Orwell, you magnificent bastard!
I read your book!
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Unlike other generals, Patton was an “aggressive thruster,” Hanson explains.”
And maybe a slow learner. Germany’s “aggressive thrusts” into the Soviet Union had just failed completely, despite Barbarosa being unleashed when the SU was unprepared, its military poorly equipped and even worse led. In 1944, Soviet war production, military size, momentum, and sheer brutal force were at a peak. The US was still at war with Japan, and the US population was eager to bring our forces home, not convert our “wonderful” Russian allies into new monsters to slay. Patton was like a queen on a chess board, but winning requires all the pieces.
One wonders how Stalin would have responded during a drive eastward by Patton after seeing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In college I had a WWII history class and the question of pushing the Soviets out of Eastern Europe after Germany was defeated came up. I can’t say for sure what his politics were but he was certainly no Leftist. He was probably my favorite teacher. He spoke in a blunt, gruff manner and had no tolerance for tolerance for stupidity. If Clint Eastwood was a teacher he would have been like this guy. He chain smoked cigarettes in the classrooms while he taught. This was in the early 1990s.
Anyway, he said once Germany and Japan were defeated that there was no way in hell the American public (or American soldiers” would have wanted to go into another conflict with the Soviet Union. People were tired of the war and just wanted it over. Not that people trusted or liked the Soviet Union but it would have been asking people too much to have them endure more war.
Patton was right though.
This soldier tales of the battles he was in will show how brutal the war was. He was the only original member left alive and they went thru hundreds of men in his unit. All in a few short days and months.
If You Survive: From Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge to the End of World War II, One American Officer’s Riveting True Story
https://www.amazon.com/If-You-Survive-Normandy-American/dp/0804100039/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YA5ASK17STMU&dchild=1&keywords=if+you+survive+george+wilson&qid=1605030721&sprefix=if+you+survive+%2Caps%2C234&sr=8-1
The US was broke.
The Allies were destroyed.
Japan loomed.
Just because Puzo and Coppola wrote a decent movie doesn’t change the fact we were exhausted. The people would not have put up with it. Period.
*ping*
IMHO the removal of Patton and later McArthur led to politicians running wars. And we’ve lost ever since. Korea, Vietnam and the Iraq mess.
It comes down to logistics.
US supply lines were stretched near breaking by the spring of 45, and most captured Channel ports, roads and rail lines were wrecked. As the US Army moved east to fight the Red Army those supply routes would then be extended into and through defeated, occupied countries with destroyed infrastructure and sullen/hostile citizens, refugees and Heer/SS units wandering about.
We could’ve hurt the Soviets by cutting Lend-lease, but by mid-45, the Red Army’s resupply issues were mainly being satisfied by domestic industry.
Manpower would have been another challenge. The defeat of Nazi Germany meant priorities for men and munitions were shifting to the endgame in Japan. There would have been no guarantee the UK would be willing/able to assist, the French “Army” was marching up and down the boulevards of Paris, and settling old scores. There was speculation that German soldiers/formations could be enlisted to fight Communists, but assuming the troops could be ‘de-nazified’, they would have to be equipped, trained, provisioned and integrated, which would take time and resources away from US units. Some of these soldiers had been fighting since 1939 and were exhausted. Some were die-hard SS.
By mid-45 the US Army was facing manpower shortages of its own: the number of able-bodied men available for the draft was shrinking dangerously. The US had been a Draft Army since 1940. US casualties in Europe were high, but paled by comparison to the Pacific, and the upcoming invasions. Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been costly and the American public were tired of war. Selling the concept of fighting the Red Army, who had been an ‘ally’, to the US public would have been problematic. Using the defeated German army to assist (especially as wide spread atrocities came to light) would have been a significant challenge.
Patton was a brilliant maneuver commander, but even he understood the logistic challenges he would face. He’d led the Breakout the previous summer, executed a number of local raids prior to the cessation of hostilities, but didn’t (and likely wouldn’t) have the resources to secure his supply lines, garrison his zone of occupation and conduct offensive operations to seize/hold ground from the Red Army.
Short of horses, men and the hay to feed them, Patton’s planners were hobbled by logistics. Heading east would likely never moved beyond arrows on the map.