Posted on 07/21/2020 12:46:30 AM PDT by LibWhacker
The USSR was never an “ally” to the US troops dying in the Pacific, until shortly before the end of the war when they invaded Manchuria. While Americans were dying at Pearl Harbor, Tarawa, Guadalcanal - the USSR observed a truce with Japan.
Maybe the Hildebeast was secretly channeling this woman, and not Eleanor. 🤗
We did the same with some German allies in WW2. We should have invaded Finland by that logic, but we didn’t.
Also worth mentioning that over and above any political concerns, the Soviets basically didn’t have a navy worth the name (for multiple reasons, as the British found out when they got their Lend-Lease battleship back from them after the war) so they *couldn’t* carry the war to the Japanese at sea. The Red Air Force was mostly set up to be a short ranged, tactical support force and couldn’t have contributed to the Pacific island hopping campaign if they’d wanted to. Finally, the Red Army in the East was lacking in equipment, troops and most importantly leaders if they had wanted to go after the Japanese and Manchukuo troops on the mainland. Even the pre-war Soviet victory at Khalkin Gol against vastly outnumbered Japanese troops was only accomplished by a gifted commander (by Soviet standards, anyway) who later could not be spared from the German front and even then was only accomplished at huge cost in men and materiel. Of which neither could be spared post-Operation-Barbarossa until very late in the war when it was obvious that Germany was about to collapse and there wasn’t going to be another Battle Of The Bulge style resurgence.
Post war research has shown that it wasn’t that Stalin didn’t *want* to go expand in Asia, it was that he believed he couldn’t muster the men and equipment to do so.
Part of that is because the 1939 Anglo-Polish treaty specifically excluded Britain from defending Poland against Russian invasion. Another part is that the Polish-Russian border was still sort of fluid and the Poles were squabbling with the Russians about it.
Finland was hardly a German ally; they accepted German help in reclaiming the territory they lost in the Winter War, then would go no further. Hitler desperately wanted them to help at Leningrad, and they wouldn’t. Even Stalin took this into account as the war ended; he re-took what they’d seized in the Winter War, but alone among the countries that fought the USSR along its borders, Finland remained a free country (as opposed to an occupied Warsaw Pact puppet). Finland was no more a German ally than Franco’s Spain; once their countries were secure, they were done fighting.
The USSR wouldn’t have needed to fight in the islands, just on the mainland. Whatever reason you give as to why they didn’t, there was nothing to stop them from rolling into Manchuria afterwards - which they did with gusto. In the end, China, North Korea, and all of former French Indochina ended up in communist hands as a result of that move.
That is a pathetic excuse; for Britain to squander all of those lives, and eventually lose its colonies, due to a war started to “protect Poland”, they ended up with a postwar world with Poland (and most of Eastern Europe) enslaved. Churchill knew they’d won nothing and lost everything; France turned out to be the smarter by sitting it out for the most part.
Churchill also knew Britain was going to lose the empire soon even if they didn’t enter the war.
You should also realize that the Poles and the Russians were still poking at each other over the exact layout of the border and at any time the Poles could go to war against the Russians or vice versa. Britain (correctly, IMHO) didn’t want to get involved in that, especially when it might be a war that Poland had provoked.
France sat it out because they had to. Go look at the status and doctrine of their army in the pre-war period. They were pretty screwed up for a number of reasons to the point where most of their tactics were oriented towards defense with very little offensive capability. If you want to see how screwed up they were (and you hadn’t looked in on recent scholarship on the subject), The Chieftain on YouTube has an excellent video on just how screwed the French tank corps was, despite having the best tanks in the world at the time. It’s a microcosm of how their entire army was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqoPZK6gyao
The only part of the French military that was really even vaguely offensively focused was their navy (with the all-forward-guns battleships and battlecruisers), and even it wasn’t all that clueful.
Ummm, Finnish forces took part at Leningrad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Finnish_participation
Stalin did actually invade Finland. The only reason the Russians stopped was because the Finnish fought the Red Army to a stalemate, negotiated an armistice (the September 1944 Moscow Armistice) and then joined the Allies.
It should be remembered that China was absolutely communist in areas during the war - the Communists and Nationalists were fully engaged in combat in 1927, long before the Japanese invaded.
The USSR didn’t have the resources to spend on mainland Asia until it was clear Germany was prostrated; additionally, it was agreed at the various conferences that the USSR would continue to concentrate in Europe - remember, the policy was Germany first, with Japan as a side show.
You seem to be remembering a lot of things about WW2 that just weren’t so.
Additionally, French Indochina ended up in Communist hands because after the war we let the French take it back as a colony, where they resumed their abuses of the populace, only writ larger. At which point, the Vietnamese, fresh off evicting the Japanese and still armed, strongly objected.
No less a person than Ho Chih Minh went to Washington to ask that the French be removed or at least the aid with which he’d fought the Japanese to be continued. Washington, in their stupid “Hey, let’s appease the French” mindset, told him no. “Uncle Ho” said “screw that” and turned to people that *would* support his people. We all know what happened next.
We should have told the French, “No, you don’t get any of your colonies or territories that we had to liberate or support back” but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......
Did you read the article at your link?
“The Finnish forces crossed the pre-Winter War border on the Karelian Isthmus by eliminating Soviet salients at Beloostrov and Kirjasalo, thus straightening the frontline so that it ran along the old border near the shores of Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, and those positions closest to Leningrad still lying on the pre-Winter War border. According to Soviet claims, the Finnish advance was stopped in September through resistance by the Karelian Fortified Region;[43] however, Finnish troops had already earlier in August 1941 received orders to halt the advance after reaching their goals, some of which lay beyond the pre-Winter War border. After reaching their respective goals, the Finns halted their advance and started moving troops to East Karelia.[44][45] For the next three years, the Finns did little to contribute to the battle for Leningrad, maintaining their lines.[46] Their headquarters rejected German pleas for aerial attacks against Leningrad[47] and did not advance farther south from the Svir River in occupied East Karelia (160 kilometres northeast of Leningrad), which they had reached on 7 September.”
The Finns did NOT fight the Soviets to a stalemate; the Soviets wanted back what they had taken in the Winter War, and they got it. There is no way Finland was going to stop the same army that was taking all of eastern Europe, all the way to Berlin.
The whole point in Asia was that Soviet weapons armed the communist movements, and when China fell, Chinese weapons armed the communists in North Korea and Vietnam.
Read “Hell in a Very Small Place” by Bernard Fall, the author of “Street Without Joy”; it was clear the US wanted the French to suppress the communists in Indochina (as part of “containment”), and we armed them to the teeth to do so. American advisors worked with the French, and we even lent them an aircraft carrier.
France had enough of war; they couldn’t fight another, and told us so. We prodded them into it, and then let them lose when it went south.
To give you an idea as to how excited France was about keeping Indochina, by law they couldn’t even draft French troops to send there - so they ended up with a lot of colonials, locals, and Foreign Legion troops instead. They had no intention of spending French blood to keep it.
France understood as clearly as several other countries that when Stalin fought Hitler, there would be no “winner”; they were absolutely right, and completely vindicated by May 1945. Nazism was traded for Bolshevism, nothing more; at least France (and Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, Sweden) hadn’t squandered their youths’ lives fighting for Stalin. Britain and the US served eastern Europe to him on a silver platter, and eastern Europeans today remember that.
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