In hindsight, should the WAllies not have helped the Soviets?
- Thread starter Mosshadow
- Start date
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Churchill's proposed intra-German border conceded more of Germany to Moscow than Roosevelt's.
Churchill was more willing to concede to Tito being the top dog in Yugoslavia than Roosevelt was.
Churchill also conceded specific "percentages" of influence in the Balkans to Stalin, while Roosevelt did not so the same.
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Possible results include -
1) the Soviets end up with the same Iron Curtain or better, only they get it later
2) the Soviets collapse
3) the Soviets and Western Allies meet further east in Europe
All of 1, 2 and 3 are likely to result in a more successful Holocaust against occupied Europe's Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Serbs, Greeks, maybe Czechs and Balts and more dead and crushed resistance members.
marathag
Banned
USSR got billions in Lend Lease.
What could have the US and UK done with some of those billions on the Western Front?
1943 Invasion before the Atlantic Wall forts are built?
what would the western powers do? not much else .. it took time to ramp up.. build equipment and train for amphibious landings, to get all the material needed to invade mainland Europe.
Sure the Soviet government was not the greatest... but helping them was absolutely needed while England and the US got its crap together. remember the british and americans were engaged in the pacific as well.
Mainland invasion in 43 I think is questionable at best sometime late 43. Remember landing in france will mean facing the main german army head on and will get ugly. or should they take the southern France route? we were already engaged with Italy in late 43 and there is a lot of open water between Africa and southern France. should we invade Germany proper from the sea? that's pretty bold, but you still need to supply.
Remember, we are talking about a time when it took weeks to get a single division across the Atlantic, rejoin it with its equipment, and get it to the front.
Also of note was that while it was a moral booster to start, lend lease only starting making the critical impact in 43.
where the line is drawn depends on agreements, but if the soviets are just another combatant in a three way war where the west is not supporting them as an ally, well the soviets might go for broke and take what ever they want as far as they can achieve. changes the entire dynamic of the late war, this in turn will cost many more lives on both sides. The size of the Red Army in 45 was HUGE and a very big reason that no one wanted to press the soviets and trigger another war.
Note the Soviets lost over 8 million soldiers and another 22 million were wounded. toss in civilian deaths in german camps and the number is even higher.
by contrast the USA only lost around 440,000
I'm thinking on a humanitarian level that maybe we didn't do enough.
Sure the Soviet government was not the greatest... but helping them was absolutely needed while England and the US got its crap together. remember the british and americans were engaged in the pacific as well.
Mainland invasion in 43 I think is questionable at best sometime late 43. Remember landing in france will mean facing the main german army head on and will get ugly. or should they take the southern France route? we were already engaged with Italy in late 43 and there is a lot of open water between Africa and southern France. should we invade Germany proper from the sea? that's pretty bold, but you still need to supply.
Remember, we are talking about a time when it took weeks to get a single division across the Atlantic, rejoin it with its equipment, and get it to the front.
Also of note was that while it was a moral booster to start, lend lease only starting making the critical impact in 43.
where the line is drawn depends on agreements, but if the soviets are just another combatant in a three way war where the west is not supporting them as an ally, well the soviets might go for broke and take what ever they want as far as they can achieve. changes the entire dynamic of the late war, this in turn will cost many more lives on both sides. The size of the Red Army in 45 was HUGE and a very big reason that no one wanted to press the soviets and trigger another war.
Note the Soviets lost over 8 million soldiers and another 22 million were wounded. toss in civilian deaths in german camps and the number is even higher.
by contrast the USA only lost around 440,000
I'm thinking on a humanitarian level that maybe we didn't do enough.
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There are a lot of German troops around and their friends. Unless Hitler slips over on a banana skin and puts himself permanently out of action and whomever replaces him really sees fighting only as a last resort, someone is going to have to fight all those Axis troops, and the less the Russians are fighting, the more there are for everyone else.
marathag
Banned
Fight smarter, not fight to be the best bulletstopper of the War.
US motto was words to the effect of
'Never send a Man to do a job that a bomb or bullet can do better'
Rather than walking penal battalions across minefields to clear them, at gunpoint, by blocking detachments.
Institutionalized Cannon Fodder
And then cry about high numbers of deaths.
I'm not saying the tactics were sound.. I'm saying the us mainland was never threatened.. That differences made a large difference.Fight smarter, not fight to be the best bulletstopper of the War.
US motto was words to the effect of
'Never send a Man to do a job that a bomb or bullet can do better'
Rather than walking penal battalions across minefields to clear them, at gunpoint, by blocking detachments.
Institutionalized Cannon Fodder
And then cry about high numbers of deaths.
the war was literal survival for most of eastern Europe.
a realing soviet union and purges didn't help either
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kernals12
Banned
Given what we now know about Hitler's plans for eastern Europe, the people were better off with a Soviet victory.
I'm asking from the perspective of the UK/US governments not a moral question.
I dont have the numbers and its really amoral to even contemplate it but if in exchange for an extra year of holocaust we could have avoided communism in Central Europe (Czechslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria) and all the deaths and suffering it caused in the 40 years of its existence...
As I said I dont have the numbers but Im not sure which would have the lesser body count.
The Allies helping the Soviets was perhaps the best thing they could have done. The worst thing they did was be naive about the reality of the Soviet Occupation.
All the indicators proved that the Soviets were going to occupy and setup puppet governments in support of Communism.
All the indicators proved that the Soviets were going to occupy and setup puppet governments in support of Communism.
Max Sinister
Banned
In current Germany, I have heard people claiming that Churchill said after the war "We have slaughtered the wrong pig" (translated back from German). I'm quite skeptical about this, though.
Deleted member 1487
Potentially East Asia as well. If the USSR is too weak to intervene against Japan after the European war is over and the Communists never take over China, that is tens of millions of lives saved from Mao's decisions and the Korean War and probably Vietnam. (This is assuming the Wallies throttle LL and don't have the USSR intervene against Japan to limit their influence post-war; the Nazis are still defeated).
The issue though is how much is Stalin going to tolerate in terms of lack of Wallied help before cutting a separate deal to avoid bleeding his country white?
Garrison
Donor
Except there's no reason to suppose it would be further east. Weaken the USSR and the Nazi's can put more resources in the defence of Western Europe making Overlord altogether more fraught and there's no guarantee that the resources saved from L-L will speed the build up of forces for an invasion of Western Europe. I don't believe that L-L to the Soviets impeded that in any way, the bottlenecks were elsewhere.
The OP is also ignoring the possibility that the USSR makes a separate peace if they feel they've been abandoned by the Western powers. That was one of the things that drove the Allies to support the USSR after all, the threat of either a return to the situation before June 1941 or worse, a new Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
Max Sinister
Banned
I thought so, but was lacking proof. Thanks. If I ever meet that German guy again, I'll tell him.