I'm having trouble pinning down any scholarly studies of the 1945-1950 RAF's capabilities in terms of maintenance, training, capabilities in EW, crew capabilities, and so-on. All of my searches keep throwing me stuff from the mid-50's or WW2.
What are you basing your claim on that the Soviets would be able to get into steam roller mode in a matter of weeks
Soviet operational plans for the defense, counter-offense, and to lesser extent offensive* against a WAllied counterattack published in Soviet military journals during the 1970s and 80s. The 4 group forces in Eastern Europe (7 armies, around double the number of divisions the West had in Germany) would be ready to go on day 1, with Category A home divisions (around 35 divisions) being ready to go by the end of Day 2. All category B divisions would be ready to go by day 10. Category C divisions would be at full readiness by Day 20. Beyond that, any further divisions would be fresh-formed.
Against this, the US has one half-ready infantry division in Western Europe and four constabulary regiments, the British also have 1 division and 3 brigades of unknown readiness. The British technically had a second division on paper, 7th Armored, but it is described as "effectively disbanded" in 1947 in the organizational history of the BOAR that I'm looking at. I'm not finding any numbers on what the French have, but given the previous examples, it probably isn't any more then one or two divisions.
*I say "lesser" extent because only the generalities are known about the offensive ones.
The Soviets weren't mobilized IOTL in 1947-48 and it would take them time to get forces ready to go, perhaps only after was has broken out and bombing is already started on their logistics.
The Soviets would require almost no time to mobilize. Even the modest peacetime build-up from 1946 to 1949 nearly doubled the Red Army's strength and WW2 demonstrated how rapidly the Soviet mobilization system could recruit, retrain, and organize reserve manpower into functioning formations.
As it was the RAF had jet forces already deployed to west Germany, which would be uninterceptable by the aircraft the Soviets had deployed to East Germany and Poland. They'd be sure to hit bridges and other operational logistics ASAP.
You have not shown any plans that the RAF intended to do so nor that the RAF personnel possessed the training and competence to do so. The Soviets are known to have a regiment of MiG-9s in East Germany, which are capable of intercepting the British aircraft available at this time.
More importantly the US Navy and it's fighters would be able to offer support off short in the Baltic if necessary, the Soviet Baltic Fleet was at best a minor threat. As it was there were strong US naval forces in the Mediterranean over the Turkish Straits crisis in addition to various other naval units normally stationed in Europe. Their aircraft and forces would be an important role as well.
Between 1946 and as late as May of 1950, no US naval forces were assigned to Western Europe. By the time any ships can be scrounged up, the Soviets will have overrun Denmark and/or Norway, effectively turning the Baltic into a Russian-lake. Even then, the confines of the Baltic Sea are powerful enough to make sending US carrier forces risky business, as they would have to deal with a multi-threat environment. Unless the USN limits itself to just bombing coastal targets in quick raids, which will do nothing to the Soviets, then they'll have to approach the shores and render themselves vulnerable to Soviet air and naval forces. And to have any real effect they have got to go inland.
Then there are the French, who weren't meaningless in any fight in Europe. Same with the Italians, even if both would have their own issues internally. Same with the Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians plus Turkey.
A interesting claim, given that they disagreed. The Italian Army was a complete gendarmie at this time and the French themselves admitted their own forces were only somewhat better, ultimately describing themselves during the Berlin Crisis as practically defenseless. The Benelux and Scandinavian Countries barely even had any men in their total armed forces, much less any functional formations. Turkey's the only one of these that really has any weight in it's armies but it isn't committed to the Western Alliance yet and is liable to only join if attacked directly... at which point the Soviets are liable to hit them with so much overwhelming force that they'll still be a comparative footnote.
When I first posted I was not aware that there was an upgrade in 1944, which did make it at least as powerful as the German 88 if not slightly more powerful. Of course you actually haven't proven that Soviet AAA and proximity fuses would be effective either, just posted some Soviet claims about their range and performance of the guns, but nothing about proximity fuse quality nor anything about guidance system quality, both computer gunlaying or gun laying radar systems. It is unlikely that the best new equipment was going to be stationed outside of Moscow or Soviet core industrial regions in the 1940s and will probably be retained there given the threat of nuclear attack. So Poland is not going to be defended by the creme of Soviet air defense, neither aircraft nor ground, while even the best of Soviet equipment is of unknown practical efficacy in 1947-48. From the Korean war it seems that only the light caliber weapons when concentrated in large mass was able to shoot down tactical low altitude attack aircraft in numbers.
I've already cited multiple studies on Soviet air defense which disagree while you have not provided even the slightest citation for any of your claims. Furthermore, Soviet air defense radar and personnel in Korea (or, more accurately, in Manchuria peering into Korea) proved more then able to effectively detect western raids which came up close to the Yalu and arrange intercepts, using the same radar systems that were already in widespread Soviet service in 1947.
They can. MiG-9s are faster then, as are the YaK-15s. . Your claims that the Soviets weren't set-up to handle are unsupported and fly in the face of already-cited improvements in Soviet air defense forces.
In Korean in the 1950s despite deploying Soviet AAA they lacked the ability to bring down B-29s except by fighter.
A patently false claim. Your earlier source recorded 4 bombers lost to AAA while
this selective record has five B-29s lost to AAA (or damage inflicted there-of) while in the air and another 2 which suffered so much damage that they were written off upon landing. And this against an enemy not possessing remotely the AAA forces the Soviets did.
Do you have a link for Steven Ross' books? I can see if I can get my hands on them.
It's easy enough to find on Amazon.
What sort of sustainment did the Soviets have in 1947, given that they had at best slightly more total motor vehicle pool than the Germans did in 1941 in Barbarossa?
Between the proportionally increased availability of motor-vehicles with the disbandment of excess and obsolete divisions, improvements of the replacement system, and additional production of improved models in 1945-1947, a post-war Soviet rifle division alone possessed 12 times the motor vehicles it did in 1945 and three times that of a German infantry division in 1941.
Sure, there was substantial western failure during this period due to betrayal by communist agents in British intelligence. In the event of war though things will be stepped up more than the Cambridge 5 could safely report on and would have access to, as well as the Soviets have a lot more to worry about than the situation in Ukraine, such as potential resistance in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary.
The Cambridge 5 was less of an issue then the fact that the Western efforts at this were just plain awful and amateurish. Again, I've already posted on this.
They were not completely ineffective
There is no evidence for this. Certainly the Soviets record no effectiveness from the German raids. Notably, the German forces involved were similar in size to the sort of forces the Western powers would be able to assemble on a short notice.
The Allies had learned how to attack rail yards and bridges in WW2 especially thanks to their research work after the war into what worked and didn't so wouldn't be making their earlier mistakes they had made during WW2 when they started operations in Europe. Not only that they had better tools than in WW2 like guided munitions.
A lot of that knowledge was not institutionalized and was lost in the demobilization. The guided weapons you mentioned earlier were, like pretty much all guided weapons of the era, were too unreliable to be effective. With only a few exceptions, the equipment available to the western strategic air bombers at the start of the war is no different from that available in the end of WW2.
That is leaving out the mothballed B29s, ability to resume production if needed, ramp up of new models of aircraft, and ability to even reactivate boneyarded models. You're only talking about the starting situation, not where they'd be in even a couple of months of activating reserves and fighting WW3.
We've still yet to determine how many of the mothballed/boneyard B-29s were serviceable and ramp-up of production would still take time. Then there's the problems of fielding all the personnel needed to support additional aircraft when SAC could barely maintain their existing fleet at a peacetime level. While the situation would improve in a couple of months, it won't to the degree that'll be felt on the overall war effort.
I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to about 'too far north' and 'losing 6 of 9 aircraft'; I'm guessing something during the Korean War? In that case that was with the MiG-15 available, not piston engine aircraft or a handful of potentially not even active MiG-9s around Moscow in 1947.
Yes? You were talking about how the US in the Korean War never suffered WW2-levels of attrition in Korea and I observed cases where tactically they did. Worse then WW2 in fact. Overall though, the main thing preventing WW2-levels of air attrition in Korea was that, firstly, the Chinese refused to rebase into North Korea proper and, secondly, the Soviets refused to provide the resources to construct a proper IADS south of the Yalu.
BDAs?
The communists in Korea were most certainly not foot bound, they were motorized and used rail. They only ended up being foot bound for supply because roads and rail were wrecked. Motorization is fine until you get your bridges and rail yards smashed and convoys shot up as the Germans found out in France, Italy, and even North AFrica.
Bomb Damage Assessments, a pretty basic term. And yes, the Communists in Korea were very much footbound. The North Koreans had no effective means of vehicle replacement organized in 1950 and hence lost the gross majority of their trucks simply getting to the Pusan Perimeter, with the rest going in the subsequent attritional struggle and being gone by the time of the rout all the way to the Yalu. The Chinese fielded practically no vehicles to start with and outright didn't have the trained personnel to be able to maintain any significant vehicles stocks: when the Chinese captured 1,500 UN trucks while pushing south, they only were able to find enough people with the qualifications to even drive 200 of them. The Germans main issue in France, Italy, and North Africa was their own crap logistical plan much more so then enemy air superiority.
I'm not sure what world you're on that you think the Chinese and Koreans didn't start with rail and trucks, they had plenty to get them to Pusan and later sustain them in 1951 with Chinese entry. They were just destroyed by Allied air power and interdiction campaigns.
These are air force claims and hence of little credibility. If taken at face value, they represent the destruction of more vehicles then the Communists even fielded during the war. Post-war studies have found that the cost of UN aircraft lost in interdiction efforts was higher than that of all the destroyed Communist vehicles, rolling stock, and supplies. The only reason the West was able to afford such losses in such a ineffective campaign was because their military resources were so much superior to that of the North Koreans and Chinese, which would not be the case in the first two phases of a war against the USSR and even in the third and final stage of such a war, the gap is liable to be much smaller. The simple reality is that throughout the conflict, Communist supply lines were never cut by air power. Indeed, the opposite happened: Communist troops became better supplied as the war progressed. Nothing indicates improvements in supplies quite like ammunition: in August 1951 the Chinese fired 17,000 artillery shells. In July 1953, they fired over 375,000. This was achieved while also increasing rations so that Chinese soldiers went from starving to death by the hundreds in the winter of 1950-'51 to being better fed then they were in civilian life in 1953.
Notably, air strikes against North Korean bridges were usually repaired within 2-4 days. The Soviets, being in possession of more mechanized means of bridge repair and more rail resources overall, could presumably do it much faster.
Then there is the USN and RN air units that could more around as needed and provide fighter cover and mobile bombers/fighter-bombers as needed.
Global Western air strength in 1947 was slightly smaller then Soviet air strength in Europe alone. If anyone will hold air superiority over the tactical-operational battlefields, it will be the VVS. This goes double if the Western Air Forces stay up high, where they can't protect or cover the ground troops... or their own airbases, for that matter.
And BTW having an air force the size of WW2 isn't necessary if not simply for the reason that they aren't also fighting Japan ITTL with a totally separate force structure and the Warsaw Pact doesn't exist yet and the nations that make it up really didn't have forces yet. I doubt the Czechs would fight the west, same with the Yugoslavs. The Germans probably would be mobilizable to fight against the Soviets, while the East Germans and Poles would need to be occupied quite a bit by the Soviets.
It's a minor quibble, but the Soviets do have some local forces recruited by this time. The 1st and 2nd Polish Red Army and the Czechoslovak Rifle Corps as well as the Romanian Army exited the other side of the war intact and the most reliable of the bunch wound up serving as cadres for some post-war formations created in 1946. They aren't good for anything more then then the most basic of garrison duty though and even then their liable to have an MGB rifle regiment attached for "advisement".