WW2 Planes attacking a modern aircraft carrier

[TokyoBayer]

@Boyo_Jim

I would love to listen in on some of those conversations, with relatively junior navy officers telling Bomber Harris and Ira Eaker and even George Marshsall just how wrong they are and how they will waste tens of thousands of lives and millions or billions of dollars because the strategies and tactics they’ve developed over long careers are WRONG! Fortunately for the Allies, I think both Churchill and Roosevelt were both smart and flexible enough to listen and change course, even against the united opposition of the high command. Stalin, not so much.

There’s always the assumption on these thread, that people would actually take advice, and a lot of which are things which they don’t want to hear. Unified combat commands, for example. All fine in principle but does Marshall support it if MacAurther isn’t the guy picked?

Also an interesting question – if these guys from the future become powers behind the throne in the West, or at least very respected advisors, what happens to the Cold War after the hot one. Does it play out relatively unchanged because no one can think of better options? Or is there some game changers there too? For instance, we would know just how weak the Soviet nuclear arsenal really was, so maybe we could push them much harder than we did. Maybe we would even preemptively strike at Soviet nuclear facilities, to take them off the superpower list. Maybe this question is worth a thread of its own.

This is large enough of a topic to deserve its own thread.

There are a number of potential game changers, the most obvious of which is the nuclear bomb and Klaus Emil Fuchs which would give us another several years before they developed their own.

Another would be the respective positions of how the war ended what concessions would have been granted to Stalin. Had the US been able to defeat the Japanese without the necessary for the Soviets to join the attack, less concessions would have been required. Same thing in Europe if the knowledge of the future where to give more comfort to Churchill.

The third would be that the US would have known prior to the end that there would be a cold war coming, and made better decisions. There were differences between how they handled the end of the war in the Pacific and in Europe because the US knew better what were the Soviet intentions.