Roughly 70% of the German army was in the east. The USSR beat them, and drove all the way to Berlin. Yes, American aid helped a lot. And yes, Hitler was incompetent. That helped too.
None of that should overshadow the fact that the Red Army of 1945 was a tough, experienced force that was very well led. Could we have beat them had we taken Patton’s advice? Probably, because of our air power. But it would have been a bloody mess. And folks at home would have been in rebellion. Your kid survives the war against the Nazis, only to die fighting a recent ally.
Bottom line: Patton was not just wrong here. He was dangerously wrong.
And many of the troops in Europe were going to be sent to the Pacific for the anticipated invasion of Japan.
Patton wanted to go kill Japs but MacArthur didn’t want him.
So “Pushing to Moscow” was a pipe dream and he knew it.
You are correct. The 1945 Red Army would have been a very tough fight. And with the war still going against Japan, and the looming prospect of a very costly invasion of the home islands, the American people were going to have a hard time accepting those losses.
Under those circumstances, there was absolutely no way the American people would have supported turning on a recent ally, and paying the costs necessary to defeat them.
Patton may have been correct in immediately recognizing that the USSR was an enemy. But for practical and political reasons, what he proposed was not possible.
In a surge of enthusiasm, General Patton crossed the Rhine on March 22, 1945, getting the jump on Lord Montgomery of the British forces, and once across, he began what was meant to be the dash to Berlin. The Allied High Command got on the horn and said, “STOP! STOP!”, so Patton halted this swift advance, but he also vowed to smash all his radios and proceed unilaterally right into Berlin. This hesitation assured that the Soviet Army would reach Berlin first, but had Patton beaten their advance, East Germany never would have happened as a separate nation from West Germany,
Patton’s backup plan was to rearm the captured and surrendered German soldiers, and now supported with the US logistics, they would lead the march to Moscow.
It might have worked. The Soviet Union was never that much of an ally of the US anyway.
Patton was not wrong. He was right.
In 1945 we could have at least have pushed the Russians out of the countries they’d occupied and, if needed, we could have nuked them into submission at a time when the US was the sole nuclear armed nation.
Had we committed to the war we would have won it.