Crazy ww2 strategy idea : let Hitler and Stalin fight, mop up the winner

Great Debates
1

So I had this crazy idea for what a realpolitik, ruthless United States could have done in ww2 in order to avoid strengthening a deadly enemy of the USA, the Soviet Union.

Both Hitler and Stalin were clear enemies of the USA, at least in retrospect, and I would suspect that this was known at the time. Stalin mass murdered more people than Hitler, he just managed to get away with it, and there apparently are *not *massive museums where his death camps were?

Also, the post ww2 Soviet Union is the reason the doomsday arsenals of the cold war were ever built. Had it not existed, the total number of worldwide nuclear weapons might be just a few hundred even today.

So, how to make this happen?

Proposal : give Stalin just enough Lend Lease aid to prolong the fighting. Let him and Hitler bleed each other to the bone. Put the USA on a war footing, and develop mass armies of better trained infantry, high speed, high end diesel tanks with heavy armor and big guns, the atomic bomb, and so forth.

Then, around 1945, where the Nazis have advanced and taken Moscow but lost millions to winter attrition, snipers, and other causes, invade from the West. Seize Siberia, use nuclear weapons to destroy the command and control of both enemies, and seize all of Eurasia. Don’t give it back, either…

Sound like a plan? Could it have worked, assuming near dictatorial control of the United States and a time machine?

2

This strategy is exactly what Stalin, Hitler and the Capitalist Powers each hoped to pursue.
Events got in the way.

3

I imagine Europe and the small matter of the at the time still extant British Empire might could have remained cross with the US post-war, a non-insignificant consideration.

There’s also the whole “the winner now controls an amount of impregnable land, resources and ridiculously experienced veterans slash survivors that make the US war effort look like a kid’s birthday party” aspect of the plan, which is probably non-negligible.

In 45, the US did not produce enough A-bombs to nuke all of Eurasia and what damage one could do was still fairly limited relatively speaking. There’s also the matter of getting to drop it in the first place - it was easy to do so on Japan, because Japan had no air force left to speak of. Whether Russia or Germany won their tiff, you can be damn sure that the side that won it still had all the aircrafts to win it with.

There’s also the fact that while I don’t think Germany or Russia were any close to their own nukes ; Germany at least had copious amounts of chemical and bacteriological WMDs stockpiled still. Hitler never let them loose when he had the chance, and when he was good and psychologically ready to do so, he didn’t have the means any more. But if someone were to give him a big ol’ excuse…

And finally, there’s the question of going to war in the first place. In our world, Truman finagled the US into the European theatre more and more, albeit covertly, until Hitler had few reasons left *not *to DoW (and even then his advisors were against it). But if the isolationists had had their way and let “moribund old Europe” deal with its own shit ; how do you convince them to take up arms *after *all the smoke has cleared ?

BTW, your assertion that Russia was the reason the arsenals of the cold war were built is BS. The US always had more nukes than Russia, and always had the more aggressive posture with them (up until the Missile Crisis I suppose). The USSR played nuclear catching-up more or less the whole time. Which they kinda had to because, well, you had thousands of nukes pointed at them right across the border and an increasingly vitriolic relationship, soooo…

4

This strategy sounds great until you try to apply it in the real world.

  1. How do you know what “just enough Lend Lease aid to prolong the fighting” is? What if it’s not enough and Germany wins the war?

The priority, quite correctly, was to destroy Germany. Leaving it to chance that Germany might destroy the USSR wasn’t a sane option.

  1. What happens if the Soviets overrun all of Germany and keep going? Stalin and his generals had actual plans for invading France and Italy.

  2. How in the holy hell does the USA convince the UK to go along with this insane strategy? I don’t think people appreciate what enormous amounts of political negotiation, maneuvering and deal-making went into maintaining the Allied effort. The Allies agreed on very little amongst themselves or even without their own governments.

  3. How does the USA know in 1941 they’re going to have atomic bombs in 1945? How do they know Germany won’t?

The critical factor in all of this is that FDR does not know on December 6, 1941 what, really, is going to happen in the USSR. It’s often claimed Soviet victory was inevitable no matter what happened, a claim I find bizarre given the long history of things not turning out as people expected and the fact Germany had defeated Russia in a war just 24 years before, on top of the fact that so much hinged on Germany making several catastrophic blunders that no one could have known they would make in the manner they did. For the Western Allies in 1941, what mattered was destroying Nazi Germany, first and foremost; fascism was an existential threat to Western democracy.

5

The bulk of the fighting in the European theater WAS between Germany and Russia. They DID bleed each other dry.

Invading Russia through Siberia is logistically impossible. And even if the U.S. wanted to attempt it, we would have still needed to knock Japan out of the war first. Which took until 1945 to accomplish.

If we really wanted to attack Russia, the more practical route was to launch the attack from western Europe. (Shorter supply lines, friendly populations.) And if you want to launch an attack against Russian from western Europe, you need to have a strong military presence in western Europe before Russia overruns Germany. So you still need D-Day.

Basically, the scenario you’re proposing would lead to the U.S. fighting the war almost exactly the same way: Give lots of help to Russia, knock Japan out of the war as quickly as possible, invade France when the Germans are on the ropes. And, in fact, there were people in the U.S. military (Patton, for example) who were in favor of continuing on through Germany into Russia in 1945. The U.S. was actually in a great position to attempt your strategy at the end of the war, but the war-weary voters would never have tolerated it.

6

Churchill also wanted to keep going - he even suggested re-arming what was left of the German military to do so the better to launch a quick sneak attack ; and ordered plans and estimates drawn up to that effect. His staff complied - and that’s how we got Operation Unthinkable.

Cheeky bastards ;).

7

That’s basically what I was thinking- through design or accident (more likely), the Russians bore the bulk of the brunt of crushing the Nazis, with our main contribution to the effort being the strategic bombing campaign and lend-lease, because the ground fighting in Africa and Italy failed to tie down significant (by Eastern Front standards) numbers of German troops.

In June 1944, we invaded France, but by that point, the Germans had been on the defensive for a year or so, and had been pushed almost completely out of Ukraine, and at roughly the same time as the Falaise Pocket was closed, the Russians crushed Army Group Center in Operation Bagration. The German military was in a sort of free-fall for the next several months until the Allies ran ahead of their supply lines and had to halt, somewhere in Belgium, the Netherlands and France in the West, and roughly on a line between Warsaw and Budapest in the East.

From that point on, it was essentially inevitable that the Allies would win, although they fought like hell until the very end, especially in the East.

The catch with then going on and fighting the Soviets after the German capitulation would have been that the Soviets had an absurd number of men- even more than the Western Allies did, and had arguably better tanks. Both sides were highly experienced.

The things that would have evened out the Soviet superiority in men and tanks would have been the US/British strategic bombing abilities*, the US/British advanced technologies- at the end of the war, and nuclear weapons.
*The B-29 could hit most Soviet cities east of the Urals from existing 8AF bases in England, and could have flown from Japan, India or Norway or other closer places to hit even more targets within the USSR.

8

Hitler and Stalin both KNEW that the Allies wanted them to fight. That was precisely why they made their pact and gobbled up Poland together!

9

4-to-1 on manpower, 2-to-1 on tankpower according to Wiki.
Air is (heh) up in the air but what the USSR lacked in long range strategic bombing they more than made up in tactical and air-to-air.

Nah. The British staff evaluated its own chances of success at “hazardous” with complete surprise *and *the US on side, “fanciful” without the US. 90% of the time, Goliath smashes plucky little David all the time :slight_smile:

10

Well, would this have been easier if we didn’t give the Soviets Lend-Lease?

If we had to, could we give the *Nazis *lend lease so they will defeat our enemies the Soviets…

I wondered if we could perhaps do that with respect to the ISIS/Iran conflict…

11

This pretty much hits all the high points. I suppose if one had perfect knowledge of what was going to happen, had all of the stats one what was actually given, what was actually used, and some sort of alternative universe sandbox machine, you COULD game it out such that the Soviets and Germany would be in perfect balance to both crush the other and collapse. Of course, Europe would have been even more devastated by further years and even more deaths (this doesn’t count if atomic bombs were used at some point by someone), nor does it explain what the US would have done with Japan in the mean time.

I’m no big fan of Stalin OR the Soviets, and I agree that what they did was arguably as bad if not worse than what the Germans were doing (though less focused…Stalin et al were equal opportunity killers, much more than Hitler who was focused on a few ethnic groups), but I think that how history actually transpired was pretty optimal for the world and the US. After all, the Soviets are gone now, Germany is actually a key part of the global economy while still being relatively non-militaristic, even a bit pacifist today, Europe is, by and large a very stable and economically sound entity and has also seemingly put it’s militarism aside (frustrating as that sometimes is to the US), and the world is relatively stable (China not withstanding). Japan is in a similar boat…they are an economic powerhouse while having put their militaristic side behind them. So, it’s all worked out pretty well. I don’t think that such an optimal outcome, even gaming it as good as one could, would be forthcoming from letting the Soviets and Germans battle it out to the death while keeping both sides so balanced that neither could finish off the other.

12

If you took away Lend-Lease I don’t think the Soviet Union would have survived, and you’d have had a triumphant Germany with a huge new resource base. I can’t see how that would work out to anything good for the US in any way you cut it.

13

That kind of thinking is what led to the issuance of the “unconditional surrender” policy. Even after Hitler’s death, German commanders wanted to negotiate with the West only. It was also no small coincidence that the German populations were trying to find ways to get to the Western Zones.

This kind of thinking also led to bizarre twists like American commanders not taking German territory they could’ve easily got, simply because it was decided in post war, it would be Soviet administered, so why use American lives to take something that had to be turned over.

Also FDR was far less suspicious of Stalin. He thought that Stalin wasn’t much good, but in the end could be reasoned and bargained with. Churchill did not like him at all. But by the end of the war was out of office and what he thought didn’t matter.

14

Read Command and Control. It was a ratcheting effect - immediately postwar, the USA wasted several years and didn’t invest much into producing more and better fission bombs. Then the Russians got theres, so the US countered, eventually worked out a way to do fusion, the Russians countered, the Russians were ahead on paper in getting ballistic missiles, the US had better engineers and resources so they surged ahead, then the Russians found a way to counter that, and so on.

It absolutely was a back and forth series of tit for tat weapon building projects. Had the Soviet Union not existed, this wouldn’t have happened.

15

Keyword being “on paper”. And a… let’s call it fanciful paper at that.
When the military intelligence vouched that they were primed for reaching the triple digits any time soon, the USSR had four (4) workable ICBMs. The missile gap was bullshit, and it was deliberate bullshit manufactured by people like Curtis LeMay who were just itching to get it on with the Reds.

It would, obviously, be equally true to say that, had the US not existed, the arms race wouldn’t have happened either. Takes two to tango ;).

But my point is that they weren’t the ones who started it, and they weren’t the ones who kept raising the bar all the time. For all the scandal and brink of annihiliation, I think old man Nikita had a salient point when he sent missiles to Cuba - at that time, the US had missiles or bombers in Germany, in Turkey, in Japan… and just one battery of those was enough to make Americans freak right the fuck out.
Which, you know, they were right to. It’s scary stuff. But that was his point : if you can’t live with that fear, is it reasonable and conscionable to make other people live with it ?

16

Uh, did I say triple ? I meant quadruple digits.

17

I think the Soviets were always going to beat the Germans.

18

Hindsight is generally 20/20…especially with a dollop of historical revisionism. Certainly the Russians, with British and US help were always going to beat the Germans. Just the the US, with Russian and British help were always going to beat the Germans…and the Brits, with US and Russian help were always going to beat them.

19

Note that the original proposal–prop up the Soviets enough to bleed the Germans dry, then invade Germany only when the Russkis have them on the ropes–is exactly what happened in real life. D-Day only happened after the Germans were defeated in the East.

The only departure point is that we didn’t follow the Churchill/Patton fantasy of reinforcing the Germans on the eastern front and continue on to Moscow. The reason we didn’t do that is the Russians probably would have creamed us. They had huge advantages in manpower and machinery by that time. They had ground the Germans to powder, how many millions of American soldiers were we supposed to sacrifice to save the Russians from Stalin?

It would be one thing to spend those human lives if we thought we could win. In real life the Russians would have rolled over us and wouldn’t have stopped til they reached Portugal. Millions and millions and millions more dead, the continent wrecked again, and for what? Even if we won?

20

Even if the Germans had conquered Moscow, Stalingrad, etc., wouldn’t there have been a formidable anti-German insurgency by the Soviets for years?