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.
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.
If we were going to flip the Soviets from allies into enemies overnight, we would have needed the support of the Japanese, to keep the Soviet Army from moving from the Manchurian and Mongolian borders to the European theater. The Japanese, having seen how the Americans handled conquered people, and also knowing that the Americans were not going to be conquered in a final battle, could have decided on an armistice that would have allowed them to retain Manchukuo, Korea, and Formosa, give up the Philippines, Indochina, Burma, Jehol, and southern China, and concentrate its forces, buttressed by American supplies and materiel, on Mao’s forces in NW China, and the Soviets in what would become its eastern front. It would also free up the Manhattan Project to drop its nukes on the USSR, with the first two landing on industrial centers, and the third, if necessary, hitting the Kremlin, just as in actuality the first two hit remaining centers in Japan, with the third planned for Chiyoda-ku, obliterating the Imperial Palace.
The result in Asia would have been an Imperial “Greater Japan” allied with the US, Britain, and a nationalist China, a post-communist Russia, and a 1939-border Europe with democracies throughout. Moreover, without a Second World to compete with the First World, the history of the Third World would have been very different, but how that difference would have shown itself is, I think, unknowable.
I didn’t watch the video - yet.
But I am 100% confident that we’d have beaten them even without A-bombs.
First off, on May 8, we still had the Japanese as active enemies. If we had then “gone toe-to-toe with the Russkies” (quoting Strangelovian General Buck Turgeson), all we’d have needed to do was have 10%-15% of the Naval and air forces then engaged with Japan to stay more or less in place to bottle them up. They were already on their last legs, and had no offensive capacity or force projection to speak of. The rest of our forces could have been diverted to fighting the Soviets and later, if they still had a stomach for war once we beat the Soviets, we could’ve either starved Japan or A-bombed it into surrender.
Here are the facts - we had an untouched industrial base, fully geared up for war production. 50% of the world’s industrial production at that point was concentrated in the 7 states adjoining the Great Lakes. We had more ships in our Navy than the rest of the world combined (and the 2nd biggest Navy - the Brits - would have been on our side), including about 100 full- and pocket-sized carriers, and about a million Marines. The Soviets had just lost 26 million people, and no one in Eastern Europe was too keen on being ruled by Uncle Joe Stalin in Moscow. We had 80,000 aircraft between the AAF and the Navy, and if even 3/4 of them were trainers, that still leaves 20,000 combat aircraft. Additionally, we had started producing the M26 Pershing tank near the end of the war (2,000 by the end of 1945, and that’s with no real high priority after defeating Germany in early May), and reputedly the M26 (and its upgraded configuration as the M46 Patton tank) proved to be an overmatch for the T-34-85 (pretty much the best the Soviets had in 1945) in Korea a few years later.
We could have easily - with total air and naval superiority - landed a million guys in the Soviet Far East and taken over all of Siberia, or at least taken a lot of it and destroyed anything of value to the Soviets. Similarly in the Black Sea area - throw an entire Naval Task Force with a dozen divisions of Marines and Army into their underbelly, and take over or destroy their Caucausus oil fields. The rest of the Army and AAF in Europe would have been able to systematically cut off, starve and then annhilate the Red Army in Germany and Eastern Europe. All of those bombers that destroyed bridges, roads, tunnels, rail yards, munitions factories, ports, etc., etc. in Nazi-controlled Europe would simply have shifted their efforts to 1,000 miles or so East - cut off their logistics nearly entirely somewhere in the western USSR or the eastern parts of Poland, Hungary,Romania and Bulgaria.
No contest - if we’d have had the will to do so at the highest levels of government, and if our soldiers would have been willing to follow orders, we’d have effectively ruled the world...which would have made history a whole lot different (and not necessarily better, given what republics-turned-empire have a history of becoming).
Listen to Hardcore History latest podcast that just came out. Dan Carlin just gave a great podcast on this
effin Rosenbergs.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” — Albert Einstein
Then we move into Axis/Soviet territory and wipe them out for good by detroying St. Petersburg/Leningrad with a nuclear bomb. Bomb another city if we have to.
Then we establish bases in Russia so we would be in a better position to wipe out the leadership of China when they turn commie. I'm sure our leadership knew it was coming.
We would help rebuild and make those countries practice Constitutional Republicanism and establish trade necessary to their survival and prosperity. .
The End.
It would have been a disaster!
We used up our three nukes and had none ready to go. The Russian industries had been moved beyond the Ural mountains, out of range of our bombers. Russia still had an uncommitted army in reserve, Alaska was now a target.
We were still at war with Japan and they might have come in on the Japanese side.
We were infiltrated with communists throughout government and the civilian sectors.
My dad, with Patton’s Army, always said we could have whipped them. I beg to differ.
Not only could the Germans have been rearmed, many Eastern Europeans would have joined the fight on our side. They hated the Soviet Union and would have fought to drive the Red Army.
We would have won. Why?
1) Nuclear bombs.
2) We supplied the Russians with much of their food and equipment. The Russians rode into Berlin in American jeeps, for instance.
3) The Germans would have fought for us. They were exhausted, but they were battle hardened and even at the end of the war numbered in the millions.
4) Much of Eastern Europe would have flocked to our banners. Even in 1945 they were already tired of the Russians.
Au contraire.
We had atomic bombs they did not. There would have been no need for battle. We could have instructed them to do exactly what we wanted. They would have complied but it might have taken one bomb to explain we were serious. Stalin’s birthplace would have been a good choice. Not a great deal of life would have been lost but it would have shown we were willing to destroy them from the air one city at a time. Not one American life would have been lost.
Truman was a fool in not taking this opportunity. He laid the ground work for the next 60 years of global conflict. He was a fool.
I haven’t watched the video. My only thought is that winning the war and winning the occupation are two different things.
We would have.
They were very weakened from the losses of the prior two years, their manufacturing base was not good. And we had the bomb and we’d have used it.
Shoulda kept going. Patton was right.
We had, and had used nuclear weapons.....WE WIN !!!!
That was fun.
My dad was with the 1st hq g-2. They engaged the Russians in CZ. He said they had no fight left in them and they were done. We could have rolled into st Pete without breaking a sweat.