Posted on 11/16/2001 1:23:50 PM PST by tonycavanagh
The German High command were willing to put German troops at the disposal of the Western allies to use against the Soviets, but I think Japan would of been a different matter.
Would the American public agree to Americans fighting along side Japanese soldiers.
I dont think the British public would agree and I think the reports of the holocaust would have had a major effect on any American, British German alliance .
Tony
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.
Never had chance to play it, but I can email you extracts if you like!!
An act of cold-blooded obscenity I have never understood.
Absolutely! This fact is the first thing I think of whenever Truman is praised.
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.
In July 1945, Japan was virtually prostrate, with their military forces pushed back to their home islands, Korea, and Manchuria. Allied bombing had, by mid-1945, greatly curtailed Japanese industrial might. There are those who believe that the Japanese government was suing for peace before the atomic bombings and that said bombings were unnecessary. Without discussing whether the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were necessary, suffice it to say Japan was in no condition to be of much assistance to the USSR.
As for the Germans, remember that the Red Army took merciless vengance upon their nation. An important Soviet general bragged that "the blond hag (Germany) was in for a hard time." Soviet troops raped several million German women, from eight to 80 years of age. Most items of any value that were not hidden were stolen by the Russians. Unspeakable atrocities were inflicted on German POWs in Soviet camps. Machinery and factories would be boxed en masse back to the USSR, and over a million Germans died on a "Trail of Tears" from areas that had been German for centuries, like Silesia and the Sudetenland, to what would later become West Germany.
It is no wonder that German refugees fled from the Soviet enemy lines on the east to the Anglo-American lines on the west and why the German military fought the Soviets fiercely on a two year retreat from Russia back to Berlin, while fighting the Americans and British far less intensely. It is extremely unlikely that German soldiers would shoulder arms with such mortal enemies. On the other hand, they would have welcomed the chance to avenge their wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters, under the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.
As for the Poles, the main resistance before the Soviet takeover was from the anti-Communist Polish Home Army that was more or less intact in mid-1945. The Baltic States, victims of mass exile by Stalin and too-willing collaborators with Hitler, were also an area that would have risen if given an opportunity. Don't forget, too, that guerilla warfare against the Soviet state continued in Ukraine until the early 1950s.
On top of all this, Stalin was a consummate realist who also believed in the inevitable victory of Communism. As a result, he would have retreated to the 1939 boundaries and await the next opportunity to advance the Communist cause. Furthermore, the British had no desire to recreate Operation Barbarossa. Thus, it would appear that had the British and the Americans took on the Soviets in mid-1945, the Red Tide would have retreated at least from the future East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States.
Additionally, I believe that even if the Soviets courted the old Nazi leadership, the German armed forces, especially the Wehrmacht, would have supported a renewed Third Reich. Both the officers and the troops would have been happy to fight, even in American or British uniforms, to free their land from the Soviet yoke. The hard core Nazi group was so connected to Hitler that the fall of the Third Reich discredited them. Look how rapidly the West Germans adapted to democracy and free market economics after 12 years of Naziism and three years of Allied military occupation.
In short, the Red Army would have been facing Anglo-American forces, armed with nuclear weapons, in the unfriendly climes of East Germany and Poland. BTW, I believe the U.S. could have built numerous atomic bombs in short order, as the nation's industrial and scientific bases was at full steam in 1945.
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