of civilians were sent to Germany for forced labour, most of whom did not return. The occupiers, in attempting to enlist local support, tried to foster the illusion of normal life by organising cultural events and sports, not that it played well.

Dynamo Kiev was, and is, the country’s most famous club. Players who had been professionals before the war were put to work in a bread factory. They formed a club called Start. Around the same time a Nazi-controlled team of collaborators called Ruch was formed and the Dynamo players invited to join. They refused.

Start were omnipotent, they rolled over every team they played, humiliating Ruch 7-2, humping a Hungarian garrison side 6-2 as well as humiliating a German artillery unit 7-1.

The smarting Germans, to underline their supposed mastery, decided to send their team of professionals, who had been saved from service at the front on the orders of Hermann Göering, to stop Start.

The German side was called Flakelf. They were hosed 5-1, which probably wasn’t politic, but struck a blow for the oppressed. The Germans couldn’t accept defeat from “inferiors”, so they arranged a return match, stiffened by several new recruits to the team.

At half-time it was 3-1 to Start. A German officer burst into the ramshackle dressing room to tell the players that “only Germans can win today”, making the threat explicit.

It made no difference. Start ran out 5-3 winners in what became known as The Death Match.

Start were to play only once more, winning 8-0 a week later. Two days after that the Gestapo arrested six of their players in the bakery and 48 hours later another two were arrested.

Four Dynamo players were executed by the Germans, three of them together in a line as they took the bullets. In 1971, a monument to the four was put up in the grounds of Dynamo’s old stadium, their faces chiselled into marble.

The war on the Eastern Front, in what the Russians call The Great Patriotic War, did not end with the retreat from Moscow, but with the final Nazi capitulation – also on VE Day, May 8, 1945.

In the wider war for the conquest of Russia the numbers employed and the losses are chilling, almost unimaginable. The largest invasion force in the history of warfare, the largest military operation and some of the heaviest and bloodies battles of the war, its casualties make those atomised in Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem almost incidental.

The most famous battle, even over that of Moscow, is the monumental one for Stalingrad, now Volograd. It ranks as the greatest battle of the entire war. It lasted from July 1942 to February 1943 and marked the turning of it for the Allies.

When the Red Army finally broke back and crushed the German infantry they recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses, although the total death toll is believed to exceed 800,000. Red Army casualties – dead, wounded, missing or captured – numbered more than a million. Lives, not just figures.

The historic capital of Russia, St Petersburg, then renamed Leningrad, was besieged for 872 days, from September 1941 to January 1944. The blockade claimed the lives of 650,000 Leningraders in 1942 alone, mostly from starvation and disease.

The novelist Helen Dunmore wrote a remarkable and beautiful epic novel, The Siege, a love story set in a battle for survival, where the corpses froze in the street, some were cannibalised, and people were so hungry they boiled shoe leather for soup and burned furniture to keep warm and barely alive.

Over The Great Patriotic War five million Red Army soldiers were captured, the majority of whom never went home, with more than three million either shot or starved to death by the Nazis. Mass shootings and gassings, aided by collaborators, also murdered over a million Soviet Jews. Gang rape and subsequent murders went unreported.

The figures of catastrophe are barely credible. More died in the four years of the Eastern Front than in all other combat across the globe in all of the Second World War.

The Red Army losses were 8.6 million soldiers, while more than 18 million Soviet civilians also perished. Destruction was also monumental, with 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages razed. Of the 17 million German soldiers who fought on the front, 5.5 million died. The story of the Russian suffering and their eventual triumph, which was crucial in keeping us free and speaking the language we hold so dear, has been largely obscured by what Churchill described as the Iron Curtain which descended across Europe, and which also blotted out the purges of Stalin, in the Cold War.

Recognising that, waving a flag for them, shouldn’t divide us – although it appears to – on this of all weekends.