USA-USSR WWIII with conventional weapons

[Guy2]

Let's imagine that nuclear weapons are never invented. Do you think this would have influenced to WWII result other than Japan would have surrendered later.

Do you think that WWIII between USA and USSR with conventional weapons would have been unavoidable. Which year do you think war would have begun.

Which countries would have been at USA side and which at USSR side, and which neutral?

Where would have been the main fronts and where one would have fought the major battles? I think that European front would have been the biggest, what about the others?

What would have been the result of the war? I guess USA and allies would have won. Perhaps after conquering Moscow, or perhaps USSR would have surrendered already before it.

[mowque]

Why weren't nuclear weapons invented?

[The Red]

What would have been the result of the war? I guess USA and allies would have won. Perhaps after conquering Moscow, or perhaps USSR would have surrendered already before it.

This isnt Red Alert any date before the late eighties and NATO is pretty much screwed.

[lonewulf44]

Let's imagine that nuclear weapons are never invented. Do you think this would have influenced to WWII result other than Japan would have surrendered later.

Sure ... a lot could have happened. Korea might have been totally overrun by soviet/communist forces. The USSR might have gained foothold on the Japanese home islands and some sort of N/S Japan developed. Possibly some harder negotiations from Stalin for the post-war Europe as well.

Do you think that WWIII between USA and USSR with conventional weapons would have been unavoidable. Which year do you think war would have begun.
I firmly believe that without witnessing the destruction from the two bombs dropped and the subsequent adoption of MAD, the two sides would come to blows sooner rather than later. Probably mid to late 50's.

Which countries would have been at USA side and which at USSR side, and which neutral?
That's relative to the starting conditions of the war and if the post-war map changes in this TL.

Where would have been the main fronts and where one would have fought the major battles? I think that European front would have been the biggest, what about the others?
A lot depends again on how and where the war starts. I don't see how Germany won't be the major battleground in every case though.

What would have been the result of the war? I guess USA and allies would have won. Perhaps after conquering Moscow, or perhaps USSR would have surrendered already before it.
I'm not so certain of that but depends on timing.

[Fiji]

Without the nukes, I agree that all of Korea and some of Japan end up under soviet control.
And, yes, the two sides come to blows in the 50s. If early enough in the decade, the USSR and PRC are still in bed together, giving Stalin 100 million men to piss away as he sees fit. The US would need to stay in Europe with way more then they had in OTL to counter this. And even then, it's very iffy whether the US and allies will be able to stop this avelange of men.
WWIII is going to be very brutal and casualty wise, it'll make WWII look like a pillow fight.

Actually, I don't see how the west can hold on to Europe. The Communists can afford to loose 1000000 men per day for 3 months. Even if the west manages a 10-to-1 kill ratio, they still loose the continent.

The UK survives since the communists have nothing that comes even close to causing trouble for the RN-USN tag team.

After that, things end up in a de facto truce.

hmm, if China then goes it's own way, we have recreated the 1984 geography. :eek:

[Anaxagoras]

Main battleground will be Europe. Principally Germany but also the Balkans and Scandinavia.

Asia will see considerable fighting as well, but exactly where depends on what the Soviets manage to take in a TL without nuclear weapons. Perhaps Japan will become a battleground. Assuming things in China go more or less as IOTL, the Allies will possibly build up ROC forces on Taiwan to invade mainland China.

Iran would also become a battleground as the two sides vie for control of Middle Eastern oil.

[Landshark]

The Communists can afford to loose 1000000 men per day for 3 months.

I'm sorry but that's just ridiculous.

Even if the quite frankly shitty economies of the Communist Bloc were capable of arming and mobilising that many men no one can afford to lose ninety million men in a three month period, not if they want to continue operating as a functioning society anyway.

You seem to be buying into the idea of the faceless red horde, ready to die for the cause at the command of Stalin or Mao. Even losing a million men in one day is going to put such a strain on the front line Communist army that there's likely to be a mutiny in the ranks.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Main battleground will be Europe. Principally Germany but also the Balkans and Scandinavia.

Asia will see considerable fighting as well, but exactly where depends on what the Soviets manage to take in a TL without nuclear weapons. Perhaps Japan will become a battleground. Assuming things in China go more or less as IOTL, the Allies will possibly build up ROC forces on Taiwan to invade mainland China.

Iran would also become a battleground as the two sides vie for control of Middle Eastern oil.
Whats to stop the US from sending an Army through Siberia, or bombing Moscow to rubble with conventional bombs? The rules for World War II industrialized Warfare would apply here as well. Without nuclear weapons, there is nothing holding the US back from declaring total war on Russia and China, nor on dropping bombs Dresden style on Moscow and Peking. The US can probably outproduce Russia and China in conventional long range bombers, and they just carry tons of high explosives, they can disrupt Stalin's command and control just like they did Hitler's, and Russia's armies were highly dependent on central commands. Having more men, doesn't mean they'll follow commands necessarily, and Chinese troops might not necessarily stay loyal to their government if they find they are dying in droves because of something their government has done, and civilians would be no safer.

[BlackWave]

Whats to stop the US from sending an Army through Siberia, or bombing Moscow to rubble with conventional bombs? The rules for World War II industrialized Warfare would apply here as well. Without nuclear weapons, there is nothing holding the US back from declaring total war on Russia and China, nor on dropping bombs Dresden style on Moscow and Peking. The US can probably outproduce Russia and China in conventional long range bombers, and they just carry tons of high explosives, they can disrupt Stalin's command and control just like they did Hitler's, and Russia's armies were highly dependent on central commands. Having more men, doesn't mean they'll follow commands necessarily, and Chinese troops might not necessarily stay loyal to their government if they find they are dying in droves because of something their government has done, and civilians would be no safer.

Depending on what era this is, shooting down said bombers won't be beyond the capabilities of the Soviets. And an invasion through Siberia? Seriously? The logistics alone would be a nightmare...

[CalBear]

This isnt Red Alert any date before the late eighties and NATO is pretty much screwed.

This really depends on what happened to the nukes. The NATO concept of defense and the entire military structure of the Alliance was built around nukes. If they do not exist, the U.S. and the rest of the Alliance would have a very different structure (not to mention a HUGE pile of money to spend on conventional weapons) to deal with the Pact.

Of course, without nukes, I seriously doubt you make it to the '80s without things being settled on the battlefield long since (probably in the early '60s, if not shortly after Stalin's death).

[boredatwork]

Another suitably horrid point worth mentioning is that nukes are far from being the only weapons of mass destruction - there is no reason in an industrial war scenario why the combatants wouldn't be doing bombing runs with incendiaries, and eventually Chemical/biological weapons as things progress.

[MacCaulay]

The Canadian military actually established the Mobile Striking Force in 1949, with the intention of building an airborne brigade. The thought was that any war fought in the then-near future may involve Soviet bombers staging through capture islands in the north, so the Canadian Army would need an airborne and highly mobile capability to take back said airfields should they be captured in the event of a Third World War.

There were detachments from the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, 3rd Batt., Royal Canadian Rifles, and 2nd Batt., Royal 22e Regiment, along with the short-lived Canadian SAS Company.
They operated out of C-47s originally, then transferred to C-119 Flying Boxcars by the end of their run.


I've got tons of pictures in Osprey's Canadian Airborne Forces since 1942, I'm trying to find some on the web.

[B_Munro]

This isnt Red Alert any date before the late eighties and NATO is pretty much screwed.


When one things changes, others do as well. No nukes, the US ends up building a much larger army in Europe with the trillions in spent OTL on the various parts of the nuclear arsenal.

(One wonders if we would have had as big a demobilization as OTL if there hadn't been the atom bomb to wave at Stalin).

Of course, "no nukes" implies a _lot_ of other things - for one thing, atomic physics is much more backward. Einstein gets run over at a train crossing while daydreaming about light on a bike ride, Neils Bohr gets his neck broken in a football accident, Marie and Pierre Curie go on a boat ride and sink. Not only no nukes and no nuclear power plants, but with a proper understanding of the atom delayed, quite likely the development of the transistor and modern electronics is also greatly delayed.

Frankly, unless you have time travelers working to prevent the development of physics, for any post-1900 POD that does not radically change the world I find it very hard to believe that the development of knowledge about the atom would be so slowed that a nuclear chain reaction would not have been produced in some lab or other until 2009. Now, slowing it down by, say, a generation, so that the first chain reactions are produced in the lab in, say, the early 60's would be interesting, in a Chinese provert sort of way.

Bruce

[Ferrell]

Let's imagine that nuclear weapons are never invented. Do you think this would have influenced to WWII result other than Japan would have surrendered later.

Do you think that WWIII between USA and USSR with conventional weapons would have been unavoidable. Which year do you think war would have begun.

Which countries would have been at USA side and which at USSR side, and which neutral?

Where would have been the main fronts and where one would have fought the major battles? I think that European front would have been the biggest, what about the others?

What would have been the result of the war? I guess USA and allies would have won. Perhaps after conquering Moscow, or perhaps USSR would have surrendered already before it.
The main reason that convensional forces were drawn down post WWII in OTL was the existance of nuclear weapons. Without them, Western governments would be forced to keep (or even expand) WWII levels of conventional forces in the late 40s early 50s; I don't think a US-Soviet war would have been put off longer than that.
I think that the main theaters of war would be:
Europe-Germany/France
Europe-Balkens
Eastern Med/Black Sea Coast/Anatolia
South Central Asia-Iran/India
South East Asia
North Atlantic
North Western Pacific
Siberia/Alaska/Japan
The last one needs some explination: The US could invade Siberia, but with the intended goal of capturing Vadivastok(sp?) with its important naval port and the Soviet's Pacific Fleet Command. This would also cut off (many) supplies and command& control from Soviet forces in northern Japan. I think this would be a difficult, but worthwhile objective.
I don't think the outcome of this war would be anything but devistating to all involved. If one side or another won, then most of the world would be left in ruins, and not completely rebuilt for generations (but probably much more stable); more likely, however, at some point a truce would be called and a tie declared; that would set up the circumstances for another destructive world war a few generations later.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Depending on what era this is, shooting down said bombers won't be beyond the capabilities of the Soviets. And an invasion through Siberia? Seriously? The logistics alone would be a nightmare...
It would make it a two front war for Russia, while they're busy piling on Europe, we're coming in through the back door, stealing their natural gas, oil and coal, and Russia had just been through a pounding during World War II, and they jump back in ten years later while still recovering from the last war? The USA on the otherhand hardly took a scratch, they tremendously expanded their industries. Without nuclear weapons, the USA wouldn't have demobilized its conventional forces as much as their is no nuclear deterent that they could rely on. The Soviets not moving out of Eastern Europe would have made it very clear to the American Public that the Soviets were going to be the next threat after the Nazis, thus a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe would not have come as a great surprise. A non-nuclear post World War II USA would have kept a much larger Army, Navy and Air force than existed in OTL. The Soviets didn't have much in delivery capability and in nuclear weapons in OTL anyway, so nukes would have primarily deterred the Soviets from attacking, had the USA wished to invade the Soviet Union in the 1950s on its own initiative, it could have survived, and beaten the Soviets as their nuclear response would have been feeble anyway. In a world without nukes, the Soviet Red Army would not have been much larger that it already was OTL, as they spend most of their budget on conventional forces anyway, while the USA depended more heavily on nuclear deterent, without it USA conventional forces would have been larger, and a greater investment would have been made in Jet fighters and bombers.

I also think any potential non nuclear World War III would have had to have occured in the 1950s, any later and atomic weapons would have been developed in the 1960s at the latest by somebody. Probably if World War III occured in the 1950s, "Manhattan projects" would have been started in both countries and if the War lasted, say 4 or 5 years, towards the end it would likely have gone nuclear with the first atomic bombings of cities, if the war hasn't been decided by conventional weapons before then.

[Corbell Mark IV]

Point, I don't know the numbers for intercostal shipping in China, but it has to be huge and totally vunerable to the US Navy, subs if nothing else.

[mowque]

Depending on what era this is, shooting down said bombers won't be beyond the capabilities of the Soviets. And an invasion through Siberia? Seriously? The logistics alone would be a nightmare...

Logistics? Come on this is AH. It's like a textual version of Red Alert or something. I say....Soviet invasion of Mexico in this TL!

[CalBear]

Logistics? Come on this is AH. It's like a textual version of Red Alert or something. I say....Soviet invasion of Mexico in this TL!


Thye thing about Siberia until very close to this decade was that there was no "there" there. The resources were technically almost impossible to reach with the equipment available before about 1965, and much of the area was the same as it had been during the reign of Peter the Great.

What had to be done was take Vladivostok, a strip along the Yellow Sea, and maybe a chunk of the Trans-Siberian. That would knock the Soviets clear out of the Pacific, provide a base to move against the Far East Front as needed, and distract a portion of the Red Army.

Overall this would be a clash of totally different military schools of thought. The results are far from a slam dunk either way.

[Landshark]

Once again let me recomend Red Thrust by Steven Zaloga. In all the scenarios presented in the book, except one, NATO training and technological advancement leads to the defeat of the equivalent Soviet forces.

[LeoXiao]

Directly after WW2, the USSR had a bigger army than all the other armies of the involved powers combined. In 1950, they would've still held an overwhelming advantage and could have taken Western Europe with relative ease. Korea would also be Soviet territory and America would be helpless until they did make nukes.

[DoktorDespot]

Directly after WW2, the USSR had a bigger army than all the other armies of the involved powers combined. In 1950, they would've still held an overwhelming advantage and could have taken Western Europe with relative ease. Korea would also be Soviet territory and America would be helpless until they did make nukes.

Yes, and that massive army is going to have its combat efficiency drop dramatically when its no longer receiving a constant influx of American made trucks, grain, boots, clothes, and rations; all of which the soviets lack an immediate quantity to produce on the scale required in such a situation.

Also, the U.S. would have a decided advantage in strategic bombing through the mid 50's, with the USSR lacking sufficient high altitude interceptors to really prevent the US from raining bombs down on soviet military installations.

[CalBear]

Directly after WW2, the USSR had a bigger army than all the other armies of the involved powers combined. In 1950, they would've still held an overwhelming advantage and could have taken Western Europe with relative ease. Korea would also be Soviet territory and America would be helpless until they did make nukes.

There are a number of threads here where we kicked this around. It isn't that cut & dried.

The Western Allied have a major advantage in airpower, and an advancing force would be especially vulnerable to air attack. Directly after WW II the U.S. had somewhere around 5,000 multi engine bombers, with the U.K. not all that far behind. The only Soviet fighter that was an equal to the Mustang was the La-7, and given the relative lack of armament of the Soviet aircraft (2 20mm isn't all that much) that may be a stretch and the Yak 9, which was by far the most numerous PVO design was even less well armed with 1 20mm and 1-2 12.7mm mg. When you throw the Meteor F.3 and P-80 into the mix the Soviet Air Force is at a significant disadvantage.

Does this mean the Western allies win easily (or at all)? No. But to project the strength of the Red Army against the Western armies without considering the rather overwhelming advantage of the USAAF and RAF in the medium and heavy bomber categories, not to mention the potential of Western fighter/bombers with the Tiny Tim rocket (1,500 meter range, with a 500 pound AP bomb as a warhead) as tank killers is ignoring a serious strategic and tactical asset.