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I wonder when I read a post like yours if you bothered to read this thread. Please review posts 7, 17, 22, 24, 32 and 34. This issue was discussed and many reasons were given why the invasion was more than a pretext for containing the Soviet Union after the war had ended. Apparently, you paid no attention to these. Let's review,o.k.
1. Stalin asked for a second front in France, against Germany, on any number of occasions.
2. There was concern on the part of the western allies that unless a second front established that Stalin might try to make a separate peace with Germany and leave the war.
3. Establishing a second front was a main topic during meetings between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference in 1943. Stalin wanted that front in 1943 and was distressed when Churchill and Roosevelt made it clear that it could not happen before 1944.
4. Even if Russian forces had been sufficient in and of themselves to defeat Germany, there is no way either the Russians or the western allies could have known that.
Geez, it seems as though some posters are only here to give an opinion or propagate a view. They seem to learn little.
1 and 3 are irrelevant. We have the benefit of hindsight and don't need to heed the opinion of any of the actors at the time.
2 was unlikely without wild departures from our timeline. Stalin by all accounts took Hitler's 'betrayal' quite personally and was unlikely to accept a negotiated peace without a good reason. If we are including coups and assassinations in our scenarios then of course the might've played out differently.
4 - pretty much everyone at the time knew that the Allies would beat the Nazis, for the same reason that we knew the Union would beat the Confederacy. In an attrition based total war scenario the bigger power has always won. There was also no way that little Romania could produce enough oil to power a war economy that's on par to what's available to the Allies. In any case it shouldn't matter whether the planners at the time knew whether the Soviets could beat the Nazis on their own. Events have an inertia on their own and the Soviets were inclined to continue operations without a good reason to change course.
I'm not sure why so many poster here kept thinking the resources on the Western Front could turn the tide. Before the end of Citadel the Germans were throwing all the men and material they could spare against the Red Army to no avail. Interior lines and fancy generalship wouldn't save them either. Even if Rommel and Guderian took over the Wehrmacht there weren't enough room in Eastern Europe for fancy maneuvers that could bag you half a million prisoners, and the Red Army seemed to have learned their lesson.
To OP.
USSR would have stopped the Red Army at the End of the World in Portugal.
Entire Europe would have been one union of socialist republics.
Even with Ally troops in Europe, Zhukov offered Stalin to wipe them out anyway and proceed towards Atlantic. RA had such a momentum then that there was nothing to stop them.
Joseph Vissarionovich, being a great humanitarian, decided otherwise.
the allies would have eventually come up through Italy and accomplished the same thing. We stalled in Italy because we changed focus to Normandy and left ragtag troops and horrible generals in place there. had we continued to focus on Italy, they could have come in that way pretty quickly. However getting large numbers of troops and supplies through the mountains may have been difficult. With god generals, it may have been faster and less costly (in lives) to go that way.
The Italian campaign was difficult because:
1) The Italian peninsula is narrow, 140 miles across at its widest and considerably narrower elsewhere, and
2) It's got a mountain range running down the middle of the boot, extending most of the ways to the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian/Ligurian
Thus, the peninsula was tailor-made for a defending army, and did not offer the broad front that could have allowed the Allies to maximize the effectiveness of their manpower advantage.
Furthermore, what happens when the boot is finally taken? Sure, the Po Valley would be relatively easy to cross, but after that there's the Alps. The Allies weren't about to invade Switzerland, but Austrian territory is just as rugged. The spine of the Alps is glaciated alpine (obviously!) country. Germany could easily have sealed up the passes, and it would have made the struggle up the boot look like a picnic in comparison. 'might have been difficult'? It would have been insane.
up until 1943 the USSR was losing bad, losing territory and taking horrendous casualties.
Not so. The Germans were stopped in Dec 1941 when the Soviets hit them with a battering ram at Moscow. The Germans took more territory in 1942 in the south only, which was a deliberate policy of the Soviets, as they made no progress in the north. The Soviet follow up policy after Moscow was poor, otherwise there was no reason why the Soviets should not have run the German army back to Germany.
the Allies interviewed all German generals after the war..they said next time you invade Italy start at the top
Even assuming Sicily were not bypassed (and Husky was definitely invading Italy, Sicily being part of Italy proper), starting at the northwest would mean running a long (Genoa is ~400 miles from Sicily) gauntlet between the peninsula on the east and Sardinia/Corsica to the west. And invading the plain of the Po up the Adriatic would entail an even longer, even worse gauntlet with German-occupied Yugoslavia to the east. The invasion forces would have had to sail for days to the landings, into the teeth of significant and sustained hazards from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine and increasingly far from Allied air bases. In comparison, the Strait of Sicily separating the island from Tunisia is just under 100 miles wide, and of course the Italian mainland is less than two miles from Sicily at the Strait of Messina. Either way, the Alps still stand as a wall to the north, while the boot would still have to be conquered mile by mile.
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