I think we could have liberated Europe (over another 3-4 years) and then held the Iron Curtain at Russia’s border. Then an EXTREMELY hot “Cold” War would have followed. In retrospect, the Cold War we had might have turned out better. After all (aside from in Korean skies), the Soviets and the Allies never actually fought each other during WWII or the Cold War. It was all by proxy. I think everyone might be a lot more bitter if we had spent another 4 years slaughtering each other in person. The Cold War demonization would have been far worse, and the restraint against actually fighting each other would have been minimal.
Of course, if we overreached and tried to send troops onto Russian/Ukrainian soil … we’d be done. We’d wind up just like Napoleon and Hitler. You Don’t Invade Russia.
I think like the recent thread on what would happen in the US stayed out of WWII, the question hinges on one’s preconditions. At what point does this new war kick off? Who initiates it? If the allies, do they plan to do so ahead of time, or does the war just sort of happen? How much planning do the allies get before they initiate the war? What are their goals? To capture the entire Soviet Union? To contain them and ensure that all of the rest of Europe stays out of their hands?
It would have been a hard sell, especially in the UK. The US population was a bit less war weary, but I’m not sure they would have been up for several more years of conflict with the Soviets.
It depends on exactly when this theoretical war was supposed to kick off. Right after the Soviets took Berlin? Their army and logistics were pretty hosed up at that point and they definitely took a beating. Even for the Soviets causalities on those scales were excessive, and a lot of those causalities were to their best, most experienced troops.
In addition, you have to factor in the atomic bomb. One dropped somewhere at a key logistics point along the Soviets supply lines at a critical time would have cut off the Soviet Armies. If the allies had planned the timing to be just after the Soviets finally battered their way into Germany, and if they had their own supplies and logistics in place, troops ready at their jump off points, air forces (both strategic and tactical) equally in place with logistics all set up, then sure. As in the China thread (and the other thread I mentioned earlier about if the US hadn’t entered the war), there is this conception that the Soviets are like all powerful (until they fell apart in the 80’s for reasons unknown). They weren’t. They were as subject to having their logistics cut, to morale issues with their troops, to having their industries pounded, as anyone else. They weren’t magical beings, able to leap tall towers in a single bound.
I think that Stalin could have been intimidated with a combination of conventional and nuclear attacks to his extended supply lines, and could have been persuaded to pull all his troops back into the Soviet Union. Now, if the goal was the total destruction of the Soviet Union and the occupation of their territory, that’s another kettle of fish.
Actually, Hitler did it before winning the shared victory. His mistake.
[An amusing anecdote: late in the war, the Nazi high command was moving from one place to another and as a result Hitler & Co. came across an official repository of all the treaties the Germans had ever signed with anyone since the Nazis came to power. Allegedly, as they looked through them, they realized that with some trivial exceptions they had broken each and every one of them. Apparently, their reaction was to laugh uproariously. Nazi humour!]
My understanding is that nuke production in the US was fairly limited for a few years after Hiroshima, so we probably couldn’t nuke that many targets.
Plus, the death-tolls from Nagasaki and Hiroshima were ~100,000 dead, which sounds devastating, but isn’t really that many by Eastern Front WWII standards. I don’ think Stalin would’ve been particularly cowed over the prospect of absorbing a few bomb blasts.
And you need to get a plane over the city your going to bomb. The US wouldn’t have intercontinental bombers for another few years, so they’d need both a base close enough to the targets they wanted to bomb, and the ability to get the plane over the target without getting shot down (and if it is shot-down, the Soviets might strip the bomb out of it).
The US got Intercontinental bombers the same year Russia got nukes. So by the time the US could launch nuclear strikes from N. America to Europe/Asia, Russia could nuke London.
You drop nuclear bombs (or even one bomb on a vital target) on key supply junctures, supply dumps, rail heads, etc etc. The Soviets relied a lot on rail transport for their supplies. In addition you attack those same lines with conventional air craft as well…pretty much what we did to the Germans.
The thing is, supplying a large modern army is a huge task. Cut off it’s logistics and it dies. Simple as that. The Soviets were far more extended in their drive to Berlin than the US and the UK were. Also, we were much closer to the point of attack to the Soviets supply lines than they were to attacking our own. Factor in the fact that the Soviets had no significant navy that could have challenged either the US or the UK, especially in the Atlantic, and they were more vulnerable than we were, at least when they were extended to Eastern Europe and Germany. As I said, the equation changes if the goal is the total defeat and occupation of the Soviet Union. That probably wasn’t in the cards, regardless of one’s baseline assumptions.
But people who believe that the Soviets could have just rolled through Western Europe are dreaming. They basically don’t bother with understanding logistics or how modern armies actually move from one place to another, and are simply looking at the numbers of troops and tanks.
I doubt they’d have to use bombers operating from NA. The US used Britian and other forward air bases to bomb Western Europe during WW2; they could do the same in this war (shall we call it WW2+? ).
It would be interesting to see just how far the US could project bombers from their forward bases in Britian, using all the tricks at their disposal (since such bombers need only carry a single bomb, albeit a large one, presumably they could rig up extra fuel tanks and the like).
I wonder if the airfields in Norway were upgradable. I think that the Soviets trying to occupy Scandinavia in order to shut down our operations in Norway would find that they would get hurt almost as much as we would if we tried to invade Russia. (Assuming that Sweden and Finland didn’t surrender to the Soviets which there is no reason to assume that they would.)
Russia wouldn’t have a nuke anyway, nor did they have heavy bombers in production before the war ended (IIRC, they ‘captured’ some damaged B-17’s and started evaluating them late in the war, and after the war they used them as baselines to build heavy bombers later on).
The US and UK could easily have forward deployed fighters and bombers in France or even in Western Germany, depending on the preconditions one is assuming. If the war comes as a surprise (or if the Soviets attacked first), then I’m still confident the US/UK could have traded space for time, all the while blowing the holy shit out of Soviet supply trains and logistics, bombing rail junctures and supply dumps, and generally making things miserable for the Red Army. By the time the RA really got rolling, the German air force was pretty much in the crapper, and they simply weren’t able to put intense pressure on the Soviets supply and logistics routes. It would have been a different picture though going up against the US and UK, who had huge strategic and tactical air forces, well trained and veteran crews, and pretty much unlimited industrial capacity. By the end of the war the UK even had operational jet fighters just coming on line. Even assuming the Soviets had the time and energy to look over captured German jets and figure out ways to produce them (and train their crews to service and fly them), it would have taken them time to get all that up and running.
I think that even without using an atomic bomb the US/UK could have probably driven the Soviets back to their own territory. WITH an atomic bomb though, dropped on a key logistics target, backed up with the threat of more to come…well, I’m fairly sure that Stalin would have pulled back, and played for time. Pretty much like what he tried to do with Hitler and Germany…play for time while working on some way to turn the tables at a time of his own choosing.
But what’s the cost of a rail head or supply dump compared to the cost of a nuke during the 1940’s? If the US drops a nuke that costs a sizable chunk of its GNP to produce and is one of only a few dozen or so in existence to destroy a railway station the Soviets can repair with spare parts looted from Eastern Europe, how is that an advantage for the US?
In short, I don’t think the US had enough bombs or a decent enough delivery system to make the difference in a war that takes place in the mid-1940’s
Eh? We were discussing a hypothetical where the US had already been forced out of (Continental) Western Europe. So they would have to launch out of NA (or maybe Japan or N. Africa or Britain).
Plus, they could have used Alaska or occupied Japan for attacking Russia in the East. If the Soviet government had to prioritize between defending Eastern Siberia and defending Moscow/Leningrad/Kiev, I have little doubt that the Allies could have established a decent foothold there, and then used THAT as an even better staging/supply area.
I don’t think it’s a given, or even likely, that the Soviets could have swept through Western Europe all the way to the Atlantic. For one, the terrain is a much more advantageous for defensive operations than in Poland/Ukraine/Belarus/Russia. The Soviets would have been able to advance on as large a front. Not to mention the loss of supply from the Americans and the stretching of their own supply lines as they moved farther west. I don’t think the Soviets would have made it out of Germany, let alone even sniffed France.
I wonder how far into Russia American/British air power could have reached from Sweden.
I don’t get it. I say they can launch from Britain and other places and you reply that they could maybe launch from Britain and other places. What are we arguing about?
Simplicio, what is the cost to the Soviets of losing an entire army because they don’t have food, fuel and ammo to keep it supplied? All the US had to do was pick a key juncture where supplies were stock piled and where logistics flowed through and drop a bomb there. It’s not like the Soviets had hundred of different supply lines, or they had an entire cross linked network of divergent routes to get supplies to their armies. And I don’t think you realize the scales here. We are talking about millions of tons of supplies needed to feed something as big as the Soviet Army during operations that far from their borders. The Germans couldn’t hit them effectively by that point in the war, but WE could have.
We could have used the same delivery system we used in Japan. It doesn’t really take much to drop an atomic bomb on a city acting as a rail juncture and supply concentration point. Looking at a map briefly (and as a WAG), we could have dropped an atomic bomb on Kiev and then used conventional forces to systematically attack their supply and logistics convoys, rail heads, junctures, etc and they would have been totally fucked. They would have been forced to retreat back to where they could secure their supply lines (and Kiev would have been a smoking radioactive crater, which would have made things even more difficult).
I really don’t think people grasp how vulnerable a modern army is to having it’s logistics cut in this way…or what it would really mean to them if they DID have it cut when they were so stretched. Why do you think the US took months to prepare for GW I and GW II? Mostly it was getting all the supplies and the logistics in place so that when we DID move we’d have secure lines of communication and supply for our advancing armies. I’ve heard it said that one of the few effective things the Iraqi’s could have done was to just get out of the way of our advancing armies and then attack the logistics and supply convoys. It wouldn’t have stopped us since they were so over matched, but it would have really slowed us down, and probably hurt us pretty badly in the short term.
Both sides were exhausted by World War II. Europe, Western and Eastern, were in ruins. That said, the U.S. was by far in better shape than the Soviet Union by this point.
Militarily, yes the Soviets have a large, experienced and well-equipped army sitting in eastern Germany south to the Balkans. But the U.S. and British have the same to the west. Not strong enough to invade the East, but strong enough to defend the West.
And air superiority. And invulnerable sea lanes (the Soviet Navy is non-existent, with no long-range aviation capability). And invulnerable industrial capability.
Perhaps the Soviet Union’s industrial capability is protected as well-- geographically, much of it still behind the Urals following the post-Barbarossa relocation-- but their supply lines aren’t. And they’ve lost access to the Lend-Lease supplies that were essential to their survival against Nazi Germany.
Plus the Allies are getting the Bomb. The Soviets aren’t for a while-- and perhaps never, given the challenge of maintaining a nuclear development program during a war with the West.
The war would be bloody, but there’s no way the Soviets win. And if the Soviets lose, so does their regime. In fact, I’d seriously doubt the moral willingness on the part of the Russian people to fight such a war… Hitler’s greatest mistake, after all, was in being the only dictator who found a way to treat the Russian people worse than Stalin did. We wouldn’t have repeated the same mistake.
The distance between Oslo and Moscow is ~1000 miles (~1600 km). The operational range of the B-29 was 3000+ miles, easily enough to get to Moscow and back. The P-51D Mustang had an operational range of ~1600 miles with drop tanks so most of the bombing run is escorted. Even London is close enough for the B-29.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that Russia had no air force or defense whatsoever.
We can at least agree that, barring some hare brained scheme to invade via Alaska and across Canada, Russia had little means to really put the hurting on North America (the UK is another story). But there’s a long, hard road between “not losing” and “winning”.
The first Mig-15 flew in 48, and that’s not even the earliest Russian jet, merely the one that proved more than a match to US ones in the skies of Korea.
The first one, the Yak-15, was ordered and designed in January 45, only two years after the famous German Me-262, with the first ones coming out of the line in '46.
What atomic bombs ? After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world’s entire supply of nukes was 1 (which may or may not have been useable). New ones were coming in at a rate of 2-3 per month, tops. You’re not going to level Russia with that.
Not to forget that, back then, nukes were not the pants-wetting weapons of mass vitrification we’ve all grown to know and love. The psychological damage they did was high, but in terms of actual damage and death toll, they weren’t that different from your average strategic carpet bombing run.
I disagree. 2-3 nukes a month would be devastating over the course of a year. However, any war that includes more than one or two nukes is much more disastrous than the Cold War it would have replaced.
