Taken from the “Hitler: Man of the 20th century” topic. 3 things:
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Was Stalin preparing to invade the west even if Hitler didn’t start the war?
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How powerful was the USSR in 1945?
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Was Hitler’s success in the beginning of WW2 a surprise?
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If, by “invading the West,” you mean “did Stalin plan to attack France and Great Britain,” the answer is of course not! Certainly, Stalin wanted to gain new territory and spread communism throughout the world, but he lacked the money, manpower and weapons to take on the great powers of Europe in an aggressive war. Might he have tried to grab chunks of Poland or other smaller European powers? Quite likely.
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How powerful was Russia in 1945? Compared to what? They certainly had the largest war machine in Europe. No single European country could have stopped them had Stalin been inclined to mount a massive invasion and takeover. On the other hand, they were still ill-financed, under-equipped, war-weary, etc. To put it another way, if the Russians didn’t have the USA to contend with, they probably could have conquered the entire continent of Europe, but couldn’t possibly have held it long.
It’s worth remembering the words of Britain’s Lord Palmerston (he was writing about 19th century Russia, but the advice is ALWAYS applicable, even today). He said the two best pieces of advice he could offer any British diplomat was: “Russia is never as strong as she appears; and Russia is never as weak as she appears.”
- Finally, was Hitler’s success a surprise? Yes and no. Germany had a strong industrial base, plenty of resources, and a well-equipped, well trained army. No sane person dismissed the threat posed by Germany. No one was surprised that the German army was so good.
What DID surprise many was how easily the GErmans conquered France. The French army was widely considered the best in the world. The French army was hampered, however, by a severely flawed strategy (the Maginot line was obsolete almost as soon as it was built).
The other great surprise was that GErmany invaded Russia when it did. STalin KNEW that Hitler could devastate Russia if he ever invaded, which is why he first spent ages trying to form an anti-Hitler alliance with Britain, and later formed an alliance with Hitler. By making his pact with Hitler, Stalin thought he had bought himself safety from the Wehrmacht. Right up until the moment the Germans crossed the Russian border, Stalin stupidly believed Hitler was his friend, and couldn’t imagine why the Germans were massing at his borders.
john john sez:
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Command structure. The USSR had just gone through 4 years of war and it’s commanders were experienced. Their methods were field tested.
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Industry. The entire Soviet industry was geared towards war production.
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Experienced troops. The Americans had basically walked into Europe. Most of the time the Germans were retreating faster than the Americans could advance. This means most American soldiers had no experience with heavy combat. The Soviets had just marched into Berlin under terrible conditions, against the best German troops, with little food, little ammo and little clothing. Now they had plenty of ammo, plenty of food and plenty clothing. Not to mention determination. Lots of determination.
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Tanks. The giants of of WW2. The Americans had to call in airstrikes any time they encounted a Tiger, a whole battalion of Americans could be held up by a single Tiger. And Tigers were very rare. The Soviet JS2 or Su152 were superior to the Tigers and they had plenty of them. American tanks couldn’t even penetrate their armour from close range. Remember how the Germans said “1 German tank is worth 10 American tanks. The problem is the Americans always bring 11”. Now imagine the same thing but with 1:1 ratio in tanks.
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Katyushas. In addition to regular artillery the Soviets had plenty of these by the end of the war. This gave them flexibilty that the Americans just didn’t have. You ambush a column with artillery fire and it disrupts their movement and kills a couple. You ambush a column with Katyushas and there is no more column. It’s like 10 minutes of artillery fire landing in 1 minute, before anyone has time to dive into ditches or take cover. Same thing with covering retreats.
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Just plain bulk. How big was the soviet army compared to the american one?
Should I go on?
You ruled the skies over Germany. The American air force may have been better than the Russian one but you couldn’t exactly rule the skies over Russia. Same thing with the nuclear weapons. You may have been able to fly a bomber in and avoid AA fire over Berlin, but that’s only because they had no air force of their own to take down the bombers that got through. And if you’re using long range bombers you have no fighter cover, because bomber range is much longer than the fighter range. I’m sure the soviet fighters could take down defenceless bombers.
And as for seasoned troops, that may be technically right. You did have seasoned troops. About 10 000 or so. The rest of army was green. And how many troops did you have that were as seasoned as the Russians who fought from Stalingrad to Berlin? Or the Siberian troops?
The problem is I don’t have exact numbers. There’s a book called “German Eastern Front Doctorine” which has more details but it’s all the way downtown in the university library. I’ll try to see what stats I can come up with from books I have lying around.
Gilligan: I think tomndebb answered your point.
2 more things. The soviets didn’t have to wait for the Rosenbergs before they could build a bomb because Klaus (Karl?) Fuchs was already passing the plans to them even before the first bomb was built.
tomndebb: While I’m on the subject of tanks I want to talk about the T-34 and why it’s an offensive weapon.
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Tanks are always used in the offense. Didn’t Zhukov himself say that? Even when they’re being used in defensive battles they’re supposed to be used for counter-attacks. You don’t just line up tanks and wait for the enemy to come. You hold them back and only use the en masse, at weak points in the line to start a counter attack.
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Stalin already had at least 5 light tanks comparable to German Mk1 & 2. He also had the KV2 which was basically a mobile fortress. Why spend all the time and money developing what was probably the best tank in the world at the time? The KV2 was better than any German tank at the time. Why build a tank that has LESS armour and LESS firepower and is vulnerable to German self-propelled guns? It only makes since when you consider that the T-34 was much faster than the KV2. Speed matters when you’re using blitzkrieg tactics. It doesn’t matter so much when you’re defending.
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For the amount of steel used to build one T-34 you could build 20 AT or AA guns or light artillery. And then there’s the manpower issue: Do you know how long it takes to train a tank crew? It takes only about a month to get a competent artillery/AT/AA crew. So why spend all those resources on tanks? If you’re only concerned about defense wouldn’t you rather have 20 AT guns instead of 1 tank?
It all comes down to one thing: He wanted to head west with those T-34’s. You can’t have blitzkrieg with stationary AT guns. And it’s difficult to do with the slow KV2’s which break down every 100 km. But both AT guns and the KV2 are better at defense.
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Using the argument that Stalin intended to sweep over Europe based on a development of the T-34 is equivalent to saying that the U.S. had the intention to invade Russia based on the development of the M-48, M-60, and M-1 tanks. As has been noted elsewhere, Russia could barely hold its own in a flagrant attempt to conquer Finland. You will need to come up with something more substantial than the development of a couple of weapons to justify that theory.
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The background to this question requires a scenario.
Could the U.S. have walked over the Red Army to Moscow? No way.
Could Stalin have decided to take France, or even all of Germany? No way.
Stalin had no better way to attack U.S. manufacturing than we had to attack his. His armor was superior, but his air force was specifically tactical. Had it come to a showdown in 1945, we would have destroyed his air force and used our air force (tactical and strategic) to wipe out much of his armor. In any scenario where we attacked, he would have simply hunkered down at the rivers and made every crossing prohibitively costly. In any scenario where he attacked, we would have done the same thing.
Your estimates of the numbers of our “seasoned” troops is far too low. After the Italian campaign (Anzio, Monte Cassino), the Bulge, and Huertgen Forest, the U.S. had a very large body of seasoned troops. And, as the Germans discovered in Normandy, even raw American troops grow up very quickly.
With a navy capable of striking anywhere in the Baltic and the Pacific coast with impunity, we could divert an awful lot of Stalin’s resources from a European land war. Your faith in ground-based anti-aircraft weaponry is seriously misplaced. I can’t remember any air/ground battle being decided by flak. Your statement that our bombers could not reach Russian manufacturing is probably correct (but only based on the range of our bombers from Germany to the Caucasus–by 1945, we had at least three fighters that could go nearly anywhere a B-29 could go and all three were superior to any Russian fighter). Of course, while we could ship our supplies with impunity (even though the distance was farther), our bombers could easily destroy the transportation needed to bring materièl from the Caucasus to Germany.
I would guess that a Soviet/Allied war in 1945 would have been a horrible costly failure for both sides.
The exception to this scenario could be the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Much of the horror we now associate with nuclear war is based on the knowledge we gained on radiation sickness after Hiroshima and the long-term effects that we recognize on troops that witnessed above-ground tests in the 1950’s. In a 1945/1946 scenario, none of those objections would have carried weight–even if they were understood. We could easily have taken out much of the Russian army in a tactical use of nuclear weapons on the plains of East Germany. That still wouldn’t get us into Russia–or allow us to stay there once winter arrived–but it does provide the U.S. with a weapon for which Russia had no answer. The fact that it took us months to build each nuclear bomb does not lend itself to a flexible war scenario, but at least we had a bomb and a delivery system and they had neither.
- I had thought that the “surprise” we were talking about was the attack on Russia in summer, 1941. The “surprise” of spring, 1940 was not based on an underestimation of Hitler’s strength, it was based on an underestimation of his tactics. In 1914, Germany had modified the Schlieffen plan to squeeze past the Netherlands due to family associations between the royal families of the Dutch and Germany. In 1940, Hitler didn’t care and used the original Schlieffen plan. This put more of his army sweeping across the southern plains of Holland to Flanders. At the same time, he sent his armour through the Ardennes Forest where the French and Belgians did not think he could send tanks. He, therefore, got far more of his army around the flank of the Maginot line than any of the allies thought he could in far shorter time.
(There are still rumors that the French gave up so quickly that there have had to have been traitors surrendering prematurely, but I’ll let those lie as rumors for this discussion.)
Tom~
Excuse me? Would you care to tell that to either the troops who landed at Normandy OR the troops that slugged their way up the Italian pennisula???
And please, let’s keep in mind, the Americans developed the Atomic bomb in a deliverable fashion by August 1945. Imagine Moscow or Lenningrad bombed, then imagine how long the war between the Russians and the West would have lasted.
Russia didn’t fight the West in Europe in 1945 because they already had all the room they needed. The West didn’t fight the Russians because Roosevelt and Churchill realized they couldn’t sell the war to the public.
I think a lot of our analysis of this is inevitably colored by the Cold War. Few people in the West trusted Stalin completely, but he was considered an ally.
He had a seat on the Security Council of the U.N., which would prevent all future conflict. As a Marxist, he had no interest in invading any country, since every lightbulb - err, every country contains the seeds of its own revolution. All it would take for the West to defeat global Communism were strong economies and happy workers.
The first two sentences in that periods were certainly disproven, but in 1945 they still seemed plausible. Even the invasions of the Baltic countries could be seen as just another feckless attempt by a country to protect itself from Hitler. France had the Maginot Line; Britain had Chamberlain’s scrap of paper; the U.S. had isolationism; the Soviets had a Baltic buffer zone. Poking pins in tiny effigies of Hitler and Mussolini may have been more effective, but that’s not the point: the suffering Stalin inflicted on other nations was pretty easily rationalized by sympathetic Western powers, and Stalin was in any event far more cruel to his own countrymen.
Since neither side (US/UK/France and USSR) held territory adjacent to the other, the threats were quite indirect. Only in Germany did the two sides face one another directly; neutral Austria and Yugoslavia separated the two in the South; Finland and Sweden did the same in the North.
The real threat had been fascism for years and years; Communists, royalists, and liberals had fought as allies against fascism for years even before the Second World War had started. Many U.S. and Commonwealth sailors lost their lives shipping war materiel to Murmansk; these memories didn’t sit well with the image of Stalin as a rabid bear.
The “Sovietization” of Eastern European countries was carried out in a fairly sneaky manner, with Communist parties smothering Social Democratic allies in National Fronts. The Soviets didn’t need to dictate policy as a conquering empire; local Communists would happily carry out Moscow’s wishes, either out of lust for personal aggrandizement or misplaced faith in Marxism-Leninism. Only in the late 1940s was it obvious that the Soviets dominated the region in a non-democratic fashion; after all, elections were held, and more than one party took part in them. (The fact that the parties didn’t compete against one another could be ignored.)
I know that’s somewhat off the topic, I just wanted to try to separate some of our Cold War hindsight from the mentality of the time.
Oopsy. Mistake in third paragraph. Should say: “The first two sentences in the above paragraph were disproven”.
- Boris B, Hellacious Ornithologist
Did Stalin want to expand westward in 1939-1940? Of course he wanted to, and he did - he annexed the 3 Baltic states, nearly half of Poland, a chunk of Finland (10% of its territory, after failing to conquer it all), sizable pieces of Romania (Bessaraba & South Bukovina). He was spending considerable resources on pacifying the new territories, organizing collective farms and killing anyone who might organize anti-Communist resistance - the mass execution of Polish pow’s in Katyn was just one of many such crimes.
Did Stalin want to expand any further West than he actually did? Well, we know that he tried to annex all of Finland, but failed. We know that the Soviets tried very hard to conquer Poland in 1920, but failed. We know that Stalin did occupy even bigger chunks of Eastern Europe in 1945. So I guess it’s reasonable to conclude that yes, he would have preferred even further expansion, and did didn’t feel that he was overextending himself by trying to absorb additional new territories.
How powerful was the USSR in 1945?
I don’t have the references handy, but I recall reading that: 1) following VE, Stalin, Moloton, &c kept saying openly that the next war is about break out between the U.S. and the British (over the British colonies), and the the U.S.S.R. will fight on the U.S. side. Was he that far off the mark? Certainly U.S.-British cooperation after Normany was less than cordial (contributing to the disaster in the Ardennes); and Israel’s Independence War was a proxy war, with the Arabs commanded by British officers, and Israel getting support from both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
- I recall reading that after Truman found out about the Manhattan project (following Roosevel’t death), he wanted to have a stockpile of 150+ nukes, so he’s be able to blackmail both the Soviets and the British with it. That’s why the Americans were so upset by Soviets building their own nukes. The British essentially surrendered to the U.S. following WW2 and gave up on their colonies.
Not at all. “Stalin… wished above all to stave off for as long as possible the evil day of entering the war…” (The Soviet Tragedy, Malia, c. 1994, p. 281)
Up until 1939 and the Non-Agression Pact, Stalin was very afraid of a joint German-Britain-France anti-Communist pact (much like the one that had fought the Red Army back in 1919); to go forth and invade a smaller country might well be the provocation that Germany was waiting for to unite the others behind it in an anti-Communist front.
Stalin signed the Non-Agression Pact with Germany mostly to divide the Capitalist nations, and to give himself a ‘guaranteed’ breathing space to get armament production into gear. With a pact with Germany, Stalin had far less to fear from Anglo-French threats regarding the annexation of the Baltic States, part of Poland, and Finland. Unfortunately, the fear of diplomatic failure was immediately replaced by the fear of military failure, as the attempts to annex Poland and Finland proved that the Red Army was far, far weaker than anyone had suspected.
If you doubt that Stalin had no interest, then why did Stalin not invade Germany in 1939, 1940, or 1941? At many points during those years, the main part of the German Army was fighting elsewhere, and a strong forward move by Stalin could well have crushed Germany quickly (at least, in theory). Stalin certainly showed himself as someone willing to break or bend pacts when necessary or advantageous.
JMCJ
“John C., it looks like you have blended in very nicely.”
-UncleBeer
Huh? I was under the impression that when the Germans and the Russians invaded Poland in Sept 1939, they went through it like knife thru buter.
The Russians also had several minor run-ins with the Japanese in that time frame, and generally fared better than the Japanese.
The Russian-Japanese fights were strange in many ways.
The first brawl at Khasan was, effectively, a mutiny by Japanese officers in Manchuria who had argued in favor of an attack on Russia/Siberia and against an attack on British and French holdings in Indochina, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.
When the Japanese high command discovered that they had started their own private war in the north, the general staff ordered the air force to withdraw and reinforcements and resupply materièl held in China, leaving the Japanese on the ground with no air cover and no supplies.
Later, in one of the issues of “face” that I only partly understand, the Japanese commanders were allowed to have another fight to allow them to recover their honor. They went over to Mongolia and had a few trial battles, eventually attempting a river crossing that could have been used as a bridgehead to a larger attack. They had the misfortune to acquire Zukhov’s personal attention. He threw a quick loop around the hill the Japanesehad taken (preventing reinforcements from across the river) and chewed them up on their hill with artillery.
These battles are occasionally pointed out as examples of the clear superiority of the Russians to the Japanese, although the clearer picture is that the Japanese had local commanders that could be as stupid as anyone else. The actual Russian army was not tried against the Japanese army until 1945, when both the Russians and the Japanese were in quite different positions.
Tom~
I see yor point, but don’t necessarily agree.
(By the way, this was the first time Zhukov got to try out his idea of massive tank attacks, and I bet Germans were watching and learning.)
dlv said:
IIRC, The Germans went through Poland like butter. The Russians, however, found themselves vexed and delayed by the Polish defenses (including the stellar performance of the (much laughed about in retrospect) Polish cavalry), and there were great fears in the Soviet command and government that Germany would be able to annex nearly all of Poland before the Soviets could make any gains.
JMCJ
“John C., it looks like you have blended in very nicely.”
-UncleBeer
Let it not be forgotten that STALIN and HITLER were allies, up until 1941! In fact, Stalin trained Hitler’s Luftwaffe in Russia, as Germany was forbidden from having an airforce. According to Count Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law)Stalin and Hitler regarded themselves as professional colleagues (up till Hitler turned on him). Their ideologies were different, the methods the same.
What year did this occur?
I find it curious that Stalin (who warred against Hitler in their proxy fight in Spain from 1936 through 1939) would have been training German pilots to shoot down Russian pilots in Spain.
Stalin and Hitler were not allies. They signed a non-aggression pact just weeks before their joint invasion of Poland (and six months after they quit fighting in Spain) simply to keep from getting into a premature war with each other when their troops ran into each other in the center of Poland.
Tom~
dlv
I was under the impression that the Labor Party had been advocating decolonization for years, and that it was the election of 1945 - Labor’s first outright victory - was what made the difference. American influence seems peripheral.
I don’t think the annexation of the Baltic states and parts of Poland and Finland is indicative of a Soviet desire to conqueor Europe. These lands were all once part of the Russian Empire. Right or wrong I’m sure that Stalin looked upon the annexations as reclaimation of land lost during World War One and the civil war.