Posted on 06/06/2018 10:44:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The allies gave nothing away. Stalin had the whip hand and was not going to release it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Scheldt
Antwerp was liberated 3 months after D-Day but the Allies could not use the port since the Germans controlled part of the waterway access to it until the end of November.
Dream on.
The British and Canadians would not have joined us. The British Empire was broke and exhausted and couldn't take another war even if they wanted to. Germany was not capable of helping us. We would have been alone.
In case anyone noticed, we were still at war with Japan. We were in the thick of the Okinawa campaign when the Germans surrendered. So far as all but a tiny handful of people knew we had ahead of us a bloody campaign to invade the Japanese Home Islands once Okinawa and the Philippines were finished off. Estimates of total casualties (dead, wounded and missing) were up to 1 million. Even we did not have the strength to fight two land wars at once against two determined enemies.
Large Japanese land armies occupied Manchuria and most of Eastern China. We did not have land forces capable of taking them on. We wanted Russia's help in defeating Japan. Again, remember almost no one knew about the atomic bomb or if it would even work.
As noted by several on this thread, there was zero political will to start a war with the Russians and no public support. Americans understood Japan still needed to be defeated, but once that was done they wanted the boys home.
Finally, I'm not so sure Patton really wanted to do this despite some hot tempered quotes late in his life. From the movie:
Lt. Col. Charles R. Codman: You know General, sometimes the men don't know when you're acting.
Patton: It's not important for them to know. It's only important for me to know.
Patton was a bold and imaginative commander. He would take calculated risks for greater gains, but unlike some commanders he did not waste lives in futile operations.
The Netherlands wasn’t completely liberated until after the Surrender.
Any pretense of friendship was abandoned immediately after the conclusion of WWII, if not earlier.
The Berlin Airlift occurred less than three years after the war ended and we had a decent stockpile in inventory before the Soviets successfully tested their first bomb in late ‘49.
Political will notwithstanding, someone like Trump would have pre-empted the Cold War by leveraging the Soviets’ powerlessness against our nuclear arsenal and means of delivering the weapons.
"Colonel, there are 50,000 men on this island who would like to shoot that son of a bitch."
Other than the logistics of it, what is wrong with my idea? We were preparing to move the bulk of our European, China, mainland and Burma armies to Okinawa to invade Japan until Truman dropped the bombs. Pretty much just the reverse of my proposal.
A lot easier said than done. Then again I’m not really sure what he means by take them out.
It is the place where superior air power would have won the day
Sadly the Russian mentality is thatbof slave so they would have reverted as they have now to being led by a strong dictator. It is in their blood
:-))
Years ago I recall reading articles about Operation Unthinkable. It was commissioned by Churchill in an effort to understand what an attack on the Soviet Union would look like. Tons of probabilities with no clear consensus on the outcome, so I agree, it would have been bloody. Any success would have had to come from the air, and that is where we had enormous superiority.
Two or three atomic bombs and it would have been over... And nothing they could have done about it-they did not have any nukes of their own until 1949.
> The allies gave nothing away. Stalin had the whip hand and was not going to release it. <
True, FDR was not very assertive at Yalta. But you’re right! When it came to Eastern Europe, Stalin held every last card.
How could have FDR and Churchill played it differently? They could have threatened to cut off lend-lease supplies. But Stalin would have just laughed at that.
I guess FDR could have threatened Stalin with the atomic bomb. But that would have been a bluff. And Stalin was no dummy. He would have called that bluff.
Stalin knew more about the A bomb than Roosevelt. The Manhattan Project was through and totally infiltrated by his agents.
Our Allies were just plain tired, wore out basically. The Russians could muster millions of men. It would have been plain stupid to do so IMHO.
We were the only country with atomic weapons. We could have and should have subdued the planet. If not for communist like the Rosenbergs, we would have.
They wouldn’t have had to burn Moscow. We would have done it for them. Curtis LeMay was the right man for the job.
You’re probably right. Add to that Patton was the most respected general officer the US had from an external standpoint.
I think one of the reasons why the Russians were convinced in 1983 that the US intended to wipe Russia out was because 1) If they had had the capability of doing that to the US, they’d have absolutely done it, and 2) Because they likely thought that in 1945, it would not have been that hard to defeat Russia if the Germans had been remobilized against them. It would have been possible given the right logistics.
The Vietnam war was similar. Tet was a massive loss, and the NVA was four weeks from surrendering. You can’t know it at the time I guess, all history being hindsight.
As a young kid, I recall watching an episode of Kate Smith’s TV program in the early ‘50s, and during a segment which, if memory serves, was called The Cracker Barrel, Smith’s manager, Ted Collins, vigorously advocated bombing Russia.
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