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?
OUR ALLIES (May 3, 1945)
On this day the British 6th Airborne and the US 7th Armoured Division captured the north German town of Wismar. The actual capture was carried out by men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. Just outside the town were the Russian front lines from where drunken soldiers, fuelled by a mixture of vodka and rocket fuel, were flocking into town in search of wine, women and song. The main hospital in Wismar was now occupied by the Paras. That night, a group of Russian soldiers approached the main gate of the hospital and demanded that all German nurses be brought out. Told that no women were here they pushed the sentry aside and entered the courtyard. A half dressed Para pocked his head out of a window and shouted 'They are our girls, get lost'. Suddenly a shot rang out followed by the rattle of a British Sten-gun. The drunken Russians scattered as shooting broke out on both sides. It was all over in minutes, the Russians retiring to their own lines. In the cobbled courtyard of the hospital lay the bodies of six dead Soviet soldiers.
The Russians had some really big intercontinental bombers at the time ~ we didn't.
What are you smoking? Show me a link to a WWII Soviet bomber that matched the B-29, or the 17 for that matter.
Many historians believe that the Soviets would have crushed Germany even without a Western Front in the picture. The Russians were incredibly tenacious, they suffered millions of casualties, yet continued to move forward. Hitler's gravest mistake was to attack Russia. The German Army wasn't even fully mechanized when Barbarossa began. Neither was the Soviet Union. But their Homeland was being invaded. It gave millions the incentive they needed to repel the Germans, at all costs. Even without our help. I believe the Russian's, underestimated by Hitler, would have eventually prevailed.
The Russians had some really big intercontinental bombers at the time ~ we didn't.
What source do you use for your 'facts'? What 'really big' intercontinental bombers did the Russians have at the time? They took the three US Army Air Forces B-29 Stratofortresses that landed in Soviet Territory after a missions over Japan in 1945 and the flight crews were interned. The Russians then DUPLICATED (reverse-engineered) those B-29s (down to the bullet holes) to create the TU-4 bomber by mid-1947. They had no long-range intercontinental bomber until they duplicated the US B-29.
dvwjr
I believe there were a number of shooting incidents between Allied and Soviet troops when they met, usually under simlar circumstances as the one you describe. I've heard of a couple involving US troops getting into it with Soviet troops who were attacking German refugee women. There were also some instances of Red Army columns getting blown apart by Allied fighter-bombers mistaking them for Germans (who had learned back in Normandy that they could only travel at night).
IMO = "In my opinion". (FWIW)
To recap:
1. The US is a bunch of of pansies who can never beat the Soviet Union in ANYTHING (to the moon or even hockey!)
2. WW2 would have been lost if not for Russia.
3. The soviets were our brave allies, so it would have been wrong for us to try to stop them from dominating Europe and elsewhere.
4. Their superior technology and numbers has doomed us to 2nd place.
5. Communism isn't really a bad thing - It's just a force we cannot stop.
Did I forget anything?
They would have flicked us off the continent like a piece of lint. Sorry, just the fact. Besides, in 1945 there was absolutely no public support for a wider war or picking new fights, we still had the Japanese to defeat. No one knew at that time whether the A-Bomb would work, or if the Japanese would even surrender after one or several were employed.
Eisenhower saved a lot of American, British and Canadian lives by letting the Russians take Berlin.
Pure BS. After VJ day, if we flew a plane over Moscow and dropped and Little Boy or Fat Man, we would not had to worry about the Soviets for the next 40+ years. However, it is pointless to argue that because so many Soviet sympathizers were in our government by that time so that never would have happened.
We should have copied the German Panther tank at that time.
I still carry mine on my key chain .... P-38s .... not the same P-38 as American's greatest Ace but your third lined out item.
If we had taken Berlin, certainly there would have been casualties, maybe not on the Russian scale, but significant number. Given that Churchill wanted to keep it and the US was essentially leaderless (HST was kept a bit in the dark) I am not sure we would have pulled back.
If Stalin had decided that Berlin was his and fighting broke out, where would it have ended?
HUH??!!
Thats news to me.Lets hear the details.
At that time we where ready to roll out the B 36 Bomber.It was designed to fly from the US to Germany and back.Early in the war we thought England was going to fall to Germans and a crash course to build a bomber that could hit Germany from here was on.The B 36 was developed by the end of it.
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