Posted on 01/26/2017 1:06:09 PM PST by Rebelbase
On 8 may 1945, Germany surrenders.WWII in Europe is over. Europe is divided in half. Soviet in the east, Allied in the West.
But Who would have won if war broke out between the Allied and Soviets if they decided to declare all out war against each other in May 1945?
Allied even prepared a battle plain: Operation Unthinkable was a code name of a plan of a conflict between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union.
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The US would have won. Russian divisions where about half to a quarter size of regular army divisions(something we didn’t know at the time) effectively making their armies only about 50% larger than ours and Russia were almost entirely out of manpower. Add to that our domination of the air, the fact that we where supplying them with all the trucks, food, and gas needed to keep the USSR from collapsing we would have been to Moscow within a year.
Nukes wouldn’t have been a huge factor in this war because the production of the weapons wasn’t very fast at the time. We would have nuked maybe 2 or 3 Russian cities before the fight was over while our long range bombers would have destroyed Russian heavy industry within 6months using conventional attacks.
>The United States was supplying Soviet Russia with war material. If all that were cut off, I dont think Russia could have made up the difference on their own.
Russian would have starved. 50%+ of their food stuffs was coming from the US.
Patton wanted to re-arm the German army troops and use them as a strike force. That would have taken until Japan had been dealt with. So you would probably be looking at a fall, rather than a spring, kickoff.
Of course, Patton’s elimination took care of that option.
The Russian ground forces would probably have beat the allies as long as they could maintain a fresh supply of men and equipment to throw at the allies in mass. However, The allies would have quickly swept the Russians air force away and the allied bombers would have quickly degraded their supply lines until the Russians ran out of everything especially food and ammo and their soldiers would have surrendered for a hot meal.
Patton would have won easy.
Glad it never came to that. That’s about the only scenario worse than the invasion if Japan.
Only nukes would have done it. By that time Ivan had a hard crust on him.
Ivan had plenty of capacity and it was in the middle if Siberia.
All totaled 20mill.
Cut off the lend lease gravy train to the USSR and they would be hurting in short order.
That being said, such an effort would certainly face unforeseen issues and be painful for all involved by the time it was completely finished. The US swept the floor with all others when it came to logistics, but this is still an invasion of Russia we are talking about.
Also the will of the American People to continue the fight would also have to come under serious consideration. I have always wanted to find a source that spoke about what level of dissatisfaction there was among Americans leading up to V-J day (if anyone knows any, please suggest them!)
God only knows what the long term political ramifications would be, but if WWI’s effect on the European psyche is any guide, I can’t imagine they would be positive.
Actually 3 or 4 you did not include Alaska or any of the southern parts of Russia could of went at them from 4 directions
>The Red Army raped everyone they could, even freed Jews/POWs.
Interestingly enough it wasn’t regular front line Red Army soldiers doing most of the raping. It was the political commissars and the Russian occupation troops that followed behind the front lines that committed the vast majority of the rapes. It’s pretty clear that it was a deliberate policy on the part of the Russian government.
We would have since we supplied a lot of what Soviet Russia needed.
>But the US still had Japan to fight
We effectively beat Japan using about 15% of our capacity. Even the troops where getting ready to invade Japan with where largely new recruits and not the units we had in Europe.
“Depends on how quickly we could have made more A-bombs.”
I think production was about one per month. Another big issue would have been that we were already drawing down and repositioning troops for Operation DOWNFALL, the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands later that year.
Old Saturday Night live skit:
Little Tommy Tucker of Ft. Wayne, Indiana writes: what if Napoleon had a B52 bomber at the battle of Waterloo?
Man this video is stupid. The German army was killing the Red army at a rate of 4 to 1 till the very end of the war and the US was killing Germans at a rate of 5/4. Their great force size wasn’t going to be a problem. Nor would the Red Airforce have been a big issue. After the war it was determined that more Russians pilots died due to their planes failing than from enemy fire which is why they used endless amounts of American planes instead of Russian ones.
“and Russia were almost entirely out of manpower.”
I remember reading recently that 80% of the Russian males born in either 1921 or 1923 were dead by 1945.
That had to have a staggering effect on demographics.
An interesting hypothetical. Pity the background music is so repetitive and overwrought. I had to mute it after 2 minutes.
Well, we would have prevailed.
They would then be fighting a united coalition of many countries and an insurgency of those people’s countries they took over.
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