First and foremost, there is no overwhelming Soviet manpower advantage and the ratio to the West is close to a 1:1 basis than what I've seen suggested within this thread. The Soviets did have more
divisions, but that is merely a paper advantage given they were managing 2-5,000 men per division at this time as compared to over 10,000 for your regular American unit. By late 1942/early 1943
the Soviets had effectively exhausted their manpower according to reports delivered to Stalin.
A translated summary of it is here:
That ignores that from 1943 to 1945, 9 million fit males came of age within the pre-war borders of the USSR (of which a significant proportion were admittedly conscripted into the Red Army as it was) and a further 3 million were coming of age annually up through to 1947. As it was, when the war ended the Soviets had around one-and-a-half million men from the 1945 class of conscripts in replacement training from the first of the bi-annual call-ups. The decline in strength of rifle divisions was the result of a conscious decision to divert manpower into reinforcing and creating more artillery and tank units, not from an absolute shortage of men.
Next, we move to the nuclear issue. Serial production was already underway by the end of 1945 and for the first half of that year the masses of B-24s and B-17s the U.S. had used to break Nazi Germany were still present. To understand why this is important, consider the following:
Take out Warsaw, Lublin and Lwow, and the entire logistics net of the RKKA West of the Vistula immediately collapses as they've just lost their rail connections to the USSR proper.
That firstly ignores that it took
years for those B-24s and B-17s to break Nazi Germany. The British planners for Unthinkable, who were intimately familiar with the capabilities and limitations of air power operating against lines of communication having had ample experience with it against the Germans, did not believe they could achieve such a total collapse of Soviet logistics so rapidly. Additionally, looking at that map I'm seeing rail lines that would still be available to the USSR in the event Warsaw, Lublin, and Lwow were destroyed. For, the lines going through East Prussia and that one I can see that runs between Lublin and Warsaw. This is, of course, assuming the atomic bombers are not intercepted and shot down.
The Soviets could not recover from this due the following:
92.7% of all Railway rails were Lend Lease sourced.
81.6% of all Locomotives were Lend Lease sourced.
80.7% of all Railcars were Lend Lease sourced
Classic case of lying with statistics. Those figures are in comparison to Soviet production during the war, not for usage. Overwhelmingly, the Soviets used their domestic pre-war stocks throughout the war, with lend-lease inputs only being enough to cover losses. Locomotives is a good case in point: per
The Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Russo-German War 1941–1945, the Soviets started the war with 24,000 locomotives, lost an estimated 2,000 to the Germans during the course of the war, and through lend-lease received 1,900. An additional 2,000 locomotives, as well as 120,000 railcars, were subsequently captured in the late-stages of the war.
59% of all AV Gas also came from the West, which is critical as Air Power and Maneuver Warfare by Martin van Creveld states that 87% of German counterattacks against Soviet exploitation forces happened outside the range of all fire support except for the Soviet air force. With such a steep reduction in AV Gas, the VVS will be unable to play this vital role and most Soviet attacks will collapse and be destroyed in the face of Anglo-American counter-attacks. This is already no much of an issue, given overwhelming Western air advantage.
I've always wondered where that 59% figure comes from, since the numbers shipped and consumed don't support it. Between June 1941 and May 1945, the Soviets record expenditures of just under
3 million tons of high-octane aviation fuel and
received 1,197,587 tons, which works out to around 40%. Most discussions on this also ignore the fact that American lend-lease furnished the Soviets with six refinery complexes outfitted with the catalytic cracking processes for the domestic production of high-octane aviation fuel, but those refineries were still there and still producing when lend-lease stopped and would still be providing large quantities of high-octane avgas to the Soviets. This is further ignoring that the capture and retrieval of German and Romanian petro-chemical industries would have furnished the Soviets with further capacity for the production of high-octane avgas, so using the metrics of 1941-1944 for Soviet mid-1945 avgas production is flawed to begin with.
I should throw in the caveat that I'm having quite some trouble tracking down hard numbers for Soviet aviation gas productive capabilities in 1945. We have a good idea of what the demand would be: that 3 million figure gives us a average of 750,000 tons consumed annually. But the closest I can find is a CIA report from 1950 which gives a annual production figure of 970 thousand tons in 1949, excluding Romanian and German refineries, and who knows how accurate it actually is. If anyone reading this can dig up some hard numbers on this matter, ideally from something using Soviet archival material, it'd be appreciated.
Your implication that the German counterattacks against Soviet exploitation forces is likewise dubious, since the VVS was unable to do the sort of flexible CAS the WAllies did, instead generally doing stuff like interdiction patrols in set regions. This seems to be taking a correlation for a causation. By and large those German counterattacks were stopped not by the Soviet VVS but by Soviet mechanized forces conducting the exploitation. Fire support for such efforts was largely provided by assault guns and tank destroyers, not by aviation.
"There was evidence indicating that the Soviet economy was weak. Even the Soviet government's published statistics, which were thought to be generally exaggerated, revealed an economy far behind the west. Soviet diplomatic actions in the immediate post-war period, whether in the form of attempts to gain more favourable conditions for Lend-Lease payments, Soviet lobbying for a large German reparations payment, Soviet demands to gain Austrian oil, or the transportation of basic infrastructure from conquered eastern Europe to the Soviet Union all indicated economic deficiencies. General Walter Bedell Smith, a future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, estimated that it would be another 10 to 15 years before the Soviets had recovered from the last war. The CIA's Office of Research and Estimates (ORE) tried to appraise the Soviet Union in terms of war potential, looking at the industrial strength, technology, and possible bottlenecks to increased production. The ORE concluded that Soviet economic weaknesses gravely limited the ability of Moscow to fight a prolonged war with the North Atlantic Treaty nations."
"In particular, American analysts felt that the Soviet petroleum industry would find it difficult to produce enough high octane fuel, the Soviet machine tool industry did not produce enough spare parts, there was insufficient rolling stock to handle war time needs in the USSR, and the Soviets had perennial shortages of certain non-ferrous metals and certain types of finished steel. Complicating these problems, and, to an extent, causing them, were the Soviet deficiencies in properly trained technological personnel and managers."
Long on generalization, absent on specifics, and rather contrary to the historical data we do have. The Soviets didn't have trouble producing high-octane fuel for all the masses of new late-model piston engine and jet fights they were flying around in the late-1940s, their rolling stock in 1945 was about the same size as it was pre-war and that had handled the war time needs rather admirably, Soviet industry expanded significantly which indicates large production of machine tool spare parts and metal production, and Soviet technological and managers personnel were enough to design and manufacture all sorts of high technological items from radars to jet engines to atomic bombs. Sounds more like standard Western underestimation of Soviet technical-industrial capabilities (the sort that made them believe the USSR could never build an atomic bomb) then sound analysis.
Indeed, the very next paragraph, which you quite notably left out, goes on to state that since the USSR was "diverting a substantially higher percentage of its limited resources to war-making capacities, more than offset its poverty and placed itself in a position of conventional military superiority."
Indeed, we didn't supply the Luftwaffe with 60% of its AV gas or thousands of aircraft like we did with the Soviets. The Germans also had a functioning high altitude interceptor force up until their defeat, while the Soviets had to begin constructing one at the start of the Cold War.
I've already dealt with the Avgas question, but would further note that Soviet aircraft production in 1945 was already on route to outstrip it's 1944 production figures by around 10,000 aircraft. Furthermore, the Soviets in 1945
did have a functioning high-altitude interceptor force, which the Cold War force was built upon. It wasn't built from scratch.
