re: Post WW2 What-if Scenario

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They had more tanks with no ability to supply them any distance from railheads without our trucks.

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That was true early in the war.

By the late war they'd reestablished their own factories in Siberia out of reach of German (and thus our) bombers that would've supplied them just fine post lend-lease.

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They had tens of thousands of tubes of artillery but almost no Fire Direction control. They depended on just lining up pieces of arty hub to hub to get the same effect as one battery of American guns - and taking 5x-10x the amount of time to execute a fire mission.

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This is true. Its also true that they had so much of it to pair with battle hardened leadership that they could and did just maul anything in their path by the late war. We're talking not 2:1 advantages in men and material, it would've been 3 or 4:1 relative to American forces in theater.

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Without our oil, food, iron, trucks and the thousands of other items we gave them to sustain their war effort, Russia would have been easy pickings.

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By late war they had all of those things because the Germans couldn't threaten the caucauses meaning all that oil was under their control along with all the resources of eastern europe when Patton wanted to roll.

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And we haven't even mentioned yet the one military service that has won us every war we've been victorious in since the Civil War (as much as it pains me to admit it) - the United States Navy.

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The soviets didnt need outside supplies. They controlled all the resources they needed from within the borders of the nations they'd conquered at the time of the surrender.

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People don't realize how strong the United States was in 1945 compared to the rest of the world. Our oil production capacity alone dwarfed every other nation's by a significant margin.

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This is true. Its also true that the Soviets had plenty for the needs of their armed forces unless we had some means to take the oil field production I mentioned previously offline. Its also worth mentioning that our oil had to be shipped across the atlantic in drums and driven all the way from the channel ports to wherever the front lines were. Thats a massive logistical chain.

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The only thing preventing the US from annihilating the Soviet Union in 1945/1946 if war had broken out was political will.

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You left out the 6M Soviet battle hardened troops between us and Moscow.

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What if the allies took out the USSR while they were weak after Berlin fell?

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We could've been in Moscow by Christmas. What could go wrong...?




Cue the 1812 Overture...

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I think that you have this a bit twisted. FDR was the commie coddler who jumped up to save Stalin's corrupt war machine.

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You're cerntianly not wrong regarding FDR, but Churchill instigated it all and dragged the US into the conflict. Poland was regional dispute over a small piece of land that Churchill turned into ww2. FDR had a commie advisor and the rest is history.... or is it?

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True.

But without them do we defeat Hitler?

I'm not at all convinced.

If the soviets fall, Germany takes the oil fields and all those divisions shift west with much of their industry likely in underground factories and they have the time and resources to really start utilizing some of their jet and other advanced technology platforms.

Do we ever get the air superiority needed to launch D-Day? Does it get smashed on the beaches if he has 10-20 additional armored divisions to counterattack with?

Its a bad situation for us if the Russians and Germans aren't bleeding each other out in the east.

WW2 wasnt a scenario where there was a perfect partner available. The Brits were limited and spread thin and at war with Hitler, the Germans were totalitarians set on expansion and the soviets were just as bad with different ideology (just ask the Ukranians).

But assuming we side with the brits, we cant partner with the Germans against the Soviets because they were already at war, so the path and history were already kind of pointing us down a specific road IMO.

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Do you really think that we're better off with the USSR winning ww2 ? Germany was trying to extinguish the greatest threat to the west!

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but Churchill instigated it all and dragged the US into the conflict. Poland was regional dispute over a small piece of land that Churchill turned into ww2. FDR had a commie advisor and the rest is history.... or is it?

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I see - Neville Chamberlain reincarnated?

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What if the allies took out the USSR while they were weak after Berlin fell? Would the world be a more peaceful place?

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We'd be like 50 million people less dead and more peaceful. And yes. Communists are evil.

No iron curtain, no US containment policy, no NATO.

Seems like it at least should have been seriously considered.

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quote:The war machine needed a boogeyman if not the Soviet Union it would have been some other country. Think about the money made in the forty years after the war ended. You think the USSR was a fake "boogeyman"? This shows the true degree of failure in our education system. The Soviet Union is one of the most unambiguous examples of barbarism, brutality, inhumanity, corruption, and authority through terror. They are the most legitimate example of an international threat to human freedom and prosperity in modern history.

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I think you’re misreading his comment. You’re both essentially correct.

I guess simpleton Gen Whatever's don't understand the complete lack of logistical capacity of the Soviet Union. Or the American industrial capabilities in '45. Or the American ability to degrade (if not outright eliminate) what industrial and transportation systems the Soviets actually possessed. Or the complete lack of a navy meant when facing a superpower who had the most powerful navy in the history of the world. The "muh Soviet landmass" or "6million troops!" aren't even discussing the correct topics.

How many barrels of oil did the US and Russia produce in '45? How many refineries did each possess?

How many dosages of penicillin did each produce that year?

What was the relative percentages of AFVs or combat airplanes were fit for duty?

How many tons of steel did America produce compared to the USSR in '44 and '45?

How many portable radios did the average Russian infantry regiment have compared to the Americans? I guess that command and control is just an insignificant matter.

Do you think when America drove into Soviet territory and liberated populaces such as Ukraine we would have been as stupid as the Nazis in our treatment of them? Or do you think we'd have a ready made pool of manpower willing to fight along side us? How about Hungary? Czechoslovakia?

Anyone who thinks the Russians were even in the same stratosphere as America militarily/industrially/technologically in 1945 have no clue what they were talking about.

I've often wondered if America should not have helped the USSR and instead let the Nazi anaconda try to swallow the Soviet elephant.

The Roosevelt administration had a lot of Communist sympathizers including his wife.