Thank you, chris. That was very helpful.
You're welcome.
Certainly, the soviets pulled out of nortthern norway, but the wallies pulled out of czechoslovakia. So both sides yielded territory they had taken/were holding. So it was 'fair'. If the soviets are the only ones withdrawing, it wont be 'fair', and i dont see stalin agreeing to it.
No. That's not correct. The Soviet pull out of northern Norway had literally nothing to do with the American pullout of parts of Czechoslovakia. The Soviets pulled out of northern Norway and handed it over to the Norwegians (who were shipped over from Britain) long, long before the western Allies even crossed the Rhine in force in February 1945; the Norwegian force was landed in October 1944 and the Soviet commander in the area actually wanted the Norwegians to come in to take over the Soviet positions. All that was left from what I understand was a small force to back the Norwegians up in case the Germans decided to launch a counteroffensive to retake Finnmark.
Despite popular conception (or rather
misconception), World War II was not a game of Risk played with live people. It was a real war with leaders having real objectives and interests. One of Stalin's primary interest was to get as much as he could out of a Far East settlement. He was
never going to throw that away simply to keep some more square mileage of a completely devastated and gutted Germany. His interest in Germany were in order of priority:
- ensuring Germany never became powerful enough again to invade the USSR, possibly through a division of Germany into multiple states or at least with Germany divided among the Allies
- putting in place a friendly (communist) government in Germany
Refusing to pull back to the agreed zonal boundaries would result in the first interest being put at risk as that would be pushing his western Allies to align with Germany (or rather the parts of Germany not occupied by the USSR). Once that happens it is only a matter of time until rump Germany gains strength enough again (with the USA, UK and France backing them) to challenge the Soviet position in the rest of Germany and then perhaps challenging the Soviet Union once again. Stalin had lived through the 1930s and 1940s in paranoid fear at the prospect of the capitalist powers uniting with fascist Germany against the USSR. So why would he then intentionally piss off those same capitalist powers who are now his allies over some German land (land which by the way would be essentially useless once he had already extracted industrial material and foodstuff from it as reparations) and throw away the chance of getting southern Sakhalin, the Kuriles and increased influence in Manchuria and possibly Japan under an Allied agreement?
Sure when it came to places like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania Stalin preferred exclusive Soviet control (even then he supposedly agreed with Churchill's "percentages agreement"), but those countries differed from Germany in a substantial number of ways; they all bordered the USSR (and Germany would not do so after being stripped of territory under Allied agreements) and were therefore essential for defence of the USSR; some were not considered enemies (Czechoslovakia for instance) and so the Soviets would have no interest in keeping them weak by having them divided; and they only possessed a fraction of the potential war-making power of a united Germany (Romania contributed to the invasion of the USSR, but Romania by itself or even in concert with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary was never capable of conducting anything like Operation Barbarossa).
Maybe if he got all of greece,
The liberation of Greece had nothing to do with D-Day. The Germans retreated in order to prevent themselves from being cut off and local Greeks took over, aided by British landings. A failed or postponed D-Day is very unlikely to change that and in any event Stalin seemed quite willing to leave Greece to the British (which supports Churchill's claims concerning the percentages agreement):
- the Red Army didn't bother to liberate Greece even though it could have done so at around the same time it was moving through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and utilizing the Bulgarian Army to carry out offensives to help it liberate parts of Yugoslavia
- he did not encourage the Greek communists to take over or to fight the British (Tito on the other hand did and this contributed to the Tito-Stalin split)
- he even basically forced the Greek communists to either follow his line (and thus give up the fighting) or Tito's line (and thus continuing fighting) in 1949 and thus essentially contributed to the end of the Greek Civil War.
and an occupation zone in italy,
That would be rather difficult to do considering that Italy was:
- now on the Allied side
- had no occupation zones by the Allies
- and this would go a long way towards denting the popularity of the communists in Italy (and remember that in Italy, Stalin held out the hope that the communists would actually win via elections in 1948). With the communists already in the government from 1944, the Soviets would essentially be demanding a zone of occupation in country which had been in the Allied camp since 1943 and which already had communists in the government as opposed to getting a zone of occupation or being totally responsible for the occupation of a country which was an enemy right up to the end (Germany) or had been an enemy until only a few weeks (at most) before unconditional surrender (Romania and Bulgaria).
i dont even think he would demand as much in exchage, but im sure hed demand something. Big.
Why would he have to? Having already occupied central Germany and stripped it of stuff that could be use in the USSR and left behind loyal communist elements he would have gotten plenty already (and probably more than he could get out of his allies via negotiations anyway). He might attempt to delay
discussing a withdrawal while the details of an Allied agreement concerning the Far East are hashed out, but such an agreement (on withdrawal) would have been reached within a month of the total defeat of Germany anyway...so at worst we probably see the reverse of OTL (where the western Allies handed over areas they occupied between July and November).