Posted on 04/13/2005 6:24:31 PM PDT by Yasotay
Sixty years ago, the US Ninth Army had two bridgeheads across the Elbe River. One was crushed and the other secured. The sixty year old question remains: Should and could we have beaten the Soviets into Berlin?
What has to always be remembered about the early days of all the nuclear programs is that almost no one knew the dangers of radiation, or that you could screw around with units of plutonium and inadvertently set off uncontrolled fision. We know of one such accident occuring in the Soviet Arctic ~ that was the famous 50 Megaton blast. Another undoubtedly occured in Manchuria and eliminated almost all of the Japanese nuclear scientists.
That's the reason I don't think the Russians got much help from the Japanese.
In many references concerning Soviet long-range aircraft available during WWII, you will find notice of a "show aircraft" Stalin sent on various long range trips for the purpose of propaganda.
Up until a decade or so ago the "official" position taken by Janes and others was that the particular aircraft never existed and was certainly never observed in the United States.
It landed at Bolling AFB in Washington DC in 1944 and was seen by thousands of people. All the "official" position folks finally agreed it really did exist so it's OK to talk about it. At the same time no one knows how many of that model the Soviets actually had.
Now, back to the issue of how many atom bombs the US had ~ there was no major production line set up in 1945 to produce large quantities of atom bombs. That said, we note that the Russians didn't have a major production line set up until 1947 to produce large quantities of the TU-4.
So, how long did it take us to start making lots of bombs and for the Russians to start making lots of TU-4s?
Now, add to that rough equation the question of how long it would take for the US to push the Red Army back beyond Poland, or to degrade it's effectiveness?
Reflect on how long it took us to prepare for the Normandy landing. Then figure in what happens when the unexpected happens as at the Battle of the Bulge.
I think we have a large enough timeframe here to allow for the Russians to push the TU-4 production schedule up, and for us to start building more nukes which we would undoubtedly have started tossing all over Western, Central and Eastern Europe as the Red Army began bleeding us white.
This would probably have been viewed quite negatively by the people on the ground.
I don't know about Berlin but I do know about Vienna. My recollection is that we were on the Austrian border and stayed there for about a week. We had gone from Munich/Dachau is a few days and there was no reason/opposition to wait. We could easily have gone to Vienna but as we found out later, Roosevelt had made arrangements with Stalin. Roosevelt had a lot of Commie lovers in his administration. The Russians were even supplied with our currency plates.
They are can-openers. I still have mine on my dog tag chain.
10,000 to 12,000 aircraft of all types at the outbreak of World War II
IIRC, they're 4 engine prewar bombers were Bi and or Tri-planes. The Germans roached probably 70+% of all existing Soviet aircraft in the first 2 months of the war.
The Tu-4 Bull (B-29 copy) went into post WWII service.
Now, stop and think about it ~ the Russians were left primarily with aircraft that could make the distance between the Urals and the Germans.
Obviously they didn't engage in strategic bombing (since the US wasn't sending them any bombs among other reasons), but they didn't need to. The US and UK did the job for them.
That doesn't mean they weren't capable of doing it.
Remember, in WWII there were many divisions of labor among the Allied forces that in retrospect seem strange or less than understandable. The fact that one Army or the other did or did not do something does not mean that they had or did not have the capability of doing so.
There's a huge, ugly Russian built bridge in Vienna. They also have the West Bahn Hof, a nice place built by the Western Allies about the same time as that bridge. The old central bahn hof was located in the Russian zone.
The Russians occupied Vienna area - was that small? I was in Salzburg - somewhat smaller. [Vienna itself was shared just like Berlin]
The Russian occupied part of Austria was quite small. Austria itself is quite small. Place just hasn't been the same since WWI!
But we gave them Ronald Reagan. Checkmate.
There were others as well. Still, existing Russian bombers in production in 1944 were satisfactory for hitting American positions in Western Europe. It was not until 1949 that a threat to America itself by the Tu-4 became a big issue.
Russian planes flying against western allied targets in Europe would never have returned. Besides a near omnipotent air superiority, we had recently deployed the radar proximity fused anti aircraft shell.
We also refined Time on Target artillery fire, and shortly thereafter mated that fuse with artillery shells for devastating effect with area airbursts. The Soviets wouldn't have known what hit them matched against the west.
Those little bugger litter the ground in places at A.P. Hill. I've got a few tucked away (picked them up when hunting there).
A telling evidence of that fact is the complete lack of significant use of the ruthlessly effective German tank busting aircraft variants of the Stuka and later the He-129 on the western front.
Pop tops on most canned goods these days and plastic oil containers aside they are still neat little tools huh !
? The fact that a pilot and crew in a plane would never return wouldn't have bothered Joe Stalin in the least.
Additionally, the Russians were bled near white by wars end. The steriotypical spinster Russian babushka arose from the fact that ~88% of all males born in 1922, and insane percentages on either side, were killed or incapacitatingly injured in the war and women had no one of similar age to marry.
In all probability, if the Germans had succeeded in relieving Budapest via Operation Konrad, the Russians would have had a large chance of throwing in the towel and quitting while they were ahead or letting us do the finishing work. They botched that royally though, and in doing so trashed their best chance at at holding onto enough heavy equipment to really grind away at them on the rest of the way to Berlin.
That Sargent ran my 17 year old ass ragged. We did alternate driving and standing in groups of ~15 and he always sent me and a friend of mine ('Cause we're the young un's) into the sections with the most heinous agglomerations of swamp and wait-a-minute vines known to man. It was a blast, after 2 days of that, we got home and I laid down on my bed in my hunting clothes at about 8 in the evening and woke up the next afternoon :-)
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