Posted on 06/06/2018 10:44:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This being D-Day, it's inevitable that thoughts turn to WWII. The slaughter. The sacrifices. The magnificent courage of going forward into the teeth of machine gun fire and artillery barrages onto open beaches. In perhaps its only redeeming virtue, war brings out the heroism inherent in the human breast.
You can get into some interesting discussions online, and WWII always comes up. Specifically, the ending of WWII. Patton wanted to take out the Russians while we were already there, and today, a lot of people think he was right. But he wasn't right. At least, not in the sense he meant.
We had the military and economic might to take out Russia but not the political will. Ike knew it, and so did Roosevelt. It would have been a hugely costly continuation of WWII, in both lives and treasure, that Americans would not have supported. The outcome might well not have been the sort of victory Patton sought.
The Russians had learned to fight against the very best German formations led by the very best higher-level German commanders. These formations had the superb lower-level leadership (sergeants and company-grade officers) for which Germany was famous. Most of this lower-level leadership died in the fight with Russia.
In the West, we fought Volksstrum units of teenagers and old men with nothing like the lower-level leadership that the German outfits in the East had had. You rise or stoop to the level of your opposition, such that by 8 May 1945, the Russians were simply better at war than we were, and their supply lines were much closer to the action than ours.
The main thing going for us was that we hadn't lost nearly as many men as Russia had,
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
We would have defeated the Soviets. It would have been costly.
In terms of production we would outproduce the Soviets in any capacity imaginable.
Consider trucks. If you watch AHC or any documentary on the Eastern front you will see the Soviets riding along in our trucks. They only made about 125k for the war. We produced in excess of 2,000,000 trucks, jeeps, etc.
We doubled their production in planes.
We would have shifted the steel being used for the Navy to the airforce and army.
We would have either upgraded and/or replaced the Sherman with Pershings or something better.
Israel showed the Sherman, while upgraded, could defeat the T-54/55 in 1956 and 1967. Where there's a will there's a way. Though we would have had the same solution to solve in fighting Germany. We kept the Sherman production line going as we found it was easier to ship two medium tanks v one heavy tank.
Someone else has already noted we pretty much fed Ivan. Take away the food and Ivan gets hungry.
Air power was the decisive element of WWII. We excelled in this in terms of long range bombers and fighters.
So from a purely production standpoint we would beat the Soviets. They simply could not keep up with us in that capacity.
What cannot said in Russia, by any historian, is that if not for America, Russia would have lost the war.
We gave them so much in aid, that was never paid back. We gave them 500,000 trucks, without which they could have never even moved against the Nazis.
A few braves writers have admitted it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bolshie_Ozerki
We had gone into Russia in 1918/19 to intervene in the Russian Civil War and it proved wildly unpopular at home.
Wilson was forced to withdraw our troops in 1919.
We should have ave saved eastern Europe! That would have been the moral thing to do.
We should have ave saved eastern Europe! That would have been the moral thing to do.
Timing is everything.
I might venture that by 1948/49, public sentiment might have change regarding the Soviets.
Retarded. Only someone who wasn’t a grunt in 1945 would have supported refighting the eastern front. And Pattons idea of arming Germans was damn near treasonous.
Imagine being a grunt, fighting your way across Europe, knowing about the murders the Germans committed at Malmedy, seeing the concentration camps... and then him asking you to accept those nazis as your brother in arms.
In some ways Patton was brilliant. In others, he was an absolute moron, this includes his un-christian reincarnation belief, and his desire to re-fight the eastern front battles.
The Soviets were exhausted and the USSR on the brink of collapse by the end of WWII
On the other hand, the American war machine was really just hitting its stride when the war ended, with many new, revolutionary weapons systems and well trained troops coming on line for 1946
America had no territorial ambitions or desire for empires. The American people just wanted to end the war and go home so we were content to cede Eastern Europe and half of Germany to the Russians
During by the war, our leaders were more than happy to let Russia do the heavy lifting and take massive casualties in the invasion of Germany while we executed a strategy of using overwhelming air and artillery superiority to minimize allied casualties
Looking back over the last 70 years we made the right choice because the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War .
However, if there had been a real WWIII with a nuclear exchange, the costs of dealing with Stalin in the immediate post war time frame would have been peanuts compared to the devastation caused by WWIII
The Korean War proved wildly unpopular as well as Truman found out when he tried to run for president again in 52'.
I do think there would have been a public outcry if we weren't nuking the Soviets had we gone to war with them.
I guess we should be thankful we didn't have to find out!
“In the West, we fought Volksstrum units of teenagers and old men with nothing like the lower-level leadership that the German outfits in the East had had.”
The writer is an absolute blithering idiot on this. We fought premier units, with top skill level leaders in the west. In fact, the nazis who murdered our prisoners at Malmedy were fresh from the eastern front and were merely applying normal tactics they always used.
Or maybe he means Rommel in Africa. Or Maybe he means the Das Reich division in France. Or maybe he means Panzer Lehr, or maybe he means the old men and poor quality units our men faced in Italy.
His judgement that US forces faced weak Germans is truly an insult to our men. His judgement that the Soviets were better at war was also way off the mark.
But attacking the red army in 1945 would have been a US casualty event that would have rightfully horrified the nation.
Patton was like a lot of Generals, they are amazing on the battlefield, but absolute disasters as human beings or in any endeavor outside of war.
We had no problem bringing them in NATO in 1955.
We had no problems bringing over select Nazis to help in our rocket/missile programs.
Heck, even the Israeli's had some former Germans show them tank tactics.
“but unlike some commanders he did not waste lives in futile operations.”
Oh he sure as heck would. One example would be the raid on Hammelburg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_Force_Baum
Essentially he found out the location where his son in law was a prisoner and launched a raid to spring him. It had nothing to do with the main attacks.
FDR was a sick pup at Yalta.
Many believe he was going through the motions and wanted to get back to Warm Springs.
Land power: The 76mm Shermans and M-36/M26’s would have given the Soviets a fit. We had several thousand of the newer 90mm tanks.
Officers: Draw. Each side had seasoned officers.
Air Power: The YAK-3 may have been one of the best WW2 fighters but we had the advantage and we had jets(P-80/Meteor). The Soviets would have starved to death when we crushed their rail lines.
Intangibles: We had the German military on our side in vast numbers and they wanted the Soviets out of Germany.
“Other than the logistics of it, what is wrong with my idea?”
Try telling the guys who survived Okinawa and Iwo and Peleliu that you have decided to have them go refight Stalingrad to help save Germany from Russia.
There would have been a mutiny. There nearly was in Europe as they began discussing moving forces to the pacific. The common thinking was “we won our battle, they can finish theirs”.
It would not have been tolerated.
I used to think so, but after we won the cold war, I thought that hindsight proved caution to be the correct approach.
At the end of the war, the US was the strongest power in world history, possessing the atom bomb and no one else in the world that could oppose us for that reason. Had we known that we only had 4 years of being the only nuclear power, we might have thought about it more seriously.Especially had we known that Soviets would cause us to lose China in 1949, too.
The fact is, we could have defeated them quite quickly and easily. We would have had to attack with conventional weapons and aircraft and use our massive wartime production capabilities, to force the Soviets to retreat to strongholds and try to hold out, using their soldiers’ lives to stem our advance. That would have worked, had we been limited to conventional weapons. But once we had 10 or 20 or 30 nukes available, taking out strategic Soviet locations here and there while threatening to up the ante would have eventually forced them to capitulate. They were dedicated commies, but they were not more dedicated than the Japanese who had just given unconditional surrender. We could have marched into Moscow and had a much better Russian reset.
The reason we didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, is because Americans did not have the will to continue the fight, as noted, and also because the American government was infiltrated to the highest levels with Soviet agents who fed our leaders a load of crap to keep them from taking this approach. Without all those commies in government, and with a leader like Churchill who understood that the Russians were next, we could have perhaps engineered a crisis and a confrontation with the Soviets that didn’t give Americans the luxury of ending the war. As it was, it only took a few years for everyone to realize that the Soviets were our enemy, and then to be in a proxy war against them in Korea. Might as well have lost those men in Europe that in Korea, and been done with it forever. No Vietnam, for one thing. The peace boom would have been 10 times greater.
Bottom line, given the US that existed in 1945, probably there was no other thing to do than keep peace with the Soviets.
Not to mention all the many planes we gave them.
The Germans would have been put in Divisions of their own and given a separate sector.
Remember, Patton was going to make it look like the Soviets started the war. We would have no choice but to fight.
I'd betcha Stalin knew the date and time and strength of all of our invasions in Europe and the Pacific.
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