At least the Hollywood movie indicates that General Patton had no love for the Soviets and wanted to keep fighting right past the Nazis and into the USSR. Is this true? If so, if somehow he’d gotten the green light to do this, or the Russians back-stabbed us or whatever, could the allies (assuming Britain would stick with us on continuing the war) have beaten the Soviet Union? Or would they have driven us off Europe? The Germans quit before we dropped the A-Bombs so those wouldn’t even be an option until later, correct? What would have been the result?
This post is porbably GD material but till it gets moved there…
Yes Patton wanted to go after the Russians.
Second…the A-bomb didn’t come all that much later after Germany surrendered (3 months).
My guess is the Allies could have defeated Russia IF they committed to an all-out war (essentially keep up the pace they had through most of WWII). Russia had been hammered pretty badly and while they had a huge army in the field they relied heavily on Allied supplies to keep going. Russian industry was almost completely dedicated to military weapons. As important as those are when fighting a war it turns out things like trucks are even more important (many Allied Generals declared the humble Jeep the most important single vehicle in WWII). Most of Russias trucks were supplied by the US. Add in food shipments and such and it is hard to see how Russia could have withstood the Allies in the long run.
Make no mistake however that it would be a LONG run and by no means easy. Russia had a huge army mobilized and battle hardened. Russia never really had the equipment or leadership to compare to what Germany had but they made up for that with sheer numbers. Remember that Russia was fighting something like 75-80% of Germany’s military and the better parts of that military to boot. The other allies only had to face the other 20% and mostly second tier military units at that.
Of course, if you throw nukes into the equation all bets are off. Still…even that is debatable. The US developed three nukes and used them all (one for testing, two dropped on Japan). It would have taken several more months to get another one ready and mass production of the things back then was not really possible and they were hugely expensive. Nevertheless they are nukes we are talking about and the US had them and no one else did. Used effectively they’d make short work of numerically superior Russian forces and would almost certainly tip any uncertainty over who would win in the US/British favor.
I should note that Russia had arguably one of the best, if not the best, tanks in the war. By comparison US tanks flat out sucked. The T-34/85 outclassed just about anything except, maybe the German Tiger II but that was an expensive and somewhat unreliable design. If it worked it was devastating but they were too few and too expensive and never made a dent in the war. The T-34 by comparison was excellent, reliable, relatively cheap and mass produced in large numbers. The American Sherman was utter crap in comparison.
Look at history for your answer.
Napoleon Bonaparte could not conquer Russia for many reasons, but chief amongst them was the harsh Russian winter.
Hitler could not conquer Russia, again for many reasons, but chief amongst THEM was the harsh Russian winter.
Patton would not have conquered Russia because when he was leading the charge against Germany, it was in October of 1945 and he would have launched against the Soviets during Winter.
Now, if someone with enough supplies and enough troops willing to survive the winters could conquer Russia.
Then again, with Atom Bombs, it could be done in a matter of weeks rather than years.
You should read the Dean R. Koontz book Lightning, which has an interesting twist on that. Since it doesn’t come until the last chapter, I’ll have to put the rest in a spoiler box:
[spoiler]The hero, in the process of rescuing the heroine, makes a detour back in time to warn Winston Churchhill of the Soviet “future”. He then returns to present time, to learn that WWII did NOT end at Berlin, but the Allies found an excuse to march on to Moscow as well.
As a result, he now lives in a world filled not only with German & Japanese imports, but also Russian cars, Russian radios, Russian electronics, etc. etc. etc…[/spoiler]
Maybe the winter was too harsh for the Frenchies & the Germans, but the Russians considered those years to be just ordinary, normal winters.
So a supply of troops from Wisconsin, Minnesota, & the Dakotas would have been pretty much right at home in the Russian winter. I think that if they had had adequate supply lines (and given a cutoff of Allied supplies to the Russians), such troops would have been able to defeat the Russians, eventually.
Plus, the USSR at that time was a very centrally controlled country. A single atomic bomb on Moscow, wiping out Joseph Stalin & most of his henchmen, would have left them rather directionless. Follow that up with a generally broadcast peace offer, promising local control & the opportunity to freely choose their leaders (maybe even going back to the ‘good old days’ of the Czar) and I think you might have seen most of the Soviet troops laying down their arms. After, all, they had more deserters than anybody else in WWII, right? The general populace didn’t have a lot of loyalty to the Stalin regime, except in comparison to Hitler’s troops.
The sherman tank did quite well in Korea , against those same tanks. The T34 and the sherman were basically equals.
Declan
I think that people fail to take into account , something called war fatique. The american population had just gone through 4 years of a two front war ,and looking at garrisoning both Japan and Germany.
After talking with some people , it would have taken quite a bit of soviet chicanery for the march eastward to continue. Not that I doubt that America would have won , with her allies , just that the stated goals had been achieved.
Some things to think about however , the soviet airforce had nothing that could match american bombers ,with their battle hardened crews. Their fighter squadrons did well against increasingly green german aircrews , but going up against american fighter pilots in bearcats and corsairs and jugs and mustangs would have put paid to any sort of airforce that the russians could have mustered.
For two years , the soviets were able to slowly tear down factories in the west and rebuild them behind the ural mountains and bring them up to production. In an american assault , these factorys would not have the luxury of having sanctuary.
Both the Royal Air Force and the American Air Force (usaaf) were both starting to deploy jet fighters and tinkering with jet powered bombers , with atomic bombs being both used in the tactical and strategic role, the end result would have been balkanized russia.
your opinions may differ
Declan
Winston Churchill actually considered the possibility…and his strategic planners did, as well. And so you have Operation: Unthinkable
An interesting element of this plan is that it was to involve 10 rearmed German divisions, "under a reformed German High Command.’’
But the plan doesn’t figure in one element…The Bomb.
If we could get some B-29’s into Europe…I just did a little figuring with a world map and a ruler, and going with thr figures of 3,250 miles @ 25,000 ft. with a 5,000 lb. payload…A '29 would need to take off from Sweden, Poland, Slovakia, or Hungary. Longer, if it’s a suicide mission.
Soviet air-defense shouldn’t be that much of a threat, I suppose.
'Might have to worry about the 'reds trying to make a counter-offensive through Japan, China, or the Bering strait, though. But I can’t imagine that they’d do very well.
We could always “go chemical” or biological, even. We probably would have had Japan’s Unit-731 data in hand by the time we engaged the Soviets. I doubt that the Red Army would really have been able to supply protective equipment to all of their
troops.
A Bat Bomb or two might prove usefull, too. At least in clearing out major Soviet-occupied cities without wasting a nuke.
T-34/85 versus Shermans in Korea.
Almost every picture I’ve seen of Sherman tanks in Korea show the Sherman firing at almost 45 degrees as field artillery.
[/aside]
Hell yes. The Russians lost about 10 million soldiers & 15 million civilians in WW 2. There is no chance that a country that was backwards 30 years ago and that lost 25 million men could withstand the US, Britian & France combined for very long. Germany alone managed to push them back past Moscow, and for every 1 German soldier killed, 3 Russians were killed.
You also have to take into account that Stalin decimated the military leadership due to his paranoia.
The allies would’ve overran them, killing 8 Russians for every 1 Ally.
The British certainly had tanks that were superior to just about everything else, its just that they didn’t quite make it to WWII.
They might well have made it into a following conflict as a few did make it into WWII.
People shouldn’t be writing off the Red Air Force so quickly. They had the premier ground attack plane of the war (Il-2 Sturmovik), and their air superiority fighters (Yaks and Migs) were damn good by the end of the war. Pretty sure they had jets under development, too. I don’t know enough about their numbers to make any educated guesses about how they’d have matched up against the western allies’ air forces, but achieving air superiority certainly wouldn’t have been the cakewalk some are suggesting.
It’s highly unlikely that the allies could acheived anything more than a limited victory against the Soviets. In terms of sheer man power and knowledge of the Russian terrain it would of been impossible for the allies to successfully beat the Soviet’s in an offensive war.
Yes.
The Red Army was at the end of a very long and thin suplly line. The railroads and so on in France were battered, but better than anything in Poland.
The best-case scenario (if that is the right word) would be for a Soviet attack into Germany. The Allies would be forced back, but be on the defense. The Russians would have been pounded to bits trying to approach a front on the French border by tons of Allied airpower.
Eventually the Russians would have reached the bottom of the their manpower barrel. The Allied form of more mechanized warfare very much favored them in this situation.
France would have been out of the picture, IMO. The french post-war government included the communists, who were vastly popular, in part due to their important role in the resistance. It was a government of national unity which tried to avoid the nation to split apart. There was no way in hell that De Gaulle would have supported a war against Soviet Union.
Assuming it would have do so, there would have been whole units of the french army (those made up from former communit resistance groups) which would have deserted. And the communists still had access to the various weapons the resistance movements had been supplied with during the war. The country would have, I think , fallen in civil war in the way , say, Greece did later, with guerillas fighting the Americans/British. That’s a wild guess/what if, of course, but I really don’t think that the allies could have expected France to be involved in such a war, apart as a pain in the ass.
I was precisely thinking in particularabout the allies suplly lines and the railroads through France in my previous post. One of the specialities of the communist resistance was to blow up railroads, and the communist party had a very well developed network of sympatizer/informants amongst ther people working for the railways companies. The allies would have had to protect their supply lines through France, and probably to provide military support to an (assumed) supportive french government to help it crack down on the communists guerilla movements, IMO. Or to militarily occupy the country, plain and simple, which would have diverted troops as well from the war against Soviet Union.
If the allies were smart they would have had to wait until after Japan surrendered and was occupied. Assuming they wouldn’t re-start the war in Winter (assuming too much w. Patton et al?) an Invasion of the USSR, really of eastern Europe, probably wouldn’t start until, say Spring '46.
Any other way? If it were truly a case of “Keep right on going” after defeating Germany, the Allies had to fight the USSR & an encircled but still military viable Japan …
In any event, if it were a slugfest to death I think the West still would win, probably but not certainly. The most likely outcome however, I think, is that the West would have wrested E.Europe and perhaps the Baltics away & then accepted a negotiated peace with the USSR.
“Probably” on the death match:
I really think it very well might come down to the fact that West might reach casualty fatigue first (“Why are we spending a million men to fight our ally?” on top of WWII casualties). I think esp. France & England & possibly even the U.S. (once Japan was defeated) might start seeing this sentiment if Stalin could keep the War going long enough.
Also re the A-bomb, & Heaven knows how the invasion would affect the program, but the Soviets had an A-bomb by '49 … The Allies 46-49. would have had circa 10-15 A-bombs that would have been deliverable* before then. Some would have probably been duds… how many would we need right? Still the decentralized nature of the Soviets Industrial might ++ Stalin’s williningness to incur whatever he needed to makes me wonder how much value add they would be …
*from here http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/ocp7.htm
The released figures show that only nine bombs were available in June of 1946, and two were used the following month on the Bikini tests. Rosenberg considers the numbers for 1947 the “most intriguing.” In this crucial year of the Cold War, the U.S. had thirteen nuclear components, just four more than the previous year. These numbers were closely guarded. President Truman probably did not learn just how few available weapons existed until April of 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission took over the management of the nuclear weapons. The bombs were few in number, not necessarily assembled, and not available for immediate delivery. Rosenberg writes that through 1948 the bomb storage site was an hour’s flight from the nearest Air Force bomber base, and only 23 of the 46 “nuclear modified” Boeing B-29’s were operational
<snip>
In the first three years after World War II the U.S. was not weaponized, as the bombs were not assembled or available for immediate delivery.
Yes, but if we were actually planning on using the Bombs within weeks or months, to the point where we were actually moving troops and aircraft into position to attack Russia, wouldn’t our nuclear preparedness be stepped up quite a bit?
Plus, we’d only need one or two nukes dropped on Moscow for a good decapitation strike, anyway.
Just another thought…would this only have to be a one-front war? Could the allies launch a second “prong” through, say, China? Or even mount an amphibious assault through the White Sea?
Supposedly, when German troops first moved into Ukraine, they were welcomed as liberators. However, when the SS showed up and started killing everyone in sight, things turned nasty.
So it might have been possible for the Allies to march into the USSR quite easily. Let’s remember, also, that when Hitler was fighting the Soviets, he was also fighting the other Allies on the Western side of Europe. Hitler is supposed to have said that was one mistake of Napoleon’s he wasn’t going to repeat.