Without the resurgent Russians tearing through Europe, no D-Day?

Today of course is D-Day, and speaking with a French friend, and giving him the old “If it wasn’t for us you’d be speaking German,” he answered “No, if it wasn’t for you we’d be speaking Russian.”

He went on about his own, long-held conviction, that the ultimate reason for the (late) invasion was not, like so many cases, rescue of the Allies (let alone Jews, naturally) but prevention of a Russian domain of all of continental Europe and a huge chunk of Asia.

What were the US military considerations of that, certainly post Stalingrad (1942)? How locked in place–or the absolute necessity of securing such an agreement–were the agreements to stop at Berlin? And of course in the early 1940s the US knew an agreement with the Soviets was easily broken.

ETA: The conversation started with me asking about if and how most people mark or care about D-Day, or even if they call it that, Debarkation Day works out as D-Day, but what he said was a bigger deal there is L’appel on June 18, The Call, when DeGaul announced on BBC he new relationship of the armed resistance.

It’s a myth that we “gave” Berlin to the Soviets; the city was never ours to give away. There was no point during the war when American and British troops were closer to Berlin than the Soviets were. If we had started a race to Berlin, the Soviets would have won it.

Some people at the time (and some people since) believe that the Germans would have unofficially helped us take Berlin; they would have preferred an American occupation so they wouldn’t have resisted our troops the way they resisted the Soviets. But there’s no evidence of that. The Germans offered full resistance to American soldiers right up to the end.

The other factor is Japan. We didn’t know at the time that the atom bomb would work and Japan would surrender. So America wanted the Soviets to join in with the war against Japan and participate in the invasion of Japan. This meant the Soviets had more leverage against us than we had against them.

Given all the above, does that not support (as a proposition of historical analysis) the argument in OP?

USA Lend-Lease to the Soviets in WWII:
*
In total, the U.S. deliveries through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[41] of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[42] 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras)[43] and 1.75 million tons of food.[44]

Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.[45][46]

The United States delivered to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel,[24] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production.[24] One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company’s River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.[47]*

So yes, they drove into Germany with an impressive amount of artillery. On American trucks with American artillery shells.

History is hard. :slight_smile: Although not everything can be true. I’m just throwing this out there.

They were called ‘The Allies’ for a reason. The Soviets without American/Commonwealth/French/etc. help would not have won. The US had effectively completely blunted any Japanese designs on the USSR and allowed the Soviets to focus on Germany. Stalin was terrified of a two front war and without US troops destroying the Japanese, that’s almost assuredly what he would have had. As said above, the US supplied a great deal of the industrial might necessary for the Soviets to mount an offensive. The Soviets did not produce any vehicles related to logistics. They essentially built armor and artillery and left everything else to the US.

If you can find an old map of East and West Germany - a I understood it, that boundary was where the Russians and Anglo-Americans met up. The Russians graciously agreed to share Berlin which was deep in their zone.

As I understood it, the Russians continued to push for an northern Allied invasion, to help spread the load of German forces. The allies were already working their way up Italy, but that was tough slogging too.

I guess an interesting question is - without D-Day, what would happen when Germany was effectively overrun by the Russians? I doubt they would have kept fighting when the Russians were approaching Alsace-Lorraine area; most likely by then local commanders would call Britain and say “get over here now…” There are stories (don’t know how true) of German forces toward the end heading west as fast as they could to surrender to the British and Americans rather than the Russians.

That’s putting the cart before the horse. The UK, US, and USSR agreed on zones of occupation in Tehran in 1943, then finalized them in February of 1945 before forces met up (they also took territory from US/UK zones to create a zone for France). While the boundary was where the Russians and Anglo-American forces met, that’s because both sides used the already negotiated boundary as a stop line. The way you’ve written it implies that the boundaries were decided by whoever got there first, which isn’t correct - the stop lines were decided on before the armies stopped there.

Not sure what you mean by ‘unofficially’, but there’s definitely evidence that
multiple higher ups in Germany, including political figures like Himmler and Goering and military figures like generals, attempted to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies, with the idea that The conspirators behind the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 also had the idea of making peace just with the Western Allies. None of them had the support of Hitler (which would make them technically unofficial), but they were serious offers floated by people in position to possibly make it happen. The Allies had no interest in leaving Germany in any state other than “completely and unarguably defeated”, so all of this went no where.

The latter part of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich discusses these various peace offers, and has citations to original documents if you really want to dig deep.

The US wanted to defeat Germany, period, the weird idea that it was only to stop Soviet domination of areas is bizarre and doesn’t match history. If the US didn’t care about defeating Germany, the US could have just cut off lend-lease to the USSR and/or signed a separate peace. Note that 30-40% of the German army, including numerous elite formations, were tied up in western and southern Europe either fighting against or guarding against the Western Allies throughout the war even before D-day, and the vast majority of the USSRs logistics vehicles and aircraft fuel came from the US/UK.

This film that was shown to US occupation troops after the war gives a really good picture of the mindset of the US towards Germany at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv1yZ6tq3mY

At the time D-Day was launched the Germans were still in the western Soviet Union; Operation Bagration, launched July 1944, was the attack meant to drive the Germans out of Belarus. The two operations were meant to coincide.

As Pantastic points out, the common myth that the Germans weren’t dedicating much of their army to defending the West is just not true; it wasn’t half, but it wasn’t far short of half, and the Allies occupied most of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Germany had an enormous force in France in 1944 but the Allies could bring far more firepower to bear in any one place, partially because of air and naval supremacy, partially because of logistical advantages, and in part because Germany was forced to defend more places than the Allies actually attacked (twelve wasted divisions in Norway being the prime example.)

The Soviets were our allies and were begging for an invasion in order to take pressure away from them. They were suffering tremendous losses and wanted a second front to occupy the Germans.

You can’t always predict, but without D-Day there was the possibility the Germans might hold off the Soviets and stay in power.

Had the war in Europe dragged on a few more months a nuke could have been dropped on Germany. On the other hand there is a thought that the US was less likely to drop a nuke on white Christians as opposed to non Christian Asians.

My grandma had an uncle who fought in the European theater. He was absolutely convinced that we should have fought the Russians at the end of the war. And I know he wasn’t the only person who felt that way.

Since anecdotes is the plural of anecdote, let me chip in that my father, who attended the Surrender Ceremony 2nd September 1945 in Tokyo Bay, had the same viewpoint as your uncle.

(Admittedly, my father was not aboard USS Missouri as an honored strategist for the Allies. He was a 19-year old radio tech on one of 250+ ships in the vast armada that had filled Tokyo Bay.)

So were those locomotives that the US gave Russia the same gauge , or did they have to modify the locos for Russia.

That would probably have been a bad mistake. The Allies had a lot of strategic and industrial advantages( including control of the seas and a vastly superior bomber fleet ), but the the Soviet military in 1945 was a tactical juggernaut. In terms of sheer masses of veteran troops( AND armor AND artillery )the allied forces on the ground in Europe would have been seriously outnumbered and Soviet tactical air cover was at least at parity. Granted the Soviets had all but exhausted their manpower reserves, but the Allies were nearly as bad off. The allies might have won eventually, but quite possibly only after a second D-Day as it is not outside the realm of possibility that the Soviets could have pushed them right out of Europe in the first couple of years. That’s even assuming the UK( let alone France )had the stomach for further fighting in the first place.

Realistically, nobody on either side wanted to start World War 3 immediately, and it wasn’t for several more years that the conflicting goals of Western Allies and the Soviets became too obvious too ignore or paper over anyway.

What percentage of Americans felt that way in 1945? There were certainly some (Patton is a famous example), but from all accounts it was vanishingly small. The examples people are giving are of people who said ‘we should have fought the Russians’ decades after the war, after the USSR became the primary enemy of America. The number of people who would actually support turning on an ally at the time was tiny by all accounts, the US populace in general had grudges with Germany and Japan but no real animus towards the USSR.

This is revisionist nonsense. The US was happy to bomb the Hell out of the Germans, and nuclear bombs did not have the stigma attached to them that they do now. There is no data to support the idea that the US would have hesitated to use nuclear weapons against Germany, and no reasonable argument for why the US would even hesitate, much less actually decide not to use a weapon against their primary enemy. The US certainly didn’t hesitate to firebomb Dresden, killing more people than either nuke did, and had chemical weapons stocks standing by to use in Europe if Germany decided to open that door.

  1. That’s generally true up thru (Western) Allies were never closer to Berlin than Soviets. Whether the Soviets would always have taken Berlin is less certain though, especially if the West had countenanced any kind of double cross side deal with Germany.

  2. This I don’t agree with. Elements of the Nazis wanted to make a side deal with the West, all along. Anyway while it’s hard to exactly measure or prove how hard the German Army resisted in the final stages, the scale of ground fighting in East and West in the war’s final weeks was not comparable. The US Army (representing the majority of Allied forces) suffered 9,273 battle deaths in April 1945 and 478 in May in the European Theater (doesn’t count Italy, so in Germany at that point, includes also the USAAF). The Soviets lost nearly 100,000 killed just in the Battle of Berlin, not their whole effort, from mid April thru the end of the war in May. Soviet casualties were higher than Western throughout the war, and US Army monthly battle deaths in ETO while generally higher than 10k per month from June 1944 had occasionally been lower than in April '45 (September when the army was basically stranded on the German border at the end of its supply lines, and again in February between the close of the Ardennes battle and getting the offensive moving again). However it’s not meaningful IMO to speak of ‘full resistance’ in the West compared to the East in the final weeks without noting how much less carnage there was in the West.

  3. That’s true, and the whole picture is that the US and Britain decided it wasn’t in in their interest to stab the Soviets in the back and make a side deal with the Germans, at any point. But it’s not as if we know that would have been impossible at any point.