Posted on 04/13/2005 6:24:31 PM PDT by Yasotay
You have to look at the issue from the 1939-1945 perspective instead of today with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, the Nazis were seen as the greatest threat in Europe. The Soviets were too busy exterminating themselves with purges, starvation, and mass deportations to be seen as much of a threat. The Soviets would not have joined the allies had Hitler not made the biggest foul up of his life and launched Operation Barbarossa. Stalin was not in a position to fight a war and only did so when Hitler forced the Soviets into one.
Even though the Western Allies did not trust Stalin (and rightfully so) they knew at the time he was a needed ally. As the saying goes "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." I don't think Churchill and Roosevelt would have wanted Stalin as an ally if they knew the war was going to be quick and easy. However, they knew it wasn't so it became necessary to make a deal with the devil.
BTW, no one knew if the Japanese would capitulate after only two atom bombs were used. The Russians were an insurance policy. Then, too, we only had two atom bombs ~ and we ended up dropping all of them. What would have done if that hadn't been convincing?
It's noteworthy that Sorge, Stalin's spymaster, was well aware of a Japanese spy present in the Manhattan Project staff ~ he exposed him to American intelligence who then prepared to trip the spy up. He fled before he was caught however.
So, if Stalin's spymaster knew about the Japanese spy, he knew about the Atom Bomb ~ and, in fact, he had his own spies in the program. The Russians weren't all that far behind us in developing nuclear weapons it turned out.
Again, back to the question of how fast the Japanese would surrender ~ given what was going on in China it was probably a darned good idea to have the Russians on our side rather than sitting out the rest of the war.
Nuked Moscow? With what? We used up our entire arsenal of atom bombs on Japan!
Keep going, this is an excellent discussion and am enjoying every minute of it.
It wasn't, in the end, a fair fight.
As a friend of mine who served in the German homeguard said (he was 15 and in a hole facing off against American troops), "for every rifle we had the Americans had an artillery piece ~ truly not the best artillery piece ever built, but they had more of them we could have ever imagined".
We did the same thing on the Eastern front, only there you had Russians doing the fighting ~ still our stuff ~ some to their designs, some to ours, but still a lot more stuff than the Germans could begin to produce under the best possible conditions.
Seems we didn't have all that much stuff in Korea to start with. Bad situation FUR SHUR.
That convinced them that we meant business and would be back!
Agree:
Was a SNAFU from the git go, and still is.
An attack on the Soviets in May 45 would have been like Korea but 1000 times worse.
Our supply lines would have very long, across an ocean, while theirs would have been short.
Fall and winter coming, in Russia.
We still had to finish off the Japanese.
Monday quarterbacking but I think our leaders made the right decision
Remember, Korea had been handed over to Japan as a colony by the United States after WWI ~ Teddy Roosevelt negotiated the deal.
Japan then used it as a colony. In fact, all those nastyassed guards that gave Japanese POW camps such a bad name? The guards were Koreans! They were pi$$ed a lot~! I don't know how any Allied troops survived the camps.
For some strange reason we split Korea into a Soviet occupied zone and a US occupied zone. The Russians then armed and financed the indigenous Communist forces in their zone. Intriguingly the US was busy rounding up "nationalists" in Korea and handing them over to the remnants of the puppet government ~ (and we can all get in big arguments here about whether Rhee was pro- or anti-Japanese so I won't get into that at all). The nationalists fled the Southern Zone to the North, and shortly all sorts of problems happened.
We had not provided sufficient military force to our Korean zone to secure it.
That's the start of the war ~ most folks end up more concerned with the "conduct" of the war, and that involves the Democratic party betraying the troops in the field. Of course that happens every time.
I don't think you can blame the UN for the Korean War. Blame Harry Truman and the guys who forgot to secure the LZ.
Which they only did with the help of several treasonous "americans". The left was screwing us over then too.
How long do you think it took us before we had a 3rd bomb? I'm not saying we should have nuked Moscow, but we certainly could have used the threat of doing it to some advantage, especially when we had it and they didn't. Evil should be stopped in it's tracks.
The Russians had some really big intercontinental bombers at the time ~ we didn't.
You and I wouldn't be on this thread.
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