“FDR should have only helped the Soviets enough to keep Germany from advancing, the people from starving.”
The Russians were fighting over 100 German divisions before we even entered the war. And this was some of the best of the German army.
The only reason we were finally able to land on the Normandy coast three years later is because Hitler wrecked his armies on the Eastern Front. Many Americans have little idea of how big those battles were.
If Hitler had defeated Stalin then Germany would have been immensely stronger when we tried to gain a beachhead on the Continent. It was in our interest to make sure that Russia was able to keep fighting. There was no way to know what “just enough” support would have been.
Patton wasn’t the only American who knew that the USSR was trouble. But the reality is that there was little we could do about it. For one thing on VE Day we still needed Russia if the atomic bombs didn’t work and we had to invade Japan.
And moreover everyone could read the same map that Patton was pretending didn’t matter. Russia has internal lines of communication leading right to Central Europe. We are on the other side of an ocean. Wars are won with logisitics. And all of this ignores the fact that you would have had a mutiny by the American people who were tired of war and their sons coming home in boxes.
It was strategic, and also,
The Soviet advance and ultimate capture of the German capital was virtually unopposed by their allies. In an effort to avoid a diplomatic issue, United States Army General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower had ordered his forces into the south of Germany to cut off and wipe out other pieces of the Wehrmacht and to avoid the possibility that the Nazi government would attempt to hold out in a National Redoubt in the Alps. However, the failure of Operation Market Garden in late 1944 may have played a key role in this decision. .
The western Allies' decision to leave eastern Germany and the city of Berlin to the Red Army - honoring the agreement they made with the Soviet Union at Yalta - eventually had serious repercussions as the Cold War emerged and expanded in the post-war era - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_Berlin
Yet Western aid was substantial,
Soviet Weapons Losses in 1941 (The First Six Months Of The War)
72% of all Tanks.
34% of all Combat Aircraft.
56% of all Small-arms and Machine guns.
69% of all Anti-Tank guns.
59% of all Field guns and Mortars.
Take it from Zhukov:
"It is now said that the Allies never helped us . . . However, one cannot deny that the Americans gave us so much material, without which we could not have formed our reserves and could not have continued the war . . . we had no explosives and powder. There was none to equip rifle bullets. The Americans actually came to our assistance with powder and explosives. And how much sheet steel did they give us. We really could not have quickly put right our production of tanks if the Americans had not helped with steel. And today it seems as though we had all this ourselves in abundance." - http://www.historynet.com/russias-life-saver-lend-lease-aid-to-the-ussr-in-world-war-ii-book-review.htm
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.[29][30]
The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil), 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.[31] British deliveries to the USSR
In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of 27 June 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.[32][33] In June 1941 within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic sea routes to Murmansk arriving in September. It was carrying 40 Hawker Hurricanes along with 550 mechanics and pilots of No. 151 Wing to provide immediate air defence of the port and train Soviet pilots. After escorting Soviet bombers and scoring 14 kills for one loss, and completing the training of pilots and mechanics, No 151 Wing left in November their mission complete.[34] The convoy was the first of many convoys to Murmansk and Archangelsk in what became known as the Arctic convoys, the returning ships carried the gold that the USSR was using to pay the US.
Between June 1941 and May 1945 3,000+ Hurricanes were delivered to the USSR along with 4,000+ other aircraft, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 2,560 bren carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines and 15 million pairs of boots in total 4 million tonnes of war materials including food and medical supplies were delivered. The munitions totaled £308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled £120m in 1946 index. Naval assets supplied included a battleship, 9 destroyers, 4 submarines, 5 mine sweepers, 9 trawler minesweepers, over 600 radar and sonar sets, 41 anti submarine batteries, several hundred naval guns and rocket batteries.
Significant numbers of British Churchill and Matilda tanks along with US M3 Lee were shipped to the USSR after becoming obsolete on the African Front. The Churchills, supplied by the arctic convoys, saw action in the siege of St Petersburg and the battle of Kursk.[35][36] while tanks shipped by the Persian route supplied the Caucasian Front. With the USSR giving priority to the defence of Moscow for domestically produced tanks this resulted in 40% of tanks in service on the Caucasian Front being Lend-Lease models.[37]
There was also Operation Unthinkable:
Operation Unthinkable was a code name of two related plans of a conflict between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Both were ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces’ Joint Planning Staff at the end of World War II in Europe.
The first of the two assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany in order to “impose the will of the Western Allies” on the Soviets and force Joseph Stalin to honour the agreements in regards to the future of Central Europe.[citation needed] When the odds were judged “fanciful”, the original plan was abandoned. The code name was used instead for a defensive scenario, in which the British were to defend against a Soviet drive towards the North Sea and the Atlantic following the withdrawal of the American forces from the continent.
The study became the first Cold War-era contingency plan for war with the Soviet Union.[2] Both plans were highly secret at the time of their creation and it was not until 1998 that they were made public.[3]...
The Chiefs of Staff were concerned that given the enormous size of Soviet forces deployed in Europe at the end of the war, and the perception that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was unreliable, there existed a Soviet threat to Western Europe. The Soviet numerical superiority was roughly 4:1 in men and 2:1 in tanks at the end of hostilities in Europe.[1] The Soviet Union had yet to launch its attack on Japanese forces, and so one assumption in the report was that the Soviet Union would instead ally with Japan if the Western Allies commenced hostilities.
The hypothetical date for the start of the Allied invasion of Soviet-held Europe was scheduled for 1 July 1945.[1] The plan assumed a surprise attack by up to 47 British and American divisions in the area of Dresden, in the middle of Soviet lines.[1] This represented almost half of the roughly 100 divisions (approximately 2.5 million men) available to the British, American and Canadian headquarters at that time.[3]
The plan was taken by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible due to a three-to-one superiority of Soviet land forces in Europe and the Middle East, where the conflict was projected to take place. The majority of any offensive operation would have been undertaken by American and British forces, as well as Polish forces and up to 100,000 German Wehrmacht soldiers. Any quick success would be due to surprise alone. If a quick success could not be obtained before the onset of winter, the assessment was that the Allies would be committed to a protracted total war. In the report of 22 May 1945, an offensive operation was deemed “hazardous”.
In response to an instruction by Churchill of 10 June 1945, a follow-up report was written concerning “what measures would be required to ensure the security of the British Isles in the event of war with Russia in the near future”.[5] United States forces were relocating to the Pacific for a planned invasion of Japan, and Churchill was concerned that this reduction in supporting forces would leave the Soviets in a strong position to take offensive action in Western Europe. The report concluded that if the United States focused on the Pacific Theatre, Great Britain’s odds “would become fanciful.”[6]
The Joint Planning Staff rejected Churchill’s notion of retaining bridgeheads on the continent as having no operational advantage. It was envisaged that Britain would use its air force and navy to resist, although a threat from mass rocket attack was anticipated, with no means of resistance except for strategic bombing.
Subsequent discussions
By 1946 tensions and conflicts were developing between Allied-occupied and Soviet-occupied areas of Europe. These were seen as being potential triggers for a wider conflict. One such area was the Julian March (which was applied to an area of southeastern Europe, today split among Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy), and on 30 August 1946 informal discussions took place between the British and US Chiefs of Staff concerning how such a conflict could develop and the best strategy for conducting a European war.[7] Again the issue of retaining a bridgehead on the continent was discussed, with Dwight D. Eisenhower preferring a withdrawal to the Low Countries, rather than Italy, for their proximity to the United Kingdom. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable