Can this picture from 77 (or so) years ago have real relevance to today's headlines?

[Stinky The Clown]

That's the Yalta Conference. From left to right we have Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin. They were allies. Two very close allies and one of convenience. No matter the differences between the two and the one, they worked together to defeat an existential threat - Adolf Hitler.

Did the US or the UK love and trust Stalin? Nope. Not even a little bit. But an alliance with him was the best path forward to Berlin and the defeat of Hitler.

Please read the history before you comment here. The notion above is overly simplistic of what transpired back then. Please also consider the prescient General Patton, who was ultimately fired for his push to not end the war with Hitler's defeat but rather to keep advancing until the Brits and the Americans reached Moscow and ended that threat, too. Again, read the history. It is a fascinating story. Patton was right

But back to today. The headlines are what I'll call the Liz Cheney story. If this were a morality play, she would be reprising the part of Stalin. She can play a big role in defeating the zombies (sorry for mixing metaphors - or not ) that now inhabit the corpse of the GOP.

I think supporting her by staying out of her way would help her cause. If and when she is successful, we can deal with her. But for now (another metaphor, I guess) the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Personally, I won't invite her to tea, but I support what she is doing in this moment and wish her success, again, in this moment.

[PortTack]

1. Exactly!! We would not have won WWII had it not been for the Russians

But following the war, the US and Russia parted ways.

Politics and wars make strange bedfellows

[Wounded Bear]

2. No, Patton was not "right"...

The Russian army was larger than the whole US Army fighting on two fronts. No way we could have marched to Moscow.

Your analogy has some validity, but the "cooperation" between the Allies was not that close.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. Sorry you have a headache. But from the OP there is this:

"Please read the history before you comment here. The notion above is overly simplistic of what transpired back then."

Your point about Patton is the flip side of a debate that remains unsettled. We had nukes and we had just used them. Many disagreed, but Patton's viewpoint was certainly worthy of debate.

[Wounded Bear]

9. When Berlin fell, we did not have nukes...

in fact, the first active test of a real bomb didn't happen until two months after Germany surrendered. After Nagasaki, there were no more bombs extant and wouldn't have been for quite some time. In some ways, Truman was bluffing. We were lucky that Hirohito fell for it.

And besides, there would have been pushback on using nukes against Europeans.

Yes, the OP analogy is "overly simplistic" TBS. I have read some history.

[rzemanfl]

11. In 1947 the United States had seven atomic bombs in its inventory.

The people who knew how to do the final assembly in flight were spread out all over and it would take time to gather them. I am sure of this, I covered it in a Masters thesis I wrote years ago.

[thucythucy]

16. We should also note that FDR and the US military

were desperate to have the USSR join us in the war against Japan once Hitler was defeated.

As you point out, at Yalta it wasn't at all certain an atomic bomb would work (and the Trinity blast wouldn't happen until the Potsdam Conference many months later). Even then, the US was able to manufacture exactly three nuclear devices in 1945--one exploded as a test, and two dropped on Japan.

The standard US narrative is that it was only the dropping of the atomic bombs that led to the immediate Japanese surrender. However, the Russian attack on the Japanese army in Manchuria (which was actually a more dangerous military concentration than the home forces in Japan) was also a major factor. The Japanese government had been counting on Stalin to act as a go-between during negotiations with the allies. When the Soviets attacked Manchuria and began the push into China and Korea, it was obvious this wouldn't happen and that the Japanese army on the Asian mainland was doomed.

Had we taken Patton's advice, we would have been left to face the more than a million strong Japanese army in Manchuria and China essentially on our own. In fact, Stalin, faced with another western invasion, might well have provided aid to the Japanese, including landing Russian troops in Japan to ward off our invasion there.

Not to mention the Communist parties in France, Italy and the Balkans--which had been major players in the resistance to German occupation--would have turned on us and made life behind the lines miserable. The various resistance movements had tied down more than two dozen German divisions, keeping them from both the eastern and western fronts. They would have been just as much a threat to us. In fact, it was only because Stalin refused to intervene that the Greek communists were unsuccessful in seizing power in Athens in 1945. He refused because he'd made an agreement with Churchill to assign Greece to the British sphere of influence, in return for assigning Romania and Bulgaria to the Soviets. Even so, the British had to land thousands of troops in Greece to keep that country from going communist.

Patton was delusional if he thought a war against the Soviets would have been a walkover. Ike was absolutely right to refuse to consider his ridiculous proposal.

[druidity33]

15. The Russian army at that point

was a demoralized, starving, rapidly diminishing due to sickness and disease, totally under and unequipped through the duration of the war... a total suffering mass. Though they consisted of a larger force, i think if we could have fed them as we went along, they would have gladly surrendered.

[rzemanfl]

19. They seemed to have been healthy enough to rape a lot of German women. n/t

[Wounded Bear]

20. Not sure where you get your info, but it's wrong...

The Russians maybe were that way in the fall/winter of 1941/42, but by 1945 they were the largest and one of the most well equipped forces in the world. They had several models of tank that were better than the Sherman, the primary AFV in our army. There katyusha rocket battalions were a terror.

Repeating what the Germans tried in 1941 against a vastly improved Soviet force would have been the height of folly.

[Hekate]

3. Thank you, Stinky. ...

Some of these posters make me feel so old, and not in a good way.

[Aristus]

4. That ignores one huge, uncomfortable reality:

if Patton had been allowed to attack the Soviet Union, we would have suffered a substantial defeat at the hands of the Red Army. We've fallen into the trap of thinking that we defeated the Nazis with a little help from Russia. It was Russia that defeated the Nazis with a little help from us. The huge battles we fought on the Western Front, including and especially the Battle of the Bulge, would have been swallowed up without a trace on the Eastern Front.

Patton was stupid, and Ike was right to relieve him. He was too narrow-minded to see the big picture: the Red Army would have defeated us on the battlefield, and then would have pushed into Western Europe to make the entire continent, and not just the eastern half, a buffer state for the Soviet Union.

Fortunately for everyone, cooler heads than Patton's prevailed.

Was the Cold War that followed messy, frustrating, and destructive? Hell yes. But people seem to think that any alternative to the Cold War would have been better, instead of substantially worse.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. See post 5

In hindsight, I should have left Patton out of this. The point is allying with Russia for a common cause.

[Aristus]

8. If we're going to leave Patton out of it, we should also leave nukes out of it.

Any discussion of nuking the USSR before they developed their own weapons would be immoral in the extreme. And would cost us allies the world over.

The narrative would run: The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Of course they got nuked. The Soviet Union is an ally. Why nuke them? If the US is going to nuke its own allies, what possible credibility is it going to have in the post-WWII world?

[Kaleva]

10. Western Allies would most likely have quickly gained air superority.

The Red Army would have been unable to maneuver during the day without incurring heavy losses and also be adequately supplied from the rear.

Western Allied naval forces would have been able to move into the Baltic Sea and operate there with impunity and possibly the Black Sea (with Turkey's permission) also.

It's a mistake to think of a hypothetical post WWII conflict with the Soviet Union as being solely a ground operation.

[rzemanfl]

12. How many of us here would not be because our fathers and grandfathers died in such a war? n/t

[Kaleva]

23. I think of what Mark Twain once said

Something like "I was dead for billions of years before I was born and it did not bother me in the least.".

[rzemanfl]

26. Interesting. Thanks. n/t

[Aristus]

13. If we turned on the Soviet Union and attacked them, I don't know how many allies we'd keep.

Nobody was a huge fan of Stalin or the USSR, but everyone other than Patton wanted the war to end. The UK almost didn't have a choice. They were bankrupt and exhausted from six years of war. Churchill's ouster and the Conservatives' loss exemplifies that best. The Royal Navy was still formidable, but I'm not sure a war of choice in the icy waters surrounding the USSR is something they would have pushed for.

Air superiority may have garnered us a win on the battlefield, but it would have been of dubious value in the guerilla war that would have almost certainly followed a Soviet defeat. If we occupied the USSR, it would take huge resources to keep the occupation going, guerilla warfare and all. And if we didn't occupy the Soviet Union, they'd bounce back the way they did against the Nazis in 1943.

This makes for a nice little intellectual exercise. But too much discussion on the subject starts to sounds like the Vietnam-Era "We could have won the war if the politicians had just let us." Which ignores the will of the people we would be fighting against.

[Kaleva]

22. This discussion is a nice little intellectual exercise

and I enjoy participating in it from time to time.

Take care!

[Aristus]

24. You too!

[soryang]

18. Air power is over rated

We had complete air superiority for all practical purposes in North Korea during the Korean conflict and couldn't dislodge the PLA.

It really wasn't that effective in the European theater during WWII either in terms of stopping German war production.

How well did it work in Vietnam?

There are limits to air power in a conflict dominated by ground forces.

You can make a country suffer with air power, especially the general population, but a country with strategic depth can weather it, and ultimately wear down the effort.

[Kaleva]

21. North Korea's aim was to take the entire peninsula which they couldn't

Your comment:

"It really wasn't that effective in the European theater during WWII either in terms of stopping German war production."

The aim was never to completely stop war production but to severely damage it.

"How well did it work in Vietnam?"

Pretty well. Superior air power prevented the NVA and Viet Cong from ever defeating the Americans and South Vietnamese like what happened to the French earlier. Air power was key in defeating the Tet Offensive.

[soryang]

25. China took back the North and held it

That's all they wanted to do, to preserve their sphere of influence. US air power could not dislodge them.

The US lost the Vietnam War, maybe you didn't notice. The US lost hundreds of tactical bombers and literally thousands of helicopters.

All the tactical fighter and bomber pilots captured became the achillees heel of the US in trying to leave Vietnam.


The powerful image by Hubert (Hugh) Van Es shows South Vietnamese boarding a CIA Air America helicopter during the evacuation of Saigon."

[Kaleva]

27. You are ignoring the reason why the Korean War started.

North Korea invaded South Korea but lost the 6 week long Battle of Pusan Perimeter in part because of Allied air superiority.

The 1968 Tet Offensive was a massive defeat for the NVA and VC again in part because of American air superiority.

More recently, the tide turned against the the expanding ISIS caliphate when Allied air power was brought against them.

"Isis lost more than 1,500 men in Kobane for no apparent gain. “Kobane was the first real battle in which American air power was deployed to support a group, in this case the Kurds, on the ground,” said Shiraz Maher, the director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London. “I think the number of people Isis threw into the campaign therefore reflected their desire to show the Americans they were prepared to fight hard. Ultimately, of course, the campaign was a very wasteful one.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/23/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-isis-caliphate

[soryang]

30. I'm not ignoring anything

Link to tweet

and the US couldn't dislodge the Chinese PLA.

Tet was a pyrrhic victory, the war was lost in spite of US air superiority.

Kobane, really? Comparing this to a proposed invasion of Russia?

[CatWoman]

7. great analogy

[Girard442]

14. Stalin was undeniably horrible to his own people, but what else did he do to deserve annihilation?

Granted the U.S.S.R. tried to spread Communism worldwide, which wasn't so great, but the U.S.A. and allies weren't so squeaky clean during the Cold War either.

[Elessar Zappa]

29. He was a mass murderer.

No comparison between the US and Stalin-era USSR.

[Girard442]

31. Yes, Stalin was a thoroughly evil man, on a par with Hitler.

But before you get too self-righteous, look up the estimates of civilian and military casualties in:
The Korean War
The War in Viet Nam
The two Wars in Iraq.

None of those countries attacked us, by the way.

[Retired Engineer Bob]

17. I've read a bit, so here's my $0.02 worth

Patton was a great tactician, not so great strategist. And certainly had little sense of political reality. The war with Germany was over, unconditional surrender achieved. And we still had the war with Japan going on. Many US military in Europe would have been sent to fight the Japanese.

There’s no way in hell folks in the USA would have supported an attack on Russia. If Truman supported such a thing, he would have been impeached.

Besides, he died in a car accident Germany late ‘45. Patton would not have been around to lead his wonderful war.

[Tommy Carcetti]

28. Even as someone who has relatives who were terribly persecuted by Stalin...

...we obviously made the right choice to ally with him under those very limited circumstances.

That's not to say Stalin was in any way an honest broker. He had previously allied with Hitler, and even when he broke with Hitler, his fight against him provided him cover to do some absolutely atrocious deeds to his own people.

In my mind, there's no doubt that Stalin was every bit the monster that Hitler was.

But even still, for us it was strategically the right call.