It’s very true that British Tenacity/Soviet Manpower/Commonwealth Pluck didn’t win the war. By 1945 the US was churning out Liberty Ships so fast the Germans and Japanese couldn’t sink them all no matter how hard they tried.
Ditto guns and ammunition- everyone involved produced such vast quantities of small arms and ammunition that 60 years later they’re still being used to fight wars (the Nepalese Civil War was fought largely with British SMLE rifles, for example).
As I understand it, Hitler never seriously expected to invade Britain. Even with Operation Sea Lion drawn up and initial preparations made (landing barges were constructed, for example), Hitler respected the British and I’m of the opinion that, had the Luftwaffe won the Battle of Britain, then Hitler would have simply sat down with Churchill, said “No hard feelings, eh?” and sorted out a treaty that involved Britain leaving the Germans to do the Evil-Do That They Do So Well in Europe, the Germans leaving the British Empire to do the Voodoo That They Do So Well, and both of them generally staying out of each other’s way.
Which would have had interesting consequences in the Pacific… With Britain no longer tied up in Europe and North Africa, the Japanese might have had second thoughts about trying to add Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements to the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere…
You can extend that statement : if you study any war in depth, you’ll notice that wars are not decided by weapon systems, numbers, leadership or even battles, but by economies and supply lines. It’s not about who pounds the hardest, but how long he can pound.
And yes, in WW2 America’s economy vastly outmatched that of the rest of the world… but that’s not an inherent property of the US. It’s “just” because not one bomb landed there, not one factory destroyed. With the UK down, and Russia pushed far East, German U-Boats could have cut US access to Middle Eastern oil, built tons of them in UK harbors and sent them out in the Pacific… Possibly even landed troops in Mexico and gone on from there (Operation Torch in reverse, if you will)
I’m not sure how feasible it would have been (or is) to totally isolate the US, but the US cannot stand alone against the economic might of the entire world.
No, that’s not true. The Reich would have survived Hitler’s death, had it not happened coincidentally with the war being utterly and totally lost. In fact, the Reich would have been better served with Hitler dying before betraying Brest-Litovsk
However, I agree with you that empire building through hostile conquest is not sustainable, or at least not in the space of one lifetime. The further you extend the borders, the more men needed to keep the locals in check and not available to further extend (or protect) the borders. The Romans managed, but Rome wasn’t built in a day :p.
But how long would the British Navy have remained strong, without the vast resource network needed for its maintenance ?
International politics aren’t based on “fair”. And if you’re going on fair, I’d say the Poles weren’t exactly thrilled with being subject to Soviet rule ;). The Soviets were allowed a buffer, because it was more expedient than not.
Meh. Why cross the Atlantic, when you can see Alaska from Siberia ? Palin wasn’t there to stop them yet :D. Cut the source of Lend Lease v2.0, then you can obliterate the easy pickings. Again, that’s the thinking in Red Storm Rising : in that book, what the Russians really, really want is to conquer the Middle East. But they figure they can’t do that with the OTAN unbeaten, so they go after the OTAN first. They can’t go against the US directly because of nukes, but without them ?
Russia was pretty much a joke towards the end of WW2. The most bizarre thing about WW2 was that we did not retake all the land occupied by the USSR. Makes you wonder who is in control of the USA. Patton knew, which is why he had to die. We could have completely destroyed the soviets within a year or two after finishing off japan. Everything but some of their tanks were a joke and they had a small supply of the good ones.
But seriously ask yourself why we didn’t get rid of Stalin when we had the best chance? Because it’s obvious there was some secret cabal behind the scenes pulling strings in our foreign policy, it’s hard to say where WW3 would be. My guess would be at the oil fields in the middle east.
On what do you base this observation on? I’d say towards the end of WWII the Russians had one of, if not THE finest army in the world. They were battle hardened, willing and even eager to fight and die for the country, were equipped with the finest tanks of the war and had an air force that was just starting to come into it’s own. They were FAR from a ‘joke’.
Why was this bizarre? Even if we assume that we COULD have taken it all back (I think we could have), the cost in men and material would have been staggering…as would the further destruction on Western Europe and Russia. There was no public support for turning on the Russians (who had been our allies) and continuing the war either in the US or in any of the other allied nations. So…it would have been bizarre if we HAD done so, especially unilaterally.
Um…the citizens perhaps? You know, the ones who DIDN’T want several more years of war and death for no real reason? Those guys? Perhaps you’ve heard of them?
:rolleyes:
Complete horseshit. Even if you are factoring in having atomic bombs and the willingness to drop them on Soviet cities we couldn’t have completely destroyed the Soviets in that time frame. Bomb production took some time to really get rolling with, IIRC, a new bomb added to the stock every 16 months initially. We shot our bolt in Japan…then we ran a bluff until production could catch back up.
So, we’d have had to do it the old fashion way into the teeth of the largest and best equipped, motivated and experiences army left in the world. Oh, I think we would have won in the end…our conventional strategic and tactical air power would have eventually done the trick, and at least the Brits armor was up to snuff (we would have eventually had to figure it out)…but it would have been a long, bloody, nasty fight that would have taken years and cost us mountains of treasure and hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives.
You have an extremely skewed (and erroneous) view of things at that time. It was the American’s who tanks were a joke and only had a small supply of the good ones. The Soviets had a LOT of ‘the good ones’…and they had better ones coming on stream. The Soviets built something like 50,000 T-34’s (with at least 10 variants I can think of)…and a T-34 was more than a match for anything the allies had. The KV and IS tanks were even nastier. Soviet artillery was also very good…and their air force, especially their tactical air support was equally good. Then there were the Soviet troops who had been battle hardened for years and were pretty much the driving force that defeated the Germans. Tough, resourceful, experiences and not particularly averse to take as many losses as it took to do the job (they lost almost as many men taking Berlin as the American’s lost in the entire war).
Because there was no popular support for continuing the war in Europe after the Germans were defeated. Even though the US didn’t join the war until fairly late in the game the citizens back home were already getting tired of the war effort and just wanted it to be over. Even going after Japan wasn’t exactly met with a rousing cheer…more like a weary sigh and grim determination. Attempting to restart up the war in Europe against the Soviets at that time would have been next to impossible…at least unilaterally. Our allies were in even worse shape. Who was going to help us fight the Soviets? The UK? They were even more war weary and tired than we were…and they were in pretty bad shape. France? Even if we assume that France would WANT to help in such a fight they were in even worse shape than the Brits. Who else? Canada? Australia? Again, both were weary of the fighting they had done.
Yeah…the ‘secret cabal’ known as ‘the citizens of the United States’. Good grief, what a load of horse shit. We didn’t want to get into the war in the first place…the only reason we DID jump in was because we were attacked by Japan! If there was a ‘secret cabal’ working behind the scenes it was to try and GET us into the war in the first place on the side of the allies…and this ‘secret cabal’ were folks like Churchill and Roosevelt himself.
They were too busy raping children, drinking themselves into comas and what have you to put up much of a fight. Seriously, you got some nice revisionist take on history. The Russian army was complete joke relative to the allies. Good tanks, but nothing else. And LIKE I SAID ALREADY, they had very few of them at the time.
Any waiting would delay the inveitable build up of a stronger army. With a large popualtion, natrual isolation via geography, and being a stones throw from portions of the US, leaving the soviets to regroup and build a monster army could lead to only one thing: a much more bloody WW3 that the US would be invovled in. It didn’t happen, thankfully, but it could have, and any military man concerned about the future of the USA would have went for the hear of Russia. Have them surrender immediately and return to pre-war boarders. Don’t listen? Nuke a large coastal city.
Who cares if they were our allies? Evil is evil. And stalin and commies were pure evil. An Evil that bled into other portions of the east and guess what— caused us more grief.
Umm, there was a huge body of eastern and nothern europeans that would have fought at the drop of a hat if they had a chance to push the USSR away from them…
So…in other words you don’t have a clue what you are talking about. I’m shocked…SHOCKED!
And yet you’ve proved none of your assertions. You claim (in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that the Russian army was a joke, too busy drinking and raping to do much…but what is your evidence of this? You present none. My evidence would be the fact that from 1943 onward the Russian army basically kicked the Germans ass all the way back into Germany, then went into their capital (unsupported by anyone else) and wiped out the Nazi regime. Revisionist? I think not, baby puppy.
You claim the Russian’s had very few tanks at the time…but again, you offer no evidence of this except your unsupported and obviously ignorant opinion. Here’s what I gots (mind, this is JUST the T-34 production figures):
I’ll just ignore the rest of your post as it’s not worth discussing it with you, honestly. ‘pelosi-eyes’?
Based on the How’s Obama doing thread I have to say that a banning was never so well deserved. Sadly I’ll never get to see caligulashorse’s probably stunning proofs for his assertions in this thread now, however.
Do not forget though what was stated earlier. The Soviets were benefiting hugely from US help in raw materials and other crucial aid (e.g. trucks). Guaranteed an army with no trucks and all tanks is doomed. The Soviets would have to shift production to trucks and trains and shoes and all that miscellaneous stuff so critical to an army.
Also remember that the Soviets lost around 3:1 compared to the German military units. By the end of the war Russia had lost about 13% of its population. The US? About 1%.
The Soviets had a massive army in the field but I am not sure at all how long they could maintain it without the aid they received from the rest of the Allies not to mention how long they could keep finding young men to throw into the grinder.
That said, and disregarding the fuckwit’s points, I’d say by the end of the war the US did catch on re. the tank thing : the M26 Pershing tank was a beast that could go toe to toe with a Panther without blushing. I don’t rightly know when exactly they (or their M48 and M60 descendants) replaced the gazillion Zippo variants in the US roster, but they were already starting to by the end of WW2 (and were used in Korea).
ETA : But that being said, I totally agree with you. The Russian army could have run rings right around the US one in 1945.
No doubt…but I think that they also had a much simpler logistics problem than the US would have had. Also, by the time of the wars end they had their industrial capacity going full bore…switching to trucks and jeeps wouldn’t have been all that challenging for them in the long run. As for raw materials…Russia has vast resources. Again, it might have slowed them down, but I don’t think it would have put up any insurmountable obstacles.
That’s true…but an industrial nation with 80k+ tanks can easily shift production to trucks…especially since we couldn’t exactly take the trucks we’d already given them back before hostilities started. The Russian’s had also spent massive amounts of energy staging up supply depots on their march from Russia to Germany…and, in the standard Russian manner had also spent lots of energy disguising these large caches to keep what was left of the German airforce from blowing the crap out of them.
I’m not at liberty to do any kind of research atm, so just going to wing this off the cuff. From memory, those loss rates were mostly reflected in the early days of the war when the Soviet Army was poorly lead and had very bad logistics support. They even lacked things like radios in their tanks (they used a weird system of flags to attempt to command tanks in the field)…so, even though they out numbered the Germans and had technically better armor they took huge losses due to poor training, poor leadership and poor doctrine. Later in the war however the Russian’s gave a much better account of themselves…until attempting the final push into Germany and capturing Berlin. They took huge losses there, but this was mainly due to the stupidity of the Russian generals competing against each other for who would take the final prize and Stalin, who was egging them on…and also due to the nature of attempting a force entry assault on highly prepared defenses and assaults in a large city.
The US on the other hand joined the war late, and frankly we weren’t fighting the kind of brutal campaign the Russian’s were. Also, we pretty much had air superiority throughout much of the ground phase of our own campaigns in Europe. We also had the benefit of getting to use the experiences of others who had been fighting the Germans for years before we had to commit any troops at all.
I’m not taking anything away from the US here…I think without our efforts the Germans could have gotten a stalemate or could have taken many more years and killed many more millions of people before finally going down. But I don’t think that those rates of exchange really show anything wrt the question.
I think they could have maintained it on their own resources…but I think that ultimately they would have not been able to support the logistics if the conflict dragged on due to US air superiority, especially our tactical air capabilities. Initially I think the Russians would kick ass and take names…they already had quite a lot of supplies staged up along their attack route into Germany, they had superior ground forces in both quantity and quality, and I’ve never heard anything about the Russian people or soldiers suffering from war weariness (at least not in the second world war). So…if the Soviets could hit hard enough fast enough they might have pushed us right off the continent. But if we could have dragged things out I think eventually they would have lost in the end.
It would have been VERY bloody and nasty though, and I doubt much of Western Europe (or Russia) would have remained. I shudder to think what the post war years would have been like…bad as they were in our universe they would have been many times worse had the US and Soviets fought to the death there for control of Western Europe. Between bombings, major army clashes in cities and towns and throughout the country side, starvation, disease, etc etc…I doubt even the US would have had the resources to even attempt to rebuild all of that. And who knows how many of our allies would have completely collapsed due to economic exhaustion?
I agree that the Pershing with it’s 90 mm gun was a match for a Panther (or the Centurion from the Brits). The IS-4 though had (IIRC) a 120mm gun and sloped armor…and was WAY more than a match for any of these tanks. I don’t think a lot were built…but that’s mostly because the war was over by then. The earlier IS models were probably a match for the Pershing though…as was the T-34/85 and some of the KV variants…and there were a hell of a lot of these things out there. From memory the US only sent a very small number of Pershing’s to Europe before the war was over, and we never really produced that many of them (the tank didn’t even make the top 10 on the Military Channel ;))…but as with the IS-4 that may have been more due to the ending of the war than anything wrong with the tank.
The Brits Centurion though…now THAT was a great tank!
And through 1946 as well. After that though things might have started to get dicey for the Russians if the war dragged on. They also might have started to have some issues holding down the backfield in Eastern Europe by then…which would have added to their logistics headaches trying to supply their armies fighting in Western Europe.
A couple of interesting things to speculate on though. Would the Russians have gotten the Mig-15 into service earlier? How about the AK-47?
I’ll post the semi-obligatory defense of the US’s much-maligned Sherman tank: it was perfectly fine for it’s intended mission, infantry support. It failed in an armoured cavalry tank-vs-tank role.
It made number 10 of the top 10 tanks of all time on the Military Channel. Mostly due to it’s production (we produced something like 30-40k of the things). After it was up-gunned and up-armored it worked fairly well for the early IDF…but with that gas engine it was a death trap in the tank vs tank role.
I recall reading about a German mission that was planned but never carried out that would have blasted the 5 power plants that delivered the vast majority of electricity to Western Russia.
Using the Long Range bombers we had (that Russia lacked) could we have hit them and essentially cut the throat of Soviet Industry, if we had had to?
I think we could have hammered Soviet heavy industry (though with a lot of losses as the Soviet air force was a lot bigger than the German’s had…especially if they had gotten the Mig-15 into service). I doubt we could have completely stopped it though, especially the industry they had moved behind the Urals and into Siberia. It would depend on where we were able to stage out of.
What we probably could have done though is put a major crimp in their logistics resupply by bombing the crap out of their supply columns traveling from Russia through Eastern Europe and into Germany and wherever the front was in Western Europe.
