jb6 has it right.
How many of those divisions were fresh and fully staffed and equipped?
(oh the rest of the allies were in no shape to support us).
I never said they were. But the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians, if supplied with US arms, would have gladly joined the fray.
They had air parity and they had supply lines one fourth the distance of ours.
They didn't have nuclear parity and their supply lines would have been pretty scarce of supplies were it not for us.
Oh and then there was that whole little Japanese war still going on.
It ended within months of the European campaign and would have supplied us with more air power, naval power and manpower.
That's true. Russia had already lost much of its best troops.
I don't think the American public was ready to start taking losses measured not in the thousands or ten thousands but in the quarter millions per battle.
We would have been fighting not to capture and hold territory, but to defeat the Russian army. We wouldn't have been fighting a positional war like the Nazis.
The Russians were exhausted, undersupplied and overextended and the situation for them would only have worsened, not improved. The Pacific War was already in its final phase and we would have found enthusiastic allies in the Eastern European countries who would have been a source of fresh troops, since only small numbers of the Hungarians, Slovaks and Czechs served in any capacity during the war. Also a largely intact France, hungry for hard US currency, would have served as a nearby source of supplies.
You need to read some biographies like Roll Me Over. Most US units had very high attrition rates and were quite tired by April of 1945. They'd been driving over the remenants of the Wehremacht but they were taking heavy casualties still. Difference was, the Wehremacht was out of men.
The writer in Roll Me Over (a guy who started out as a private and ended up as a lieutenant) had only 1 man in his platoon that he had started out with. He was part of a replacement team that made up half the platoon originally. Everyone was dead or wounded from his original crew and green troops were taking their place. He also didn't get a pair of boots (his first) until after Ardenze, before that he was in a pair of shoes through most of the winter.
jb6 has it right.
Good God, man, the Ruskies had inflicted something approaching 7 Million dead on the Germans and had themselves sustained something approaching 20 Million dead. We lost 500,000 in both theatres. They set up machine guns and murdered their own troops who broke and ran. We were a democracy where your (and mine) beloved Patton was nearly cashiered for striking a private. Do you really expect any reader of this thread to believe that the mothers of America would stand for their sons being attrited in such a bloodbath for the sake of eastern Europe? Do you really think a democracy can muster the will to sacrifice millions of lives to wage war on a country which had been described in the most glowing terms as our ally for years? Please!
I never said they were. But the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians, if supplied with US arms, would have gladly joined the fray.
One hardly knows how to respond to this. These nations were behind Soviet lines and we had no way of supplying them after the fall of Germany anymore than we did before the fall of Germany.
They didn't have nuclear parity and their supply lines would have been pretty scarce of supplies were it not for us.
It doesn't do to play leap frog with dates in this sort of a discussion. At the time of Yalta, no one had nuclear air power, that did not come until Potsdam. If you want to charge Truman with failing to rescue the eastern Europeans when he had monopoly of the atom bomb for 3 years, I will provide you with the cite to my comments to that effect. But that is not what we are arguing here. It is just intellectually silly to mix the conventional age with the atomic age in this discussion which is at the time of Yalta. It makes no sense.
Oh and then there was that whole little Japanese war still going on. It ended within months of the European campaign and would have supplied us with more air power, naval power and manpower.
It ended with the first use of the atomic bomb instead of a million American casualties. I point out to you that we were very eager to get the Soviets to enter the war against Japan to relieve us of some of those casualties until we got the bomb. Lets see, mothers of America, I know they were going to save your sons by helping us in Japan but now we decided to absorb a million casualties and and also attack them and absorb millions more. Or, maybe we will wait until they help us in Japan, and then we will attack them? Do you see how absurd your position is?
I don't think the American public was ready to start taking losses measured not in the thousands or ten thousands but in the quarter millions per battle. We would have been fighting not to capture and hold territory, but to defeat the Russian army. We wouldn't have been fighting a positional war like the Nazis. The Russians were exhausted, undersupplied and overextended and the situation for them would only have worsened, not improved. The Pacific War was already in its final phase and we would have found enthusiastic allies in the Eastern European countries who would have been a source of fresh troops, since only small numbers of the Hungarians, Slovaks and Czechs served in any capacity during the war. Also a largely intact France, hungry for hard US currency, would have served as a nearby source of supplies.
There is not one concept in the immediately quoted paragraphs which is true. To review them all would prove to tedious to me and to the intrepid reader who might have ventured this far. You simply have no idea of the devastation and exhaustion of the countries you so easily count as ready to die for your ideas. You are also obviously unaware of the huge numbers of eastern Europeans who were drafted and forced to serve on both sides and died for their captors' ideas.
A decent respect for History is a precious birthright vouchsafed to Americans. We conservatives have a moral obligation to honor the truth of it wherever it leads. We dare not rewrite it as we think it could have been or ought to have been. Churchill said he thought history would treat him fairly because he was going to write it. Well, we are not Churchill. We do not have a grant as to a genius to take liberties. Even Churchill said at the beginning of the war that he wanted to be judged on the contemporaneous written record - such was his respect for history.