re: How insane were Douglas McArthur and Curtis LeMay?

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The whole idea is to kill the bastards

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Utterly false. The point of war is to force someone else to do what you want after negotiations fail.

Destroying stuff and killing people is enormously wasteful.

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Also in retrospect even as terrible as Stalin was, the Nazis were worse

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False. Stalin is responsible for close to 50 million deaths.

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At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win."

Pussified Americans have lost this way of thinking. We apologize for our exceptionality. frick all that! I like winning.

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3 people left Between us and Russia is not winning.

The amount of unsubstantiated presumptions you've made there is staggering.

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As time has shown, the Soviets were containable and predictable.

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This is the attitude of saying, 80 years later, well the USSR eventually collapsed and we didn't, so therefore it was the right move and we knew that all along. That's utter nonsense.

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They did not invade our allies before or after, and at all points during the Cold War understood they were in the more precarious position relative to the 2 superpowers and behaved accordingly. They were largely rational actors who held no delusions about their place in the world, relatively speaking.

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You are completely disregarding the monumentally different context created by the nuclear age. The nuclear age is largely the reason wars were limited to proxies. There are plenty academic studies on the effect of nuclear deterrence as a primary factor in limiting the occurrence of war between major powers. Perhaps you can read works on Stalin and other Bolsheviks and their attitudes towards Soviet foreign policy. They were extremely clever and maniacal. To suggest they were benevolent is monumentally ignorant.

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They did not invade our allies before or after,

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You keep mentioning this as if it's some great distinction. You seem to refer to "our Allies" as only the Western powers. Hard for the USSR to invade those nations that don't border them and have a rabidly anti-Communist state in NS Germany standing in their way. Not to mention the Soviets were in a massive rearmament effort and Stalin's purges in the late 1930's further delayed their military readiness. The Soviets by 1941 were entering a stage of much more modernized weaponry rolling off the production lines. To suggest because they didn't invade Western Europe wholesale prior to WWII that they were therefore benevolent foreign policy actors is asinine and obtuse beyond words.

And I guess you don't consider Poland our ally then, though. Apparently Poland was an important enough ally to justify British and French declarations of war against Germany over, but you ignore the Soviet invasion of Poland, which they agreed to in secret with Germany before September 1, 1939. Again, Stalin was simply more clever in the manner in which he conducted his aggressive foreign policy. And I suppose you don't consider the Finns an ally. Therefore the Soviet attack on Finland is a-ok. Not much international aggression from the Soviets there. To hell with the Finns. I'll just mark you down as having that same attitude towards the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Romanians as well. All invaded by the Soviets prior to U.S. entry into WWII.

I'd also like to hear your justification of the Soviet smashing, with Soviet military forces, of Hungarian and Czech revolts against their Communist puppet governments. The Soviets controlled Eastern and Central Europe following 1945 with puppet governments post-war. I'm not sure what reality you live in in suggesting they were anything other than a tyrannical, aggressive, global threat to freedom and national sovereignty.

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The truth is that we should have played realpolitik and struck a deal with the Germans to end the fighting in the West and then hung the Soviets out to dry.

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No way we would have been able to do this. We were counting on the USSR participating in the land invasion of Japan.

Remember, the Allies decided to win the war in Europe first then focus on Japan. The U.S. was able to win the Pacific essentially single handed, but capitulation due to the atomic bomb was never a given.

If you want to see some jaw dropping stuff, look into the proposed land invasion plans. We were going to need every last Russian peasant involved.

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No way we would have been able to do this. We were counting on the USSR participating in the land invasion of Japan.

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Of course we could have. And had we not been handcuffed to a policy of only accepting absolute and utter capitulation from Germany, we likely could have facilitated the overthrow of the Hitler regime and the installation of a different German government. However, even the resistance forces that attempted to assassinate Hitler had no intentions of signing on to any unconditional surrender that involved the Soviets, thus guaranteeing a fight to the bitter end, even from those who opposed Hitler from within Germany.

And the United States was actually very much concerned as to limiting the Soviet involvement in the Pacific war to keep the Communist expansion into East Asia at a minimum.

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Remember, the Allies decided to win the war in Europe first then focus on Japan.

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Not sure what this has to do with anything being discussed.

McArthur was a narcissistic moron who had blips of great military strategy in a career more filled with impulsive and poorly thought out ideas.

That’s just IMO obviously.

Fun Fact, Gen. Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove is based off of Lemay


ETA: Also interesting Kennedy V Lemay - Cuban Missile Crisis

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Yeah and if we dropped fricking 50 of them during Korea what message does it send to the word about the acceptability of using nuclear weapons in a non total war scenario?

Maybe try thinking more than two steps in front of you.

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Well, using that reasoning if we were willing to drop 50 on Korea , seems like overkill, then we would be willing to drop 50 on any nation that even tried to develop their own nuclear weapons, thereby insuring that only we had the capability to do so.

I mean logically speaking, we could have dropped atomic weapons on Moscow immediately after WWII and avoided the Cold War altogether.

I'm not advocating that this is what we should have done, I'm simply saying IF we had of.

You mis-state MacArthur’s position and only tell half the story.

His point was that a country should not be willing to commit troops unless it is willing to use every tool at its disposal to win a war (and in Korea, that most likely involved the use of nuclear weapons near the Yalu). Nothing short of that standard is adequate, and a country should either not enter in the first place OR be willing to use everything at its disposal to win if necessary. Limited war is largely fruitless and wasteful, and American military history since 1950 has proven him prescient in that regard.

He was among the first of his generation to grasp (and had re-learned a lesson that Sherman and Grant learned 85 years before him) that the deadliest aspect of modern war is length, not weaponry or brutality. His approach also necessitates that when a country commits to war, it really commits. Not this half-assed imperial boutique army shite that Truman and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Bush Jr. and Obama have loved.

Your counter-factual is absurd on its face. First, nine figures dead - who? With what delivery system? Why?

Second, I propose another, probably more realistic one: that tens of millions would not have died in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Wars has we obliterated part of their country along the Yalu and de-stabilized their regime. And tens millions of North Koreans wouldn’t have suffered horridly and died at the hands of the most brutal regime in the modern world.