Posted on 11/10/2020 5:43:42 AM PST by Kaslin
WW 3? No. WW 2 continued. It would have been Fat Men and little boys reducing Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad to rubble. Case closed and the example set would have prevented Mao from the ultimate takeover of China.
Except they ran the government.
Eisenhower also had a relationship with Zhukov and the two of them were corresponding frequently in the last weeks of war and thereafter. Zhukov did not support soviet hegemony Eisenhower was hoping Zhuk could be a positive influence in Soviet post-war politics. No way Eisenhower would support going up against Zuk in late 1945.
Wow, that is way off. The leftists were behind the antiwar movement and they kept us out of the war until Hitler attacked Stalin and then they pushed us into total war. I suggest you read a little bit more about left ism in America pre-World War II.
Hell, there were leftist riots in my home state of Montana in 1914 that had to be put down by the National Guard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana_labor_riots_of_1914
The T34 was an excellent tank, no doubt; however, the US M26 that was just trickling on board at the end of the war was superior, as was later demonstrated by M26 - T34 engagements in Korea.
That said, I agree with everything else in your post. Our going after the Soviets at the end of hostilities would not have been supported by the American public, largely due to sympathetic parties in FDR and HST's administrations, to say nothing of the depth of their penetration of US and British intelligence services.
But what if the US had not supplied the USSR with so much material that helped enabled it (despite Stalin's absurd programs executing military leadership) to become an advancing army, getting to Berlin first? What if humanitarian assistance was given but only enough military aid was supplied in order for Stalin to stave off Germany? Lots of "ifs" in history as well as Scripture.
War could have ended months earlier had Patton been given fuel to continue pushing once the breakout occurred in France as Germany was on the ropes. Instead they diverted resources for market-garden.
Decision to let Soviets take Berlin was made in Yalta.
Stalin wanted a higher count of Soviet dead to give him “moral superiority”, as in “We lost 20 million people, so we deserve Eastern Europe!”
There are many inciteful posts on both sides in this thread. However, I think yours wins.
Couldn’t do it in May 45 because we wanted the Soviets to fight the Japanese. The US didn’t want that war to stretch out any longer than needed.
By the end of 45 every US soldier in Europe was ready to go home and it would have been a very hard sell politically to fight against “our allies” the Soviets.
Yeah, if we just pretend Japan wasn’t a thing, Europeans would love to keep dying, and that Americans at home would have gone along with this.
The whole question isnt just one of guns and bombs.
And that is if people back then were as dumb as the Germans were in 1941 when it came to thinking the Russians were just an easy pushover.
The T-34-85 was a better tank than the Sherman, which made up the bulk of our armored forces. It existed in overwhelming numbers.
But the Soviets had also developed heavy tanks, specifically the IS-2. This had a 122mm gun and could crack open King Tigers at over 1000 meters. The Soviets were also introducing the IS-3 Stalin tanks with the same gun and better armor.
The primary failing of their AFVs was their ergonomics and quality control (and lack of radios, and targeting optics and...). But the Soviets had more tanks, and better ones.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha*gasp*hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha*gasp**Thump*
Laughing myself to death.
The Left was massive at that time.
Or have you forgotten, McCarthy, Hiss, etc.?
I’m not saying we should have chosen to go to war with Stalin, what I am saying is we could have pushed further east and seized a lot more territory and kept the Soviet union much more contained than we did. And do you think we were tired of war what do you think the Russian people felt? Their death toll was in biblical.
I'd bet we could've enlisted the Germans to fight the Russians and they would have.
Plus...we had the bomb. Even with their theft of the Manhattan Project it took the Ruskies until 1949 to get theirs.
But as the Germans learned one has to be able to get them to the front.
Our air power would have made this very difficult for the Soviets.
Nonsense.
You take away the air war against Germany and you free up a whole bunch of troops and guns to be used on the Eastern Front....not to mention the impact on German manufacturing.
If we don't invade North Africa and Italy all those resources could have been used against the Soviets.
Agree. IF the Germans had embraced the Ukrainians and others it would have made a significant difference in the Eastern Theater.
The movie, “Brass Target,” (with George Kennedy as Patton) speaks to an assassination of Patton. However, it wasn’t related to his anti-Soviet mindset or plans, but rather regarding a train-load of stolen gold. Not a good movie, but topical.
The other side was, of course, that we had just spilled oceans of blood and spent enormous amounts of treasure to free Europe from a horrible tyrant...and the Soviets came in and essentially enslaved many of the very same people (specifically including the Poles, who were the first victims in the war), with little difference to those people other than having their occupiers/oppressors flying a different flag. Stalin and the USSR were even bigger threats than Hitler and the Nazis - and anyone with even a modest knowledge of human nature, strategic affairs, logistics, etc. could see the threat of the Soviets to the entire Western World from a mile away (and, clearly, Patton was among the crème de la crème of such people on the entire planet).
Anyone retrospectively saying words to the effect of “how many casualties did we have during the Cold War?” as an argument **in 1945** for not pushing the USSR back is assuming that policy-makers had a fully-functional crystal ball - i.e. it is an absurd argument. The simple fact is that Patton saw the immense carnage of WW2 and, being the strategic genius that he was, he saw a repeat of the same (but against an extremely heavily-armed enemy with immense strategic depth) only a few years later - and wanted to pro-actively avoid beginning such a war in a state of unpreparedness like we at the outset of WW2 - he even worried that we could lose such a conflict. One of his maxims in training before WW2 (and justification for pushing his men to the limit before combat) was “a pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood” - evidence that he sought to minimize casualties and suffering both on an individual and a national/civilizational level). Also, consider that he had lived through the inter-war years, during which the West disarmed and left itself incredibly vulnerable to the Germans and Japanese...and that there were plans to basically completely demobilize after WW2 was over (which we pretty much did - thus displaying great weakness of spirit and materiel which led to the Nork/Soviet gambit to invade South Korea...an issue with which we’re STILL dealing). Not much that happened in the next 20 or more years would have surprised him very much, except WRT the policy effects of nukes (which pretty much no one could have foreseen) - such was his depth of knowledge and his analytical skills.
There is simply no way that anyone could have foreseen that the Cold War would play out with only proxy fights and no direct US-Soviet battlefield conflict. Based on all of History up to 1945, it would have been obvious to ANY strategic thinker that we and the Russians would have mixed it up no later than the 1960s or ‘70s - NO ONE knew the effect of nukes on strategic thinking, or that there would be so many of them that we and they could literally destroy civilization in 1/2 hour. Given what was known then about Soviet aggressiveness and power vs. the utter inability of Western democracies to do anything but try to wish away threats until they just about came marching down the streets of your capitol city, it seems to me that Patton’s view was correct - knowing what we did in 1945, it would have been the smarter long-range move to have gone after the Soviets while we had a fully mobilized economy and the best-trained, best-equipped military that had ever existed on the planet, at least to push them out of Eastern Europe. The Soviets had been bled white, and were in no shape to successfully fight another big war, let alone against an enemy with our resources that could have fought them not merely in Europe, but in Asia as well. OTOH, given what is known now, that would have been an immensely costly crime of epic proportions (but, again, no one had a working crystal ball).
Whether it was possible for Patton to have convinced our leaders and the public of the need/desire to fight the Soviets then vs. at some undefined, uncertain moment in the future is a question that History has already answered in the negative. He might, had he not had his accident, have opened the eyes of a lot of people here as to the nature and goals of Stalin and the USSR, and thus possibly prevented the Korean War and maybe led us to bankrupt them 10 or 20 years earlier, but that’s all speculation. But the fact that on this issue he was not taken seriously speaks volumes about this particular sub-issue.
“War could have ended months earlier had Patton been given fuel to continue pushing once the breakout occurred in France as Germany was on the ropes. Instead they diverted resources for market-garden.
Decision to let Soviets take Berlin was made in Yalta.”
Our failure to hand this mission to the best field commander that we had in WW2 was a strategic error of monumental proportions.
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