Posted on 06/06/2018 10:44:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This being D-Day, it's inevitable that thoughts turn to WWII. The slaughter. The sacrifices. The magnificent courage of going forward into the teeth of machine gun fire and artillery barrages onto open beaches. In perhaps its only redeeming virtue, war brings out the heroism inherent in the human breast.
You can get into some interesting discussions online, and WWII always comes up. Specifically, the ending of WWII. Patton wanted to take out the Russians while we were already there, and today, a lot of people think he was right. But he wasn't right. At least, not in the sense he meant.
We had the military and economic might to take out Russia but not the political will. Ike knew it, and so did Roosevelt. It would have been a hugely costly continuation of WWII, in both lives and treasure, that Americans would not have supported. The outcome might well not have been the sort of victory Patton sought.
The Russians had learned to fight against the very best German formations led by the very best higher-level German commanders. These formations had the superb lower-level leadership (sergeants and company-grade officers) for which Germany was famous. Most of this lower-level leadership died in the fight with Russia.
In the West, we fought Volksstrum units of teenagers and old men with nothing like the lower-level leadership that the German outfits in the East had had. You rise or stoop to the level of your opposition, such that by 8 May 1945, the Russians were simply better at war than we were, and their supply lines were much closer to the action than ours.
The main thing going for us was that we hadn't lost nearly as many men as Russia had,
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
In case nobody now notices but we were STILL at war with Japan and at the time (before A-bomb tested) the invasion of Japan appeared to be a monumental task. At such a moment you don’t start another war.
I honestly cannot believe how many historically tone-deaf people here actually think this could have worked.
Most of these guys are just inventing armies, supplies, and nukes out of thin air and moving them across the planet faster than light-speed.
Not to mention they are clueless about the vastness of the USSR.
“we defeated the wrong people.”
Anyone that takes that seriously, and repeats it today, is a damn fool.
The only time Hitler declared war before attacking.
Didn't work out as planned.
Using that logic, we should have stayed out of WWI and WWII, they weren’t our wars.
The Soviets invaded Poland in 1939 with the Nazis, they were the enemy. Then they were losing, that is why they suddenly became “allies”, but they were never our allies. They are still not our allies.
There were many French on the sides of the Nazis as well. Does that mean that it nullifies any help. Again, your logic falls down.
Secondly, we had hundreds of thousands of troops on the Eastern border for decades, so it will cost the US one way or the other. We paid, we always paid.
And what would Stalin have done to the families of the soldiers who surrendered?
Yes! Starve Japan, Nuke Moscow. IMHO.
76mm Shermans owned T-34/85’s in Korea. Typhoons/Tempests and P-47’s would have been the primary enemy of Soviet armor, not to mention FW-190’s.
My next door neighbor when I was a kid was a P-47 pilot and he told me that German tanks had 5 planes on them every time they appeared in daylight by the end of the war.
The Soviets would be able to reach the French border by 1946/7 but their supply lines would be done by then.
My boss’s dad (who is still alive) fought for the Wehrmacht but he wasn’t a Nazi. That’s why he didn’t enter the war until 1945. He was working an AA gun until then.
Just read Baums book again. He did it for his own selfish reasons. He got a lot of good men killed, for nothing. Love Patton still but that was a cluster-fu—!
I cannot believe such an ill conceived article is in the American Thinker.
The Americans (and other allies) could have stopped the Bolsheviks while Kerensky was still alive and made an actual difference in world history.
The abyss that loomed for all Russia and the surrounding states was thought to be terrible but nothing like what it became.
And I always wonder what we were supposed to do AFTER we reconstituted the nazi army, and then used them to help them achieve their prewar goal of knocking down Russia.
“Ok, all you Germans stack up your arms right here! Thanks for your help. And now we will go back to being victors and you’ll be the vanquished”.
If you think it would have been cool to ally with nazis in 1945, I doubt I can change your mind. And having troops on the border a few decades cost money, but not a few hundred thousand lives.
I will never understand why some people see the Germans circa 1945 as someone an American should embrace in common cause.
Honestly, tactically Patton was a true genius. Otherwise, Patton had several serious screws loose. This was one of them.
Our hating in the Soviet Union was involved in the development of the Soviet bomb somewhat independently. Much of the espionage at Los Alamos confirmed that the Soviets were on the right path.
As far as the thermonuclear weapon, Sakharov took them directly to the “dry” bomb. Their first was a dry bomb, ahead of our “dry” weapon. The US was still looking at lugging the big Dewar flask based on Ivy Mike.
Had FDR not rolled (and been rolled by socialists in his own State Dept) at Yalta, had Eisenhower empowered Patton rather than playing politics... well, Germany would have been occupied by the Allies and Poland would not have been handed over to the Soviets.
Having preserved Poland, there would have been no need to invade Russia.
They owned T-34/85s in Korea driven by North Koreans. The Soviets also had excellent ground support aircraft like the IL-2. And they had a couple of years experience busting up German tanks with them.
The US had (worldwide) more people in the armed forces (army, navy, marines, army air corp) then the soviets. We were just a more efficient society. however, there was n appetite for fighting them at the time.
No one is embracing Nazis, so much as you are embracing communists. And guess again about American lives lost.Plenty of Americans died in Vietnam, killed by Soviet weapons. Had Patton ended that we would have saved millions of lives, all over the planet. And Cuba would be free.
Go polish your maltese falcon heinie. Add up the deaths on Korea and Vietnam and we lost around 90,000 dead. You are a raving lunatic if you think Patton’s insanity would have taken down the whole Red Army for less than that. We lost around 275,000 in all of the ETO, and North Africa. Stalingrad -alone- cost the nazis 300,000 dead. The eastern front cost the Germans several million dead.
And you come along and think you are going to take it down for less than 90,000. The Red Army in 45 was a brutal machine compared to 41.
And Patton’s idea of reforming and rearming nazi armies was even more insane.
And the main motivation of Patton was very misplaced compassion for the Germans. He was an extremely talented tactical leader, a second coming of Custer. But he was a strategic moron.
“No one is embracing Nazis, so much as you are embracing communists.”
No, I’m embracing our GI’s. You on the other hand, were sending them to the eastern front...to protect Germans.
There wasn’t a documented groundswell of American soldiers that were disappointed at VE day, and wished they could stay in Europe for an even nastier war. It was already extremely unpopular that they were facing being sent to fight Japan.
I suspect you have never been a grunt.
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