So the USSR takes all of Continental Europe? You'd think NATO would be able to at least keep them from crossing the Pyrenees into Iberia. Either way, the Soviets aren't keeping it for long.
Omnicide: World War III In 1953
- Thread starter Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
- Start date
Nothing, I think, could prevent the Allies from re-entering Europe after it was lost (which no one doubted large parts of it would be). The interesting question is, how far east can they push? Moscow is out of the question. Poland? What used to be Berlin? The Rhine? And what will they find the further east they go?
Iberia might prove an exception.
And no, the Allied counterattack will not be long in coming, certainly no longer than OTL's WWII (4 years)
To quote the opening post...
That's mildly concerning to say the least.
How could the Soviet Union keep fight a major war for 8 years when all their major industrial centers have been destroyed? In 1953 the Soviets hadn't even recovered from WWII yet.
The biggest spoiler I noticed was that the ceasefire was between NATO and a still existing USSR.
That's still a very long time when they are under nuclear bombardment. I'd be surprised if they would be able to fully take France.
Simple, by rooting all available resource from occupied territory, since Soviet made it all the way to British strait in this TL.
I don't see why Allies will stop before star and stripes were raised at Kremlin. Lots of American boys would die from Soviet nukes, public outrage will made Pearl Harbor looked mild by comparison.
I can see the Soviets reaching the French Atlantic coast were this 1950 or ‘51 or earlier, but not 1953. Compared to those earlier dates, American conventional forces in Europe are a bit beefier and - far more importantly - VERY thoroughly integrated with tactical nukes.
Except they largely had? Mark Harrison in his paper on Soviet recovery made the point that Soviet GDP, GDP-per-capital, and industrial indicators had returned to their pre-war levels by 1948. Agricultural indicators were back to their pre-war levels in the year before Stalin’s death. Only the service economy wasn’t all the way back there, but it had made it most of the way.
Though SAC dropping atom bombs all over everything represent a rather severe complication to that…
Except they largely had? Mark Harrison in his paper on Soviet recovery made the point that Soviet GDP, GDP-per-capital, and industrial indicators had returned to their pre-war levels by 1948. Agricultural indicators were back to their pre-war levels in the year before Stalin’s death. Only the service economy wasn’t all the way back there, but it had made it most of the way.
Though SAC dropping atom bombs all over everything represent a rather severe complication to that…
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bguy
Donor
IOTL Dulles recommended at a NSC meeting held on February 11, 1953, to grant General Clark's request to use tactical nuclear weapons on a concentration of Chinese troops in the Kaesong area. (The Truman Administration had been treating the Kaesong area as a sanctuary to help facilitate the armistice negotiations, and thus that area hadn't been heavily bombed like the rest of North Korea had.)
The Joint Chiefs themselves were apparently skeptical that even atomic bombs would be of much value against dug in troops, and General Vandenburg instead recommended that if atomic weapons were to be used that they be used instead on Chinese air bases in Manchuria (which would be done in support of a general UN offensive to push the armistice line from the 38th Parallel to the "waist" of Korea (the line from Sinanju to Hungnam.) The JCS apparently didn't see much value in using nuclear weapons on targets in North Korea proper precisely because everything worth bombing in that country had already been leveled.
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Respectfully it's hard to understood that. In 1940 the Soviet Union had a population of around 180,000,000 people. They lost over 26,000,000 people in the war, about 2/3 of them young men, and millions more with physical, and psychological problems. The demographic problems had to be more lasting than that even with the annexations of Moldova, the Baltic States, Kaliningrad, and Eastern Poland. The damage to infrastructure in the territory the Germans occupied was enormous, along with frontline cities like Leningrad. It's impossible to believe that damage was repaired by 1953.
With the problems in Ukraine how could agricultural production be back to pre-war levels? Granted they had fewer mouths to feed, but the Soviets had severe food shortages during WWII, and wartime mobilization was massively disruptive. I have to wonder were these figures put together by those statisticians that Khruschev said could mold shit into bullets.
This is excellent point, as there was a famine post war that lasted until early 48 and cost almost one million lives, further weakening the Soviets short term
It's impossible to believe... because you say so?
Soviet economic recovery is not out of the ordinary with the European norm, even in nations which suffered proportionally worse. The only country in Europe I can find which had NOT returned to it's pre-war level of industrial output, GDP-per-head, and GDP overall was Germany, which hit that point in 1954. By the standards of other European countries, the Soviet economy of 1945 was not especially depressed. Its growth had been knocked back by ten years, but some other countries had lost more. The Netherlands, for example, required three times the growth-rate to reach its pre-war level when it did so. For the Soviets to have achieved it is hardly unbelievable. Especially given it's incorporation of both Axis industry and lend-lease technology into its reconstruction. In fact, with those prior European examples in mind, it's a bit of a indictment of the command economy that it couldn't manage a faster recovery despite such incorporations.
What problems in Ukraine? The '46 famine had ended by the harvest of '47. The back of the UPA insurgency had likewise been broken in 1947 and by 1949 it had dissolved into small, uncoordinated bands hiding in the Ukrainian part of the Carpathian Mountains, too far away to affect Soviet agriculture.
I think I'll go with the actual hard numbers and statistics put together by professional economic historians over that of gutfeels and "but it sounds wrong to me!" logic.
And besides, why does it really matter in this specific situation? Whether it's fully recovered or not, the US is about to nuke it all into the ground in the first few months of war anyway.
It was, in fact, over by early-'48 and there's no evidence it appreciably weakened the Soviet Union.
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I am skeptical the USSR can totally drive France off the continent, especially if it's going to war on relatively short notice. But I'll wait and see how the TL turns out.
Anyways, I'm quite interested in this phase of the war- we'll probably see the USSR try to fight a "broken-backed war" of resistance and I'm curious how that'll go.
Yeah, lasting THAT long is questionable. Then again, maybe six of those 8 years is just the Americans slowly winding their way through the nuclear wasteland of Europe before they finally dig the soviet government out of some bunker in the Urals.
Anyways, I'm quite interested in this phase of the war- we'll probably see the USSR try to fight a "broken-backed war" of resistance and I'm curious how that'll go.
While I am skeptical that the USSR can totally drive France off the continent - because of all the tactical nukes - why does the "short notice" matter? The Soviets military formations were already overstrength in 1953 compared to where the West thought they were* and their mobilization plan called for the entire active army to be fully-manned, deployed, and combat-ready by M-Day+30 even starting from a much lower strength level. Both the Russian Empire and the Soviets had proven able to implement such plans in the past under far less favorable circumstances. If it wasn't for the effective integration of battlefield nuclear weapons into NATO plans, the initial ground war would basically be a walk for the Soviets.
*WAllied intelligence estimates of the Soviet military's strength in 1953 still placed it at 4 million. In fact, it was 5.7 million. They mistakenly thought the bulking up of forces they could see in Eastern Europe and along the Soviet frontiers in the Middle and Far East were coming at the expense of slimming down the units in the interior.
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Nothing. The thing just vaporizes with the rest of the surrounding area.
I wonder how World War III ITTL will affect the rest of the world for years to come. Like, how does the internet develop? What does pop culture look like?