I was at a party when a retired military officer began exclaiming: "After VE Day, we should have allied with the Germans to crush the Soviet Union." I kept my yap shut because the party was being held in a good friend's house. I don't like to cause scenes in private spaces.
But Sweet Mother of Bastet, when is this old tired line of John Bircher horseshit ever going to die out? Other than those mouth-breathing morons, does anyone truly believe that the American people had an appetite to try and conquer the USSR?
Look at the distances involved in both fighting such a war and logistically supplying the conflict. Look at the number of men the Germans committed to the Eastern Front-- in comparison, the amount of men they committed to fight the Western Front against the Anglo-American forces was almost paltry.
The American people were solidly behind the war effort because the perfidious Japanese had attacked us and the Germans had declared war. The American people were willing to do what it took to win. Americans wanted their men to come home in 1945, not engage in another tough war. Attacking the Soviet Union would have been an act that surpassed the Japanese for treachery.
It would have been akin to Wyatt Earp shooting Doc Holliday in the back immediately after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The American people would have never stood for it and certainly wouldn't once the butcher's bill began coming due.
Those who believe such a war would have been a good idea, let alone winnable, probably should be living in a padded room with an IV feeding them a mixture of thorazine and morphine.
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3 comments:
First, you'd have to fight the Russians, *then* you'd have to deal with the land itself.
There's the story of a Russian advisor attached to a hapless Egyptian Army battalion going up against the Israelis in ampersand war. They get their ass handed to them. Advisor is asked, What now?, responds, Fall back and counter-attack. They get clobbered again. So there's rinse and repeat until the advisor finally says, In Russia, we wait for it to snow.
There's Minard's graphic map of Napoleon's campaign which shows geography, temperature and the size of the army...422 thousand strong going in..and 10 making it back alive
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Minard.png
Nobody looks at maps anymore, do they? As you stated, the logistics would be mind boggling, particularly after the resource intense war. One reason America became the industrial leader in the 50's and 60's was due to Europe and Asia rebuilding their base. Trying to move troops and supplies overseas, and then through the USSR would have been foolish, to say the least. If someone brings up, 'but we could just nuke them' doesn't realize we had to fly the bombs to their target - there were no ICBMs back then - and getting bombers (and their escort) to target brings up different (but no less daunting) logistical issues. I do realize I've had a little more experience with how the Earth is laid out, but it's not that difficult to get an idea of the distances just by looking at a globe.
The Soviets had tens of thousands of top-notch tanks in Europe -- well protected, well armed tanks that could turn our Sherman tanks into jack-in-the-boxes with one shot from distances where the Sherman's main gun couldn't even scratch the Russian tank's armor. The Germans had nothing left. Maybe a few hundred tanks that could have been made operational. A few hundred thousand old men and children who could be armed, maybe. No industrial base left -- it was all rubble or in the Soviet sector. Meanwhile we had maybe 500 tanks in all of Europe that could take on Soviet tanks 1 on 1. The Soviets were at the end of their logistical tether and could not have sustained any kind of extended campaign, but we had no way of knowing that. All we knew was that they'd sent dozens of very scary JS-3 tanks parading through Berlin at their victory parade -- tanks we had no way of countering with any weapon in our arsenal. We didn't know that this was all of them that existed at the time.
As for nuclear weapons, we blew up two Japanese cities because two nuclear weapons was all we had. We had one uranium bomb and one plutonium bomb. It would have been months before we had two more, because we were still bringing up plutonium breeding reactors and perfecting how to extract the plutonium from the irradiated cores. What we had would have in no way stopped the Red Army from finishing the job and conquering all of Europe. We were just happy they stopped moving west and stayed behind their line. If they hadn't, there was fuck all we could have done about it at the time, because we barely had enough men and weaponry to deal with the rag-tag remnants of the German army that the Soviets hadn't already destroyed -- nevermind dealing with the army that had destroyed 75% of the German military might before we even hit French soil at Normandy.
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