and many might know Patton advocated driving the soviet forces out of eastern Europe. putting aside all moral considerations, was this a viable plan. soviets had overwhelming numbers in man and material and us never fought in such vast campaigns . they always picked on the weaker force like in africa, italy and normandy. was Patton that stupid, or did he actually have a chance.
p.s. this post has nothing to do with libertarianism.
Was this before 1949? Because advocating war on the while they had nuclear warheads would have been madness. Even if the soviets could not bomb mainland in those years, they could still turn do a wasteland. This is sheer madness, even for a general.
Prior to that it would have been quite possible. With a careful application of nuclear power and with the power of American logistics, yes everything would have been possible. The point is that, should the yanks have been so preoccupied about a soviet takeover of eastern Europe, they could have abstained form lend-leasing the USSR on its way to victory, or even backed the plan of the brits to have a second front opened in the Balkans and not in Normandy.
A ltd objective(that is on non Russian countries; Germany, Poland, etc) with complete comand of seas (and a heavy blockade), and a strategic use of nukes(as much as I hate to say it) seems at least somewhat reasonable. A full out attack on Russia/ the Soviet govt herself, hell no that is maddness. But than again I’m not much of an armchair general, and I don’t know what the plan actually was anyway.
He wouldn’t be the first to try.
I think he certainly did have a chance. He wanted to use not only our forces, but the defeated yet battle-hardened German troops. The U.S. also out-produced every country during WWII, including Russia. The idea was also not to conquer the USSR, but to weaken it severely so it wouldn’t be a threat to the free world.
I actually think it has quite a lot to do with libertarianism. If Russia was out of the picture, there would have been no Cold War, no National Security Act, no nuclear scare, no future military buildup. The Soviet government would also have collapsed much sooner, since it could no longer rob satellite nations of resources. A little more blood flowing might have salvaged a lot of freedom. If there is no enemy to fight, that’s what you call “peace”.
Patton wasn’t alone in his thinking. The main rationale behind this was that the USSR was exhausted (true enough) while the Western Allies still had some fight left in them. Russian historians have often stressed how it took the Soviet Union years to fully recover and some damages (for example the immense human casualties) continue to weigh to this day. The vast stores of material and reserves of men earmarked for the invasion of Japan were readily available, not to mention French manpower (their military establishment always held Patton in the highest esteem despite his derogatory remarks about their politically-driven conduit). Also Patton believed the large numbers of German ex-soldiers the Allies held prisoners could be easily persuaded to re-enlist. But what pushed him over the edge was probably the atomic bomb. The US and British governments knew Project Manhattan and similar programs had been deeply infiltrated by Soviet spies and Stalin had his physicists burning the midnight oil to come up with a viable atomic weapon design. But this was still in the future: Soviet Union’s resources were stretched to the very limit to crush Nazi Germany and the program could be given access to proper funding only once the war was over. Until Stalin had a nuclear weapon of his own, there was no way he could retaliate. Even then he lacked the means to attack the Continental US: ICBM were still in the future and Soviet strategic bombers were never a serious threat, even in the '50s. Atomic armed US planes could use bases in Japan, India, Iran and Europe. If things went bad, Soviet tank divisions could be annhilated in a few minutes and Moscow itself turned into cinders.
Patton was an unbelievably aggressive military leader, to put it mildly, and also showed some signs of mental instability. One of his favorite party pieces was to pull down his trousers and show the huge scar on his behind, a gift from a German anti-tank mine in WWI, while refering to himself as “the half-assed general”. It should also be remembered that there was the serious possibility Patton could have run for the US presidency: he was immensely popular at home, even more than Eisenhower, since he was seen as the stereotypical fighting general who saved “our boys” during the Battle of The Bulge and his flamboyant personality and aggressive military doctrine where surely a bigger hit with the public than the relatively cautious Ike.
Thankfully none of this didn’t happen.
I think general Patton was a loudmouth who was very good at self-promotion. I think he owed his reputation to being the darling of the press. They loved him for giving them plenty of material to write about and he enjoyed being the centre of attention. I think he was a competent tactician and a good motivator, but he comes off as being a little on the dumb side when it came to anything else.
It it was simply a matter of force power, the Soviets would have likely fallen to the Western Allies. Thier manpower was near exhaustion and thier industries had been operating in panic mode for several years. They had a huge amount of mobilized forces, but thier logistics system was, in signifigant portion, supported by American lend-lease trucks and trains. I think during the course of the war we shipped something like a quarter million trucks and over a thousand locomotive engines to the Soviets. Without that supply they would have needed to divert a large portion of thier industry away from tank and airplane production to keep thier troops supplied. Furthermore, the US basically owned the seas at the end of the war, so they would have a more or less unmolested supply line from the massive US factories to the front lines. And of course the atom bomb was a factor, although it wasn’t being produced in numbers great enough to be a game-ender in '46 and '47. If the US and UK were to get air superiority over Soviet industry though, firebombing a la Japan, Dresden, and such would have devestated Soviet production power.
Socially, it may not have swung with the American public though, as the battle would have been increadibly bloody. This, along with funding issues, may have had the potential to change American society and government into something we’re not familiar with.
Basil Hart and Vladimir Rezun following him would entirely agree about the logistics problem of the USSR.
The USSR lacked trucks that it could produce that could navigate Eastern Europe and Russian Soil under any reasonable load.
The “Katusha” rocket launchers and trucks were available prior 1941, but only became useful when the USA donated more powerful studebakers to USSR. The original trucks, weighed down with armour and pitiful horsepower were only good for paved road (i.e., Germany).
Hart in fact thought that Germany’s defeat was partly due to rushing ahead with tracked tanks while leaving everything else to wheeled trucks in the first winter Germany spent in Russia. Hart also doubted that both sides possessing atomic weapons would prevent wars such as pushing USSR out of Europe, which would have become a proxy conflict that either side could have won with impunity.
Patton would have won with air superiority, if he could have offloaded some of his logistics problems onto the air force, while forcing USSR to be defensive on the ground, I suspect.
The Soviet Union acquired most of its technology from the United States to begin with, including nuclear. The communists in the Manhattan Project were leaking data to Moscow the whole time. Their tanks were built on Christie chassis designs. Most of the 770 weapons related factories deconstructed in Germany were shipped to them. The United States did a better job of fighting itself than Stalin did.
The U.S. and Europe were well over half the world economy. Yet, there were more pro-soviet forces outside the USSR than within its borders.
I wouldn’t take it that far. The T-34 design used a Christie suspension, but was the first to implement sloped armor, and was probably the best tank in the world at the outset of the war. The T-34-85 version that was being produced at the war’s end was comparable to the American’s M4 Shermans with the 76mm guns. Thier strike aircraft, small arms, artillery, etc. were all very effective and mostly native design.
Pre-Barbarossa weapons were basic. Every Soviet machine gun was a copy. The PPS was copied from the MP40. The AK47 was copied from the MP43. They were so good at copying that they even copied all the flaws in everything they copied.
The Soviet economy was basically a weapons version of a 19th century cotton plantation. Consumer goods? Never heard of them. Just slaves making weapons.
Do not underestimate the role communist factions played in the liberation of western Europe. In France in particular, they made up a large part of the resistance forces. Fighting the Soviet Union would mean using the same violent repression against these battle-hardened resistors that the Nazis had employed.
Patton also wanted to pursue a “race to Berlin” strategy, that would’ve seen Germany defeated before it was all in ruins(his British counterpart(Montgomery, I believe) also wanted to do so, but Eisenhower insisted on keeping a broad front).
Pre-Barbarossa weapons were basic. Every Soviet machine gun was a copy. The PPS was copied from the MP40. The AK47 was copied from the MP43. They were so good at copying that they even copied all the flaws in everything they copied.
The Soviet economy was basically a weapons version of a 19th century cotton plantation. Consumer goods? Never heard of them. Just slaves making weapons.
Not disputing the second part about the nature of the Soviet economy, but you’re still off the mark with the weaponry. First off, the AK-47 was not a copy of the MP-44. It used similar designs for it’s gas system, but was influenced by a number of different weapons and was an original weapon. The PPS was designed under siege conditions in Leningrad, and the Soviet’s main SMG, the PPSh-41, was superior to the German MP-40, and an original design. And where are you getting that “every Soviet machine gun was a copy”? The DP, DShK were copies? Yes the Maxim was widely used, but what of it?
Tank wise, the T-34 was well into production by the time of Barbarossa, and thier KV line was impenetrable to most German armor until 1943. Both of these existed in large numbers before the German invasion.
You answer your own question don’t you. The Soviet Army ground component of 1945 was the most formidable army the world had ever seen up to that time.
American forces were beaten to a standstill by the Chinese in Korea. This keeping in mind the Chinese had neither the material nor the operational experience of the Soviets.
An original by the same engineer that made the MP44.
Anyway, my point is that the USSR heavily depended on outside help across the board and what they got was primarily made possible by the pro-Soviet U.S. officials one way or another. So, the idea of a war is ridiculous and their independent capability is far overestimated. Russians were taxed to the limit. Harry Truman’s position was essentially the same as the Socialist Party’s, despite the illusion of the supposed Truman Doctrine. In other words, there is no clear dichotomy between Soviet and American.
i forgot all about nukes. i say with conventional weapons us did not stand a chance. they would have bled white like germany.
I’m sure that is a primary fact: the moronic Blitzkrieg tactic. The emphasis on winter hindering the Germans never made much sense. Soviet tanks used diesel engines, which are harder to start in the cold. If anything winter would hurt the Russians more. This is a country with one highway for 2.5x the land area of the U.S. and far greater distances to transport across. The German supplies were still crossing a shorter distance to the front near Moscow and much of that was through developed European roads. It’s like thinking that northern Canada would be hard to invade because it is big and cold. The disadvantage is the same for the residents. The invader can simply withdraw to comfort whilst the defender suffers harsh living and re-attack as circumstances change. Of course, that does not follow from Blitzkrieg, which apparently says always go forward as fast as possible regardless of anything.
It was no less true at any other time than it was during WW2 that a hypothetical American invasion of the Soviet Union, assuming equal public zeal and administrative loyalty, may have stumbled at first, though inevitably rolled to victory on the back of an economy many times the size of the Soviet economy. For every weapon the Soviets built the U.S. could make it 5 times more expensive and it would be better at the same cost and this gap would quickly grow wider over time.
I believe Patton was a military genius and that anything he uttered (military-wise) must be true.
The only problem with Patton’s plan was the same problem with all other plans to invade Russia… logistics. Your supply lines simply get too long after a few hundred miles. You need to slow down, sweep up any pockets of enemy forces behind enemy lines, regroup, and then relaunch the attack. The Americans have learned this, and this is why there was that “break” during the Iraqi invasion, when it seemed like US forces were bogged down in Baghdad, while the reality was that they were simply waiting for supply lines to catch up to the invading force.
The biggest problem heading East from Germany would be precisely the problem described above, namely, supply lines. Patton was known to push beyond the reach of his supply lines. I feel like him pushing beyond his supply lines and then being forced to wait for them to catch up would spell disaster. It would give time for the Soviets to regroup themselves.
That said, the first 3/4 of the way to Moscow would be ridiculously easy. Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belarus would all probably happily go to Allied hands. After that, winters would bog down the Allies, as would the aforementioned supply lines. But then of course, there’s the fact that Stalin’s USSR would’ve almost certainly fallen to the Nazis had it not been for US economic help soooo… I think it could’ve been done. It would’ve been tough. And the populace back home would’ve had a tough time accepting even more war, especially against a former ally. But it could’ve been done. With at least two more years of war, I believe that the USSR could’ve dissolved of economic reasons loooong before it actually did.