Attack the Soviets post WWII?

In another thread (accessible via the following quote) Stranger on a Train posted a notion of how the Soviets gained dominance and extended life because the Allies (well, Allies sans the Soviets) were unwilling to go to war to kick to Soviets out of Eastern Europe.

Questions for debate:

  1. Could the US/Great Britain (GB) have possibly sold continuing the war to the populace?

  2. Could the US/GB have had a chance in hell of kicking the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? On the one hand the Soviets were in full-on war mode and smashing things left and right at that point on the other they had lost 10 million soldiers and even they could not keep such a pace up much longer.

IIRC there were such notions being kicked around. I’ll leave it to the responders to decide whether nukes play a part or not (part of me wants to choose based on conventional forces and part of me has to be a realist and say the US had nukes so would probably figure in…I leave it to you).

Doubt it. Britain was thoroughly spent, selling a war against the Germans to the American public had already proved hard enough, and much propaganda work had been done to firmly entrench the Soviet=friends notion in people’s minds. Suddenly turning back on that would have left people confused, and confused people don’t make for a strong political base.

Not a chocolate cherub’s chance in Hell.
Not only was the Soviet war machine generally better in terms of sheer tech (better tanks, bigger guns, sturdier planes, more reliable small arms), but they were also had the numbers advantage by a wide margin, their operational doctrine was pretty much foolproof, they didn’t have to deal with an ocean in the middle of their logistics game, and their officers and soldiers had much more combat experience. Yes, they’d lost many - which only meant the grittiest, hardest, meanest and most badass motherfuckers were left alive.
To put in bluntly, as of 1945 the Red Army could have run rings around any other fighting force in the world, period. Had the Western Allies launched a sneak attack, they would even have had the whole Defense of the Sacred Rodina going for them again.

The only things that could possibly have turned the tide would have been nukes (of which there wasn’t near enough a supply to even impress the Sovs at that point), or a long, bloody and grinding attrition war meant to leverage the superior industrial capacity of the US which of course had the advantage of *not *having bombed to smithereens. I really don’t think the latter would have been politically sustainable or even economically viable.
Quitting the game while everyone was ahead (well, except for the Axis powers, obviously…) made much more sense.

Hard to figure. You have to presume insanity on everyone’s part.

Harry kicks it off with a nuke on Moscow in September, 1945. Stalin survives, and tries to drive west to Paris and south to Tokyo and Peking. The USAAF is unchallenged from bases in Norway and France. B-29s knock out already fragile lines of communication across Siberia and Poland.

A new generation of US tanks and aircraft come online in spring, 1946. The Russians are hampered by a reduced amount of loot in German scientists. There are a mess of Russians, but the US is on the defensive. More nukes become available in early 1946.

It would have been very nasty.

I agree with your assessment except for this part. The Sturmovik was a great plane, but the American P-47 Thunderbolt was famously sturdy itself, and grossly superior as an overall weapon, since it was quite effective in an air superiority role the Sturmovik could not perform.

But, had the Western Allies caught the Soviets by surprise, and had Patton quickly driven an armored wedge through the Soviet front, and had the American air forces gained overall superiority, and had the Soviets made a series of fantastic blunders…the Western Allies could have eked out a crushing defeat. Even badly surprised Soviet forces would have smashed them.

I think the best chance in a conventional standup war was the one thing that some in the Axis leadership were hoping for: that we’d let the Axis “surrender” to us and ally against the Soviets. If for some reason most of the Nazi leadership were killed or removed from power, and we changed our alliances based on the change in German government, we would at least be able to prevent the occupation of Eastern Europe, although we still might not have been able to oust the Soviets from Russia without it becoming politically unpalatable due to the massive resources required to occupy Russia for little gain once we had gone through all the major cities and destroyed the infrastructure.

The last two invaders who attacked Russia, had had their capitals taken by storm by the Russkies few years later.

How do you say London and Washington in Russian?

Seriously, the war was to defeat Germany. That was accomplished. Why start a new one.

And many of the Eastern Euro countries had supported the Germans in their attack on the USSR, so their was very little symphaty for them at the time.

Air superiority would have been impossible in the short term. The Soviet airforce (VVS) was enormous and all of its aircraft were good. Below 10 000 ft, which is where the Soviets did most of their fighting, Soviet fighters were the best around. And the allies would have to fight at low level because the army would be screaming for air cover as the IL-2s and Pe 2/3s worked them over.

The USAAF and RAF had focused on performance at high altitude, as had the Germans, above 30 000ft the P-51 and P-47 were unstoppable, below the tree tops they would have been easy prey for the veteran VVS. And as a Soviet veteran said of the FW-190s superior diving speed, the plane that dives fastest at 10m altitude, loses.

And as for Patton, he had never fought an enemy on equal terms and had no where near the same level of experience as the Soviet generals. Montgomery and Bradley would also have been at a disadvantage because the bulk of their experience was fighting with a numerically inferior enemy while having air superiority/ supremacy.

The only uncontested advantage the Allies had was strategic night bombing. A B-29 or Lanacaster navigating by radar could drop a nuke on a Soviet city basically unmolested. Soviet defence against night attacks was minimal / non-existant.

I believe the British did a White Paper on that exact question towards the end of the war in Europe. It was titled “Operation Unthinkable”, if I recall correctly.

Assuming they could re-constitute the German army and make it an effective force within a year (doubtful) and assuming the Soviets pausing for refit and rebuild after capturing Berlin, and given an all out effort by the Allies, British Intelligence still gave it less than even odds of success.

In the short term, the Soviets would have been unstoppable in Europe; in the long term, given total war, the Soviets would have lost. They had no ability whatsoever to project power onto the North American continent. Their nation was exhausted from years of grueling war, unlike America. They were badly behind in nuclear research, wereas the Allies had the bomb already, had strategic bombers, and would without a doubt have ramped up production.

It would have been horrible, taken years and it would no doubt have left much of Europe in radioactive ruins, but the Soviets would likely have lost a fight to the death.

Theoretically to avoid 50(ish) years of the Cold War.

While we were allied in WWII it was more an “enemy of my enemy” thing. There was no love between the US/GB and Russia. I bet there was no more than 10 minutes of patting each other on the back at the end before the Soviets and the US/GB started thinking how to kill each other.

Granted the war was rough on everyone but if you want to go after the next guy then it makes sense to think about it when your war machine is already in full gear and (roughly) in theater ready to go.

what Malthus said. Operation Unthinkable was “unthinkable” because they could not win a tactical victory against Soviet forces in Europe while banging the German chicks from their nice well-paid occupation billets. Nevertheless, at this point Soviet Union was strategically in a horrendous shape. A generation of young men was dead, so for a war of attrition they would have soon had to, what, draft the people from occupied countries who didn’t speak Russian? The only available oil sources for Russia were in Caucasus and in Romania, and American strategic bombers could have targeted both locations. The whole economic and military infrastructure was dependent on railroads that could have been again shut down by air assault (just like French/German railroads were shut down a year earlier). The Russian Far East region was minimally defended and could be invaded using troops from Japan (who says that Japan had to be demilitarized immediately?). Oh, and in 1946 was the great drought and famine of 1946 so food was pretty scarce too in Russia at the time.

Selling the idea of such a war to the population would not have been very hard. E.g. they could have collected real and/or fake statistics on Soviet war crimes in Germany and Eastern Europe and then trumpet them through the newspapers instead of covering them up. Then they could have dug up documentary info on Stalin’s crimes against his own people and trumpet that too (incidentally, a lot of this info was already collected by Germans for their own propaganda purposes and hence readily available). If all else failed, they could have demanded immediate restoration of legit democratic governments in Eastern Europe and accuse Russians of being anti-democracy bastards for failing to do so. In short, demonizing Stalin’s regime would not have been a hard job, e.g. much easier than demonizing Saddam Husein.

But once Russia has taken W. Europe, the wars basically over. I guess the US could start nuking Russian cities after a few years, but at that point they would’ve been pushed out of Europe and Asia (China would’ve presumably quickly fallen to Mao and allied itself with Russia), so what would be the point other then some sort of vague attempt at revenge.

I don’t think the US and British populations would’ve been that motivated by reports of Russian war-crimes. Even now, without many isolationists around, the Bush Administration couldn’t sell the Iraq War without conjuring visions of a threat to the United States. Trying to sell a much larger and more costly war, after just finishing a World War to a even more skeptical audience on the grounds that Stalin doesn’t treat people on the other side of the globe very well probably wouldn’t have flown.

Wrong era for that. Trying to apply “solutions” of today to yesterday doesn’t fly. Remember, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Back then, war crimes were not that throbbing red outrage button begging to be pushed - the concept had just been invented. Prior to that, “war crimes” were standard war business. It’s only in the post WW2 period, when people stopped to think about what they’d done and analyze it that the public at large reckoned that maybe that sort of shit oughta be toned down.

As for invading foreign countries because they’re “not democratic enough”, again that’s an extremely modern concept that is a vestige of the Cold War and of decades’ worth of anticommunist propaganda, of demonization of and guilt over Nazi Germany etc… In the 40s, the American psyche was very firmly entrenched in isolationism .

I don’t know if Miss Manners addresses this anywhere, but, IMO, to turn on your ally of several years of hard fighting immediately after winning a shared victory would be, well, tacky. Crass. The sort of thing Hitler would do.

What if we threatened to nuke Soviet targets, and offered up a couple examples to get things going?

Always kinda thought that is how it was supposed to work. Sorta:

United States: “See these nukes? Good. We got 'em, you don’t. With that in mind we want to discuss some ideas we have for your new government…”

All that goes out the window once the other guy gets nukes. Missed our chance. :wink:

Without Japan’s surrender first, no way. That gives Russia 3 months to rest, shore up their western front, and quell resistance movements in eastern Europe. This makes a non-nuclear victory unlikely.

If nukes are allowed and the goal is only to get Russia out of Eastern Europe (as opposed to defeating them entirely) then I think the US/UK win in the end. Russia was getting a lot of material from the US, which instantly stops. If the US can incorporate some of the German mechanized military than it probably has enough to keep from getting pushed off the continent. Even if they get tossed off the mainland they still have Great Britain and the Middle East to stage bombing sorties (also India, although flying over the Himalayas is a problem). However, once the Soviets get the bomb I think the chances of them dropping their own increases a great deal (“You bombed Moscow; lets see how Vienna likes it”).

In hindsight, seeing as how the Cold War never went hot, I think it unlikely that any other scenario turns out as well.

On the other hand, completely following the standard blackmail protocol would not work.

US: “Hey, Russkies? Lovely cities you got there! Shame if anything were to…”
Russia: “actually, we think they’re pretty ugly.”
US: “OK, I’ll come in again.”

I dunno, I’m thinking long term total war. Hitler taking Western Europe failed toi end WW2, why should the Soviets doing the same have ended it? If anything, it would have left them horribly overstretched and holding down a huge, resentful population with infrastructure thoroughly ruined by the war. I don’t see them crossing the channel any time soon, much less the Atlantic, so an unthreatened US would be able to prepare a counterstroke in perfect safety. The Soviets, in contrast, would have fronts everywhere to defend. Not to mention nervously watching the skies for nukes.

The war would have been a hard sell, no doubt about it. The last thing the populations of America, Britain and its allies wanted was more war.