[Wallace T.]

There was a strong anti-Communist element in the Polish population. Remember that in late 1944, the nationalist Polish Home Army rebelled in Warsaw against the Nazis. The Red Army waited outside of Warsaw and let the Wehrmacht do the dirty work of defeating the anti-Communists before they pushed the Germans out. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Poles never returned from service with the Western Allies. A British-American move against the Soviets would have triggered civil war in Poland, and possibly, in western Ukraine. The Baltic States were also restive; the resentment against the Soviet occupiers ran deep. In the early 1990s, it was this area that led the way to the breakup of the USSR.

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.