World War III starts in 1945

burmafrd:

My goodness I'm sure you didn't mean this to sound as racist as it does. :confused:

Scientific breakthroughs come from individuals of any race. Hopefully you know there is no master race.

No. Just check the Nobel prizes for chemistry, medicine and physics - or any equivalent meter of scientific results. Before 1930 Germany got a lot of prizes, because Germany had a culture and history of higher education that was very positive for scientific invention. After 1930 the jackboot-wearing SA and SS thugs drove the innovative scientists away*. Left were the apparatchnics that were good politicians, but lousy scientists.

Around 1930 the number of Nobel Prizes that went to the US rose - because the deported German scientists emigrated to the US and brought with them an academic culture that was very positive (of course it helped that the US was rich and a very big "market" compared to any other country) for invention.

I have a PhDcollegue who explained how a specific school of chemistry that was invented in Germany around year 1900 today only survives in Umeå, due to the actions of three different professors in Sweden - and that only due to the Swedish academic traditions/history/culture.

There have been a lot of studies around Nobel prizes, and there is neither a) some "you will get X Nobelprizes per capita" nor b) "X Nobel prizes per billion USD invested in research". Institutions, history and culture is what matters.

At the same time Soviet Union suffered under a scientific "political correctness" that was worse than Nazi Germany. An astronomer got a single ticket to Gulag due to his "non-communist views on solar spots". Guess what that climate did to scientific couriosity?

Please read some about Lysenko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko) and what the combination of politics and ambitious researchers led to. Even Soviet tank development suffered from political correctness.

So, Hairog, if you want to have a Soviet Union that by 1945 can copy and produce foreign eqipment you have to change the whole Soviet academic and political structure. And that would take about 20 years to achive. POD would be before Stalin takes power.

* Or rather, since we are speaking about intelligent people: they ran before the Nazis got to power.
 
I think we are on the same wave length here. So as I understand your post you do believe that any individual of any race, religion or color can be capable of a scientific, intellectual, philosophic etc. break though? It's just a matter of opportunity.

Am I correct in that assumption?

One other assumption we need to explore. Was Stalin a pragmatist or an ideologue? Did he continue to purge the his best leaders, scientists, generals etc. after Hitler attacked him?

My sense is he did not. When the chips were down he sought out and used the best and the brightest to save his own skin. I would suggest that he was a pragmatist to the point of being a sociopath.
 
I do not share your very strong beliefs in Soviet engineering and its ability regarding "fussy bits" (the Germans were great at reverse engineering, and even they would take well over a year to take something and make it into an effective tool, even coming up with the panzerschreck, which wasn't a very complex system, after capturing a bazooka took more than six months). The Soviets QC efforts alone made any work like you describe very much hit and miss.

I do not have any delusions about the engineeing prowess of the Stalin pruged Soviet Union. I do recognize a possible alternative history that has just a whiff of enough plausibility to pass the maybe meter without intervention from god or space aliens. That is the kind of thing I'm going to keep discussing.

Is my Soviet solution at all probable? Of course not. Was the invention of the V2 Rocket probable in 1939? . Was it probable that the Atomic bomb would be operational before the war ended, or that even if they did produce it that there would be a plane big enough to carry it? What if Oppenhimer was in a car accident or never was born or had a head injury at the age of 19 while playing football. That is the beauty of alternate history.

My scenario depends on just a few twists to history.

How about this. An up and coming party member catches Stalins eye at a party. He gains Stalin's confidence. This advisor is obsessed with the war in the air. He could not become a pilot because of a heart murmur. His only dream as a child was to fly. He lives and breaths anything that has to do with flight. Let's name this advisor Hairogski.

Hairogski feverishly studies all things air warfare related. Through Stalins spy network he gains all sorts of knowledge on allied bombers and their capabilities. He becomes convinced that airpower would be the key to any conflict with the Western powers. He knows every flight specification and nut and bolt of the B29 and any other allied plane being flown or on the drawing board.

He convinces Stalin that the Allied bomber force is a huge threat and that the crazy wack jobs Churchill and Patton are going to force a confrontation and the allied heavy bomber will be the major weapon that can defeat the Soviet Union in a straight up fight.

Stalin listens and gives Hairogski all the resources he needs.

Hairogski springs into action starting in 1944. He gathers all the former scientists, intellectuals etc. that are currently in prison of any race, creed or religion. He puts out the word that any mechanically tallented member of the soviet society or th military are to be transfered immediately to his control. As Germany intellectuals and scientist are captured they are turned over to him. All blue prints, plans, models, captured weapons, prototypes etc. are transfered immediately to his care. He scours the Soviet society for talented teenagers and gathers them all in secrete production facility behind the Urals. He is named the Technology Czar.

He is given an unlimited budget.

With this unlimited budget he has to take a handful of promising weapons from the prototype to production. Production with the best and most capable work force in the Soviet Union and possibly the world. He has unlimited power to chose any personnel he wants.

The range would be a bit of a surprise, for about a minute, assuming the Pe-8 ever got within range, which I doubt would happen.

A minute would be all it would take. Plus the Pe-8s would be escorted by swarms of Soviet fighters who want nothing better than to draw the fighters away from their charges.

I would expect that some F.3 or Mustang jocks would fall on them as soon as they appeared, simply because weird stands out in the battlefield and weird generally means bad so you kill it as quickly as you can.

I believe earlier that you said the veteran US pilots would never be decoyed away from their duties. You can't have it both ways.

The fighter force with the PE-8s would be the same or greater than the escorting fighters. The fighter forces would initially be dead even of even tipped to the Soviet side in sheer numbers. The US fighters could not just zip over and shoot down the PE-8s at their leisure. They would have to fight ther way through them. In the mean time the KI-100s would be swarming the un-escorted bombers. Just one of the objectives that the Soviets wanted in the first place. The two volleys of missiles would have achieved their desired effect.

Thank you for the information on Cobra. It was quite an extreme tactic.

Now we will see if Hairogski can figure out a counter strategy armed with the full knowledge of what the allies did during Operation Cobra in the summer of 1944. He has lots of time and a few captured German scientists, plans and prototypes at his disposal.

According to one of his newly captured scientists a very interesting prototype was successfully launched on March 8th, 1944.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Actually the probability of the A-Bomb rose to just about 100% in 1942 once the U.S. and UK agreed to pool resources and the Americans decided that money was, quite literally, no object (unlike the USSR or UK, or any other player, the U.S. could literally spend all the money required, it helps a lot if your country isn't hip deep in Panzer Divisions). The B-29 was also (or B-32), by 1942, a given. (As an aside, the B-29 program was more expensive than Manhattan) Oppenheimer in existence or not, the Bomb project, at least the U-238 weapon, was going to happen once the Chicago pile went critical. If there is a person who was critical, and even he was replaceable, it would be General Groves.

Adding in a new person, however likely or unlikely, to Stalin's inner circle, with a result that the person gets unlimited funding (BTW: since every ruble this fellow spends is one fewer ruble to build Il-2 or T-34/85, or YaK-9, or Katyusha launchers, one has to wonder if the Soviets can still win the war), greatly alters the T/L, well beyond the scope of the OP or the POD, both of which rely on OTL as a starting point (the poor soul would also be more likely to get a 7.62 Tokarev headache in 1939 or early 1940 than a design bureau named after him). It would make, perhaps, for an interesting story in the Writer's Forum (God knows more than a couple of us have used POD at least as large to generate the proper starting point) but it isn't really according to Hoyle here. This is more of a "run what ya' brung" scenario than a "how do we build a Soviet AF capable of shredding the USAAF in 1945" situation. I understand your desire to meld the outcome to a desired result, but it is a game that can easily be played both ways, to the point where the original T/L is nothing but a memory.

As an example, there are two, fairly easy, changes (at least compared to creating a new, entirely different, aircraft and an individual who the paranoid Stalin gives unlimited power) in American construction history that will make the scenario change radically and to the point that they negate the changes you have in mind. The first is the B-36 gets support from the beginning of the project, not the series of delays in priority of the project that hit the aircraft for the first two years. You now have a fully functional 48,000 foot ceiling bomber that carries four times the payload of the B-29 available in large numbers. The other project is the B-45, which is now begun in early 1943 instead of late 1944. Everything to complete both projects exists without any need to create a new person who radically changes the American production of weapons during the war, with all the butterflies that come with that sort of change. That is just the Bombers, and the two easiest at that. There is also any number of interesting fighter designs the U.S. could have proceeded with quite easily, ranging from the F8B to the XF-88 & XF-90 which would create a circumstance that would massively increase the capacity of the USAAF.

This would, of course, push the discussion from alternate history to an alternate universe, although the changes are, even in total, far less than what your scenario requires (unlike the re-engineered and massively modified Ki-100 or the addition of German wire-guided missiles to Pe-8 bombers, all five of the aircraft I have mentioned were actually constructed and flew at least in prototype configuration).

I do not have any delusions about the engineeing prowess of the Stalin pruged Soviet Union. I do recognize a possible alternative history that has just a whiff of enough plausibility to pass the maybe meter without intervention from god or space aliens. That is the kind of thing I'm going to keep discussing.

Is my Soviet solution at all probable? Of course not. Was the invention of the V2 Rocket probable in 1939? . Was it probable that the Atomic bomb would be operational before the war ended, or that even if they did produce it that there would be a plane big enough to carry it? What if Oppenhimer was in a car accident or never was born or had a head injury at the age of 19 while playing football. That is the beauty of alternate history.

My scenario depends on just a few twists to history.

How about this. An up and coming party member catches Stalins eye at a party. He gains Stalin's confidence. This advisor is obsessed with the war in the air. He could not become a pilot because of a heart murmur. His only dream as a child was to fly. He lives and breaths anything that has to do with flight. Let's name this advisor Hairogski.

Hairogski feverishly studies all things air warfare related. Through Stalins spy network he gains all sorts of knowledge on allied bombers and their capabilities. He becomes convinced that airpower would be the key to any conflict with the Western powers. He knows every flight specification and nut and bolt of the B29 and any other allied plane being flown or on the drawing board.

He convinces Stalin that the Allied bomber force is a huge threat and that the crazy wack jobs Churchill and Patton are going to force a confrontation and the allied heavy bomber will be the major weapon that can defeat the Soviet Union in a straight up fight.

Stalin listens and gives Hairogski all the resources he needs.

Hairogski springs into action starting in 1944. He gathers all the former scientists, intellectuals etc. that are currently in prison of any race, creed or religion. He puts out the word that any mechanically tallented member of the soviet society or th military are to be transfered immediately to his control. As Germany intellectuals and scientist are captured they are turned over to him. All blue prints, plans, models, captured weapons, prototypes etc. are transfered immediately to his care. He scours the Soviet society for talented teenagers and gathers them all in secrete production facility behind the Urals. He is named the Technology Czar.

He is given an unlimited budget.

With this unlimited budget he has to take a handful of promising weapons from the prototype to production. Production with the best and most capable work force in the Soviet Union and possibly the world. He has unlimited power to chose any personnel he wants.



A minute would be all it would take. Plus the Pe-8s would be escorted by swarms of Soviet fighters who want nothing better than to draw the fighters away from their charges.



I believe earlier that you said the veteran US pilots would never be decoyed away from their duties. You can't have it both ways.

The fighter force with the PE-8s would be the same or greater than the escorting fighters. The fighter forces would initially be dead even of even tipped to the Soviet side in sheer numbers. The US fighters could not just zip over and shoot down the PE-8s at their leisure. They would have to fight ther way through them. In the mean time the KI-100s would be swarming the un-escorted bombers. Just one of the objectives that the Soviets wanted in the first place. The two volleys of missiles would have achieved their desired effect.
[/quote]

What I said was that escorts wouldn't go chasing after fighters that were not attacking. I also said that the strike would have veterans in command. Veterans HATE the unusual, it means something bad is about to happen. You prevent the bad thing by eliminating the unusual.

How many fighters do you think the Soviets will have available? You can's have a thousand fighters to attack the bombers, another thousand to defend the Pe-8, and have any aircraft left to defend the rest of the USSR and Red Army. This is part of the problem with the scenario. Real life has lots of different things happening at the same time. That is why the USAAF, as an example, had different commands to perform different tasks, all occurring at the same time.[/quote]
Thank you for the information on Cobra. It was quite an extreme tactic.

Now we will see if Hairogski can figure out a counter strategy armed with the full knowledge of what the allies did during Operation Cobra in the summer of 1944. He has lots of time and a few captured German scientists, plans and prototypes at his disposal.

According to one of his newly captured scientists a very interesting prototype was successfully launched on March 8th, 1944.[/QUOTE]

It seems we are back to the video game. You don't have the resources you are discussing

Our Soviet friend will not have plans, prototypes, or scientists in hand until the Fall of Germany in May of 1945. It will be, at the earliest, June before he can get anything back to the USSR. He now has, at a maximum, six months to work his magic since the POD requires the war to start in 1945. It takes three months to retool a factory for the new model year cars, much less the sort of radical effort you are discussing.

You have your position, as do I. As I said, I fear we will need to agree to disagree on this since I can not see the scenario under discussion as being remotely plausible with the POD and conditions as set by the OP.
 
Adding in a new person, however likely or unlikely, to Stalin's inner circle, with a result that the person gets unlimited funding (BTW: since every ruble this fellow spends is one fewer ruble to build Il-2 or T-34/85, or YaK-9, or Katyusha launchers, one has to wonder if the Soviets can still win the war), greatly alters the T/L, well beyond the scope of the OP or the POD, both of which rely on OTL as a starting point (the poor soul would also be more likely to get a 7.62 Tokarev headache in 1939 or early 1940 than a design bureau named after him). It would make, perhaps, for an interesting story in the Writer's Forum (God knows more than a couple of us have used POD at least as large to generate the proper starting point) but it isn't really according to Hoyle here. This is more of a "run what ya' brung" scenario than a "how do we build a Soviet AF capable of shredding the USAAF in 1945" situation. I understand your desire to meld the outcome to a desired result, but it is a game that can easily be played both ways, to the point where the original T/L is nothing but a memory.

OK I think I'm catching on to the rules here. First of all I need to get a handle on the acronyms here.

T/L is time line?
POD is point of departure?
OP is operational period?
OTL is original time line?

So would you suggest that we start another thread with different point of departure to move this along? Otherwise this is a deadend.

Our Soviet friend will not have plans, prototypes, or scientists in hand until the Fall of Germany in May of 1945. It will be, at the earliest, June before he can get anything back to the USSR. He now has, at a maximum, six months to work his magic since the POD requires the war to start in 1945. It takes three months to retool a factory for the new model year cars, much less the sort of radical effort you are discussing.


BTW I was just reading up on the HE162. The author claims it was designed and went to prototype in 3 months and 200 were built before the end of the war. Ceiling of over 39,000.

Another example August 1943first raid on Peenemünde . By New Years day in 1944 they had moved the factory and labratories underground hundreds of miles away in the mountains and continued to work. In 5 months they produced 3 working V2 rockets. (sorry can't can change size of type in edit)
 
Last edited:
Just been thinking, what would the effects of say 15 Lancasters each dropping a Grand Slam bomb on a soviet army (which is bunched up ready for an assault), or on a defensive line if the allies are getting ready to attack?

Just too add my pennys worth to the debate about airpower, the British are the leaders in Jet engine tech at this point, together the US and Britain are so far ahead of the SU in Radar tech that its not funny. Also as an example of smaller tech The western allies had APDS shells for there guns, did the Soviets?
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
...

T/L is time line?
POD is point of departure?
OP is operational period?
OTL is original time line?

So would you suggest that we start another thread with different point of departure to move this along? Otherwise this is a deadend.

T/L or TL = Time Line

POD = as you ferretted out:D

OP = Oringinal Poster aka: the individual who made the original proposed T/L post or asked the WI (What If) question

OTL = Our Time Line Also can be used as part of IOTL or In Our Time Line

ALT = Alternate Time Line

There is a glossary here somewhere (maybe on the site wiki) that has quite a few other terms that are used here quite a bit.

You can start a thread on this. Be sure you are clear what the outline is (start date, if the basis is OTL or, if not, what the basis is). Read some of the other threads and you will get a feel for things. If you alter OTL too greatly you will need to have a POD that goes way back in time, or has some reasonable recent POD that allows for the change. (I have a couple things currently working in this Forum that have a change that have been generally accepted here, there are, of course, many others. If you sort the fourm by # of views or replies you can get a feel for what really tends to work)

One last point: If you set it up so it is heavily balanced (or unbalanced actually) in one country's direction it becomes what is known here as a wank (popular ones are Ameriwanks, Britishwanks, Russiawanks) and it should be posted in the ASB Forum if you want any replies besides (fill in the blank)Wank!!!!! or something similar.
 
Cal-Bear:
It also needs to be noted that the YaK-9, probably the best high altitude Soviet design, was woefully underarmed to deal with Allied (especially U.S.) heavy bombers. Most of the aircraft had ONE 20mm Cannon and ONE 12.7mm (.50 cal) machine gun, with even the later up-gunned version only having 2 12.7mm. This is the armament American aircraft had in 1940. Even the La-7 was generally armed with 2 20mm guns (and couldn't fly as high as a B-29 in any case). If you are going after a B-29 with that sort of armament it is best to pack a lunch.
Sovier Airfoces in 1941-45 didnt have to fight against heavy bombers. Soviet Air-defence included Pe-3, Kingkobras and Spitfires, received in 1941-45 by lend-lease. And also the was some projects like MiG-5 and so-called TIS(from russian it can be translated like "Heavy convoy fighter")
so- USSR had what to opposed to Flyingfortresses\Liberators\Superfortresses. And IMHO, B-17\24\29 prefered to bomb from 6000-7000 metres, where other soviet fighters can reach it.
 
Wait, so is this an air superiority thread now? Or are we still on the point that an Allied vs USSR war breaks out in Germany around the spring of 1945?

If it is indeed now about air power, proceed. If it's still about a full scale clash, air power can't compensate for millions of men and machinery on the ground, merely project force very effectively as it did with naval warfare. I think we should move the discussion to land operations as well as the air aspect.
 
we should move the discussion to land operations as well as the air aspect.
Today 03:32 PM
But what is the date? Spring- after German fall or September-October- after japanese fall?
 
Last edited:
The thread hasn't moved on for years.

Soviet view: Soviets smash through allied lines in Germany, destroying or capturing most of the forces there. They proceed to mop up mainland Europe, with the still fragile post-war states capable of only limited resistance and not capable of anything like total war. Without any real opportunity for another invasion peace is effectively declared with the US abandoning Europe.

American view: Airpower shatters Soviet supply lines almost immediately and as a consequence the first Soviet offensive campaign entirely fizzles out. Airpower proceeds to grind down the Soviets as Allied armies advance more or less as they did in 44-45 in Europe. Nuclear suns appear over Moscow and the key industrial sites in the Urals either further enabling advances or causing immediate and unconditional Soviet surrender.

Bizzare view: Entire world allies against the Soviets. Mysteriously equipped, fed and morally charged German and Japanese armies swarm into Allied ranks without massive outcry from almost everyone involved. Moscow disappears early and despite the Soviets ruling huge swathes of territory and having huge armies in the field they immediately surrender unconditionally. Oh, because its always amusing, I shall never forget AMBOMB's suggestion that B-29's could be used to tactically bomb Soviet formations, presumerably even as those formations are on the advance right on top of Allied positions.

Anyway, the debate all hinges on how effective an equivelent to the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria would be against the respective Allied forces in Western Germany. The Japanese were obviously significantly inferior, in every respect, to the Allied forces, however the Soviets are also quite a bit superior* to anything the Allies have faced in recent years. I guess you could try and create some extremely accurate simulation, but I suspect it will never be resolved. One thing I think is for sure is that this opening campaign shall be on a larger scale than anything the Western Allies have yet seen in WW2, dwarfing the Battle of the Bulge, and even if victorious Allied casulties are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens. While I think most would agree the Red Airforce was good for little beyond acting as mobile artillery, I wonder whether the very fact of challenging the skies, even if in an extremely suicidal way, would place an entirely different slant on the situation compared with 1944-45 where Allied Supremacy was fairly unchallenged.

*Okay, I guess some Wehrmacht fanboy just had a heart attack, but taken as an entire organisation, rather than breaking it down into a handful of divisions and incidents, I think this is a justified claim, certainly by late 44-45.

This quote by Earling pretty well sums it up.

From my perspective this thread it has indeed been a discussion about air power and superior artillery trumping sheer numbers.

I was attempting to put some life back into the discussion but apparently I broke the established rules.

When I get the time I will present an ATL where the POD is sooner and the Soviets learn from watching what has happened to Japan and Germany and start to concentrate on countering a strategic bombing campaign.

I believe they could have done it using some of their own prototypes and captured German ideas. All it would have taken was a change in emphasis at an opportune time.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Wait, so is this an air superiority thread now? Or are we still on the point that an Allied vs USSR war breaks out in Germany around the spring of 1945?

If it is indeed now about air power, proceed. If it's still about a full scale clash, air power can't compensate for millions of men and machinery on the ground, merely project force very effectively as it did with naval warfare. I think we should move the discussion to land operations as well as the air aspect.

This rather misses the point. The air power argument is what the entire scenario depends upon as its pivot point.

What air power can do, rather decisively, even in mid 1945, is turn an opponents logistical situation into a nightmare. Air power can disrupt massed artillery to a remarkably extent (especially when on opponent like to line up 1000 artillery pieces per kilometer of front) with direct strikes on the parks as well as the supply dumps. needed to supply that artillery.

There is no question that, if air power is taken out of the scenario, the Red Army would roll over the Western Allies. The Allies used air power as an integral part of their combined arms concept, without it, the Allies would never have made it back into France.
 
Top