all very well and true... i still wish we'd of at least tried to do it with out them though.
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?
Stand corrected...
Yes, but the West also got territory in northern Germany back from the Soviets after they occupied it. And let's not forget - despite not taking Berlin with their troops, the West got a substantial portion of it in the form of West Berlin after the war.
By that point in the war both sides were shifting to different vehicles. We learned quite quickly that the M4 was designed as an infantry support vehicle per Army tank doctrine of the 30s - not as a main battle tank as the Panzer V and VI series showed.
By the end of the war the US Army had upgunned the Sherman to a 76mm gun and increased its armor, but we were already seeing the M26 Pershing starting to appear in limited numbers. Meanwhile the Soviets had advanced past the T-34 as well - they were fielding more IS-2 and comparable vehicles.
Why is it so hard to believe that we could have kicked the crap out of them if we would have wanted to? They only BECAME a threat after the left sold us out and screwed us over, losing our position of strength and technical superiority. That took at least 2 years.
We had the men and the equipment there and in place, and supply lines that were established.
LOL .. I'll write that down :)
Hindsight has 20/20 vision.
They WERE our allies.
all very well and true... i still wish we'd of at least tried to do it with out them though.
The Soviets had months of foreknowledge and prepared a heavy defense at Kursk, by Berlin they were spent manpower wise and probably wouldn't have undertaken another offensive for months if they'd been held at the Seelowe Heights (where the Germans yielded essentially due to lack of ammunition).
We were essentially fresh compared to the Soviets, had an uninterruptible supply line, could have owned the Baltic, and commanded an unequaled strategic and tactical air umbrella over the continent. We would have mopped the floor with them...
Some of the German high command held out hope that the allies would beat the Russians there, see the threat of communism and take the conquored armies under their command to continue to fight the Russians...
I beg to differ Zhukov was cut from very Russian cloth, and did everything through brute force. The only reason he, or any other Russian general had success, was through sheer force of numbers. As an example, one of Zuhkov's great successes, Operation Saturn, succeeded like it did because not only were the German's in Stalingrad bled white, the German reserves were used up soundly defeating Operations Mars and Uranus. David Glantz postulates, quite convincingly, that Saturn was actually an axillary attack, in a three pronged offensive (Mars, Saturn and Uranus), with the goal of destroying Army group Center, not Army Group South. His drive to Berlin was one of brute strength, showing very little imagination, IMO, as well.
I will give him his dues, he was a master coordinator of material and men. The numbers he dealt with are astonishing. It's simply a shame that so many men, and so much material was wasted by ham-fisted tactics. Also, in the defense, he was masterful in luring his opponents into well laid out killing fields. He did it to the Japanese in Manchuria, and the Germans at Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. Of course, all were accomplished by sacrificing vast amounts of men and material.
There are reasons why Soviets loses were so heavy, and the main one was because of the willingness of generals like Zhukov to throw away the lives of his men, in lieu of tactics.
The T-34 was approaching below average with the T34-85 variant. The G series Panther, Tiger II, Pershing, and the Joseph Stalin series were the peak at wars end, hell, some of the G's that opened the Battle of the Bulge were fielding the first infrared night vision systems. The Soviets always got their asses handed to them by the Germans even late in the war tactically because they didn't even field radios in all the tanks and they sucked at maneuver warfare.
"BTW, no one knew if the Japanese would capitulate after only two atom bombs were used. The Russians were an insurance policy. Then, too, we only had two atom bombs ~ and we ended up dropping all of them. What would have done if that hadn't been convincing?
We actually had three Atomic weapons ready near the end of WWII, two of which were dropped on Japan, the third was being readied for a mission by Col. Tibbets' unit, the 509th Composite Group when Japan surrendered. The USA had two "Fat Man" plutonium Atomic weapons in the inventory at the end of calendar year 1945.
In an August 2002 interview with Studs Terkel published in the British Guardian newspaper, Paul Tibbetts recalled something similar: "Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said, 'You got another one of those damn things?' I said, 'Yessir.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'Over in Utah.' He said, 'Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.' I said, 'Yessir.' I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."
Source: Warbird Forum: The third bomb
"So, if Stalin's spymaster knew about the Japanese spy, he knew about the Atom Bomb ~ and, in fact, he had his own spies in the program. The Russians weren't all that far behind us in developing nuclear weapons it turned out."
I think that you will find that the Soviets were four years behind the United States in A-bomb tech, even with the information gained by their spies which bought them 7 years...
Hope this helps,
dvwjr
In fact, all those nastyassed guards that gave Japanese POW camps such a bad name? The guards were Koreans!
My Grandfather on Dad's side said they drew straws to see who got to kill their guard (he was a slave at a Hitachi copper mine on mainland Japan) after the second bomb but an Army Leutenant with legal experience talked them out of it by explaining that they could be charged with murder since hostilities had ceased...
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