Orwell, you magnificent bastard!
I read your book!
Posted on 11/10/2020 5:43:42 AM PST by Kaslin
Yes!............
By allowing the Russians to get to Berlin first, they had a head start in divvying up Europe.
Also they had snatched some rocket scientists that allowed them to get their space program going................
“So why didn’t the allied leadership allow Patton to have his way?”
Because they weren’t idiots.
People that actually think this was possible is one of the fastest ways of identifying a moron.
The allies didn’t “allow” - let’s be blunt, there was little they could do. The Italian campaign had hit a stalemate and it took until 1944 for D-day, while the Russians were already hammering in Poland.
There was no way to prevent the Russians getting to Berlin first.
Orwell, you magnificent bastard!
I read your book!
It an FDR fan and I wasn’t here when he made his decision. But I remember my relatives who where. They all fought and they all supported ending the War when it was ended.
Roosevelt set us up for Pearl Harbor and for the Soviets takeover of much of Europe. Yet he is lionized.
Ike, Bradley et al thought very highly of him as a field general but that's about it.
No.
The Soviets had overwhelming force. They had better tanks. They had so much artillery that they had ‘artillery traffic jams.’ The only advantage the allies might have was in the air, and the Soviet Air Force is not be underestimated.
Both armies were exhausted, but Soviets didn’t care - a benefit of being a dictatorship.
Turning around and attacking the Soviets would have played well at home which had been thoroughly propagandized with pro-Soviet media.
All in all any attack on the Soviets would have probably ended up with the Soviets on the Rhine.
The western half of Russia was in ruins.
They could not feed themselves.
They could not build trucks or jeeps to transport their army.
We could have effectively cut them off in Europe and secured Eastern Europe from Communism.
No. The fact is, there was no support at all among the US public for one more day of war. In fact, support had started to wane about invading Japan, which is another reason (for all the right ones) Truman decided to drop the bombs.
In Europe, the US & Br. had nowhere close to enough troops to prevent the Red Army from rolling through Germany and France. There would have been strong resistance, but futile ultimately without the bomb-—but even then, as a colleague of mine in the USAF wrote in “Hollow Threat,” even as late as 1946 we only had a total of about 100 bombs and NO long range delivery systems that could get them deep into Russia in other than suicide missions.
Truman, then Ike, played Europe brilliantly by stalling until the European nations could join in NATO (which still would have been rolled over in a conventional war) and until we had enough long-range delivery systems to make an atomic threat possible. Patton would have gotten us in the wrong war at the wrong time-—a war we won really without firing a shot thanks to Reagan.
America was unified in WWII for one reason only: the American Left wanted to save Stalin. The Left was for war with Germany from June 22, 1941. Pearl Harbor on December 7th allowed the Left to go after Germany and resupply Stalin. The war with Japan was just incidental to the Left.
As it turned out, the Left shot their own foot. With Lend-Lease to Stalin, Russia was able to defeat Germany all by itself and Normandy only prevented Stalin from taking all of Europe.
“Roosevelt set us up for Pearl Harbor and for the Soviets takeover of much of Europe.”
Good King FDR would NEVER have done that.
Honest Walter Cronkite would have investigated and told us so if he had!
Definitely need the /s.
>In fact, support had started to wane about invading Japan
The Left was never interested in Japan. Pearl Harbor was just an excuse to attack Hitler after his invasion of Russia. See #13
No. They were tired of war. With millions dead in Europe, WWIII was unthinkable.
True, but the left in America was largely irrelevant at that time.
Perhaps, but the United States had a Pacific Front with a looming invasion of the Japanese homeland. Resources were more needed there than fighting the Russians on the Polish frontier
There is one factor you are missing: the US was not Nazis.
The brutality of the Nazi occupation of Russia doomed Germany. The Russians liked nothing better than getting rid of Stalin. Given half a chance the Russians would have let us do the job. But we gave no impression we wanted to except for Patton.
American troops could have kept the Russians out of many areas that ended up behind the Iron Curtain without a war with the Sviet communists. we had an Air Force pound them to nothing and the atomic bomb. The main reason the Russians had a prayer of winning over Germany was that we destroyed the German industrial base, tied down millions of troops in the west, and took out the German air force. Stalin only advantage was just willingness to sacrifice millions of Russian soldiers.
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