My mother always was a drama queen. Her story has become a metaphor. This Wednesday will mark the anniversary of the end of World War II, August 15, 1945. We've never really been told the truth about this war until recently. For 52 years, we have been given, and wanted, the Eurocentric version of this enormous conflagration. We've had the Digger version, the Hollywood version, the Holocaust version, and these histories have had a popular resurgence in recent years. We've grown up on a narrative in which the Allies fight and win "the good war" against evil. None of these versions accurately portray the defining narrative of the war.

Yes, Australia was traumatised and endangered by World War II. Millions of families suffered anxiety and loss. Australia lost 40,101 war dead in a nation of 6.9 million (0.6 per cent of the population), twice as many, per capita, as the United States, which lost 410,662 war dead from a population of 129 million (0.3 per cent). Australia even suffered loss almost as much as Great Britain, 366,000 war dead out of 47.5 million people (0.77 per cent). This was not, however, a war won by the Western Allies, or a good war in which Western democracies overcame fascist dictatorships. The importance of D-Day, the Allied landings on Normandy, Winston Churchill, the Battle of Britain have been exaggerated in the totality of the war, and the importance of triumph of democracy and Western values has been wildly inflated. No, the defining theatre of the war, the one with the most heroism, the most slaughter, and by far the most ruthless chewing up of the civilian populations, was the war fought between two genocidal dictatorships. Evil confronted evil. One brutal dictatorship, Nazi Germany, invaded another ruthless dictatorship, the Soviet Union.

This conflict dwarfed all others. One statistical comparison provides a sense of the enormity of the disparity: during six years of war, the Australian military lost 19,235 battle dead. In one six-month battle, a single Russian division, the 13th Guards Rifle Division, sent 10,000 men to Stalingrad and only 320 survived. This one division lost the equivalent of half the entire Australian battle dead. Most of the carnage occurred in what the Germans came to call Rattenkreig. Rat war.

"Much of the fighting consisted not of major attacks, but of relentless, lethal little conflicts. The battle was fought by assault squads … armed with knives, sharpened spades for silent killing, sub-machine guns and grenades," Antony Beevor writes in Stalingrad. "The assault squads sent into the sewers were strengthened with flame-throwers and sappers with explosive charges … The close-quarter combat in ruined buildings, bunkers, cellars and sewers was soon dubbed 'Rattenkreig' by German soldiers." In Western Europe, at its peak the war was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht divisions. On the Russian front, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed for four years. This is where the Nazis lost 88 per cent of their military dead. The greatest miscalculation of the war was Adolf Hitler's certainty that the Soviet system was a house of cards that would implode once sufficient pressure was applied. He failed to understand that the Communist leader, Josef Stalin, was even more profligate with the lives of his own people than he was. So ruthless was Russia's scorched-earth policy that the Soviet Union lost about 35 million war dead, including 18 million soldiers, from a population of 195 million - 18 per cent. Almost one person in five. Compare this with the 5.6 million German war dead (7 per cent) or the British, Australian and American war death rates.

Similarly, in the Pacific war, the population far from the scrutiny of Western historians, authors and filmmakers - the Chinese - suffered by far the most. Even though it was the Americans who had to defeat Japan, at great cost, China lost 15.4 million war dead out of a population of 450 million (3 per cent). Only since the fall of the Soviet empire, and the opening of a vast mine of Communist archives, has a more accurate picture of the war emerged. The Communists had much to hide. The two organs of state control, SMERSH and NKVD, executed 158,000 soldiers for desertion during the war and jailed 135,056 Red Army officers, mostly after the war, because they had become too independent. A further 1.5 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans were sent to gulags or Siberian work camps simply because they had been tainted by contact with the West.

When it comes to the greatest war we have ever been part of, it is time for Australia, and America, to have a deeper, less narcissistic perspective.