[tonycavanagh]

A bit of what might have been History to chew over for all the armchair strategists out there.

I count myself amongst this lot.

Tony

[tonycavanagh]

What might have been.

Tony

[Nogbad]

After WWII, the pacifist mathematician, Bertrand Russell, advocated using the atomic bomb against Russia before they obtained it.

[green team 1999]

great finding thanks.

[OK]

There go you Brits trying to steal George Patton's idea.

Whoever thought of it, it was a brilliant plan. It would have saved a lot of global agony all these years.

[Captain Kirk]

Source please?

[Campion]

Patton would have loved this.

[Snuffington]

I think such an attack was strategically possible, but probably not politically survivable. I just don't see how the U. S. or British public would back another war so soon on the heels of defeating Germany.

Assuming political unity, I think the men and material resources of the U. S. and Britain would have been more than a match for the Soviet Union. U. S. and British industry were outproducing the Soviets by far. We would have easily gained and held sea and air supremacy. And remember, we had the bomb by that point. Stalin wouldn't for many more years.

[LarryLied]

It would have worked for two reasons:

Two million Soviet and Eastern Europeans found themselves on our side of the line when WWII ended. We shipped them back to imprisonment and death under Stalin. Many committed suicide rather than return. We could have used them to invade the Soviet Union.

We had a monopoly on the A-Bomb for 4 years.

The reason we did not push on to Moscow was not because it was impractical. It was because of traitors in both the US and British governments.

[Wallace T.]

Perhaps Churchill and Truman should have precipitated an attack on the Soviets in July 1945. The Russians were hundreds of miles into hostile territory (East Germany and Poland). The United States had the atomic bomb, which would have levelled Minsk, Leningrad, or Kiev, not to mention Soviet troop concentrations. There were hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht troops who would have been very willing to fight on the Anglo-American side against the Soviet rapists and looters. The anti-Communist Poles would have risen against the Russians, as would have the Baltic states. The Soviets could have been pushed back to their 1939 borders in a few months. The Anglo-American monopoly on the atom bomb, plus support for nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, Central Asia, etc., would have forced the Russians to sue for peace, under a Brest-Litovsk type treaty.

The Soviets could have threatened Turkey, Greece, etc., but with heavy Anglo-American pressure on their forces in Central Europe and the possibility that the United States, after forcing the Japanese to an unconditional surrender, could have opened a second front in the Vladivostok area in short order, they would have been fools to do so.

In mid-1945, the U.S. leadership, including Harry Truman, could never have been persuaded to join the British in such a surprise attack. Remember that at the time, President Truman was making favorable remarks about "Unlce Joe" Stalin. Reportedly, Truman was angered at Winston Churchill's remarks, made in the President's home state of Missouri, about an "iron curtain" descending upon Europe. There were, in addition, highly placed Soviet agents in the U.S. State Department, of whom Alger Hiss was the most notorious. After Stalin had effectively communized most of Eastern Europe, Truman, Dean Acheson, et. al., turned anti-Communist. But by that point, any Allied military offensive in Europe was untenable.

The anti-anti-Communist mindset of the American leadership in 1945 was the probable reason that Churchill rejected the operation.

[Restorer]

I'll bet American staffers developed a similar plan. The deployment of the A-bomb eliminated any need for implementing any of such plans.

Very few reporters understand that it is the job of military planners to come up with plans to do anything that might be conceivably required. The development of such plans has very little to do with what the intentions of their governments might be.

[codebreaker]

All of this unclassifed stuff is coming out after 50 years of secrecy.

[oyez]

We had the leadership, we had the men, we had the equipment, if we only had the foresight and the motivation.

[zog]

--my guess is the plans were aborted because they knew they had soviet sleepers in their midst, and in fdr's establishment, and that stalin had a copy of the plans within a day or two of them being written. They also new they would be starting such a campaign 100% infiltrated by communist sympathisers in all the liberated countries they were based in at that time of the end of the war. In short, it would have been a very bad play militarily, they stood a good chance of losing heavily. Quite a bit of the maqui, and the other resistance movements were all pro soviet, and they had literally millions of sympathisers in areas just saturated with modern weapons that had been abandoned all over recently. It would have been the mother of all behind the lines guerrilla wars almost instantly with the first advance against the soviets.