ping
What a great thread!
Since you pinged me, I'll respond to you in commenting on several of the thoughts passed above.
First, the greatest thing that ever happened to General George S. Patton was having George C. Scott play him in that movie. My uncle actually fought under Patton in Italy. He remembers Patton as having been a respected General, but not beloved. This is important. Patton was more than a little bit a prima donna. HE perhaps thought he was something of a Caesar (the comments above about putting Patton and MacArthur together) or even a Napoleon or Alexander...and ever since that movie about him came out, it seems to be the popular consensus that he practically WAS...but what Caesar, Napoleon and Alexander had in common, which Patton did not have, was the fanatical loyalty and love of the troops. Robert E. Lee had that. Stonewall Jackson had it, to a degree. George Washington certainly had it. But Patton did not. Patton was appreciated as a competent, effective officer, but with a nasty temper. He was not beloved. Is that important? If you're going to try some damfool thing like invading Russia, yes it is.
Now, as to the "What if?" question of Patton and MacArthur in the Pacific, the answer to that is clear enough. They might have had one dust-up, and then Patton would have obeyed the 5-star General or been fired. Patton had a strong personality, but he was a military officer in the chain of command, a subordinate subject to orders. You do not have a personality conflict with your commanding officer. HE has the personality, and YOU have the conflict. Patton would have done as he was told, or he would have been fired and replaced. He was not superhuman, and his authority did not derive from some mystic place. He had the authority of a General in the US Army, in a chain of command. He was no Caesar who wrote his own ticket, and had no independence from superior authority. Patton in the Pacific might have served well under McArthur, once he learned how to give his boss what he wanted. Or he could have gotten himself fired in a week. Either way, it would not have been a catfight. Military inferiors have nothing to fight with when battling with their superiors.
Like Lincoln is supposed to have said in a cabinet meeting: "That's one 'Aye' [his] and eight 'Nays' - the 'Ayes' have it."
Hero worship is fun, but we should be realistic. Patton was an effective senior officer.
As to "What would have happened" had the US attacked the USSR in 1945, two thoughts.
Long term, the result would be that the US would have conquered the world, and we would all be living in a fascist dictatorship with its capital at Washington DC. For the truth is that Americans had no interest or desire in going to war with their Russian ally, and any such attack would have required a military override of the people, in order to simply conquer for the sake of conquest. To defeat the USSR, the US would have had to get atomic bomb production underway in a hurry, and destroyed major Russian cities with millions upon millions of civilian deaths. The American Army would have had to press ahead through a Russian Army thrown into chaos by the nuclear decapitation of the command structure, and with those Russians having a (justifiable) hatred of Americans as intense as they had of the Nazis. Why? Because to beat the Soviet Union, the USA would have had to use nuclear bombs to incinerate Russian cities, and would have had to take each new bomb as it was built and drop it on centers of Russian population. That WOULD have broken Russia's capacity to fight as an organized country. It would have also turned Americans into the worst genocides in history, worse than the Nazis we had just defeated.
Conventionally, with airpower, the Americans could have held the line against the Red Army, but to actually advance into Russia and overthrow the regime would have required breaking the Russian ability to keep the army in the field. And that would have required nuclear strikes and firebombing of Russian cities, etc.
Against the Germans and the Japanese, such tactics were justified: they declared war on America. But to engage in the mass murder of Russians, using nuclear weapons and conventional firebombing of cities, would have required the Americans to turn on an ally and attack without cause. And to wage a relentless campaign against Russian people in cities.
Liberated Europe would not have supported that. After the Fascist experience, the Communists were strong all across Europe. And they would have been morally in the right too. Surprise attacks on Russia with the mass murder of Russian civilians in their cities would have made the Americans the new Nazis. Could the Americans have suppressed the Communists and Socialists all across Europe, and America too, where they had quite a bit of residual strength?
Yes.
To win, the Americans would have HAD TO.
And the result would have been a world-dominating American dictatorship.
Had Stalin attacked the West, it would have been a different thing completely, but for the Americans to simply spontaneously attack Russia, with an aim of ending Communism, would have been an act of barbarism. And given that the Americans were no match for the Soviets conventionally (and given that the Labor movement in Britain would have taken Britain right out of the war, if they were not violently suppressed), Patton would have had to use nuclear weapons.
The assumption that a nuclear bomb on Moscow would have ended Russian resistance is crazy. Mass murder a few million Russian civilians from the sky, and you think the Russians are going to surrender to you? No, they will hate you, and the whole world will hate you, and they would be right too.
Communism was not so bad that it justified the United States committing mass murder of Russian civilians, and that was the only way to defeat Stalin's Russia.
Would the US have won?
Sure.
And we would all live in a Fascist-American world imperium, because that would have been the price of such an action: the loss of American democracy and liberty. It would not have been a conservative place. It would be a corporatist/military-industrial place.
Anyway, it's unimaginable that Harry Truman (or FDR, or Reagan, or W, or any other American President since) would have ordered such a thing, even with 20/20 hindsight.
In the end, we defeated the USSR without a nuclear war, and without turning ourselves into a Fascist empire. The Russians (and the rest of the world) do not hate us as genocides. That's my view, anyway.