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As friendly reminder on how strong and powerful Allies were and how worn out and bled out RA was please, read unbiased sources on Arden operation. The ONLY reason American troops got out of that bloodbath by SS meat grinder was over a million of lost RA soldiers lives, when Allies bagged Soviet High Command to start planned much later offense NOW, ill prepared, to force Germans to withdraw their military to Eastern front. To which Stalin obliged indeed, at such expense.
RA would have stopped at The End of the World in Portugal, if it wanted to and, in very short period of time, haled and applauded by European nations. To be honest, I don't know how many A-bombs they actually had at that time to be any considered threat and, there is question of possible delivering it to say Moscow. What I really doubt was possible, considering how well prepared they were, after German siege. Bombing RA troops in Europe - I highly doubt.
What you don't understand and, likely, were never told, is that when you make Russian muzhyk real pissed and get into fight with him, he will NEVER stop, no matter what. Just like pure breed bulldog.
I wish Stalin had indeed completed what Hitler failed to complete - defeat Britain, especially that dog Churchill.
Churchill is considered a true war hero and all, but it was at the back of Russian civilians and casualties the WWII was won for the allies. Technically Germanys only and huge loss was against teh Russians. Someone should hav reminded Britains appeasement policy of Germany against Russia. And he should have taken revenge few years later atlest.
You may wish to read about the Battle of Britain.
There is no leader more courageous than Winston Churchill. Without him, the world would have been subjugated to dictatorship.
Unlike the western allies, the Soviets achieved their war aims when the Germans surrendered. At that point Germany was dismembered so as to make it a non threat. Russia had been pounded twice by Germany in the 20th Century and it cost millions of lives both times. Now that threat was finally neutralized and a buffer zone of Soviet controlled states made this even stronger.
Great Britain and France had originally gone to war in reaction to Poland being occupied by a despotic foreign power. At the end of the war, Poland was still occupied by a despotic foreign power, only it was the Soviets now who had replaced the Nazis. Thus, the allied war aim had been frustrated. I can see where Churchill might have wanted to push on to try and achieve that war goal, but as for the Soviets, they had all that they needed.
Thank you.
Some people keep on thinking that Russians "have no rhyme no reason" and act just for the heck of it, no matter what.
This is a big mistake, since Russians always know their objectives.
One of the docs where they rpesent the german point of view. Hitler never considered England to be his enemy because of their whiteness and being european. and reluctantly went to war with them. And there are enough evidences presented as to how churchill begged for americas help . In fact even in first world war, America helped turn the tide while germans were nearly about to win.
The UK studied the feasibilty of Operation Unthinkable at the end of World War II. There were two primary reasons for this. One, to guarantee democracy in post-war Poland. Two, in the event that the Red Army moved west beyond the agreed-upon lines dividing up Europe. It was determined that the former was not worth the cost (a protracted and exceedingly costly war - to say nothing of the knock-on effects on the Pacific campaign).
But remember, analyzing a possibility is very different from actively desiring such a course of action. After all, War Plan Crimson - circa 1930 - didn't mean that the U.S. was interested in invading Canada. They just thought it prudent to have the operation plans to do so ready and available.
Just like with Churchill considering - ie, contemplating and investigating - the possibility of the Western Allies moving against the USSR, I'm sure that Stalin did consider it.
But as with Churchill, it absolutely was not worth the cost, nor did it entail any particular assurance of success. While Soviet forces were relatively secure against the West in the land they held in 1945, due to numbers and being able to play defense in the event of a Western attack, they were also exhausted. They desperately needed time, and Stalin was well aware of that. Supply lines were long, and all the looting of conquered countries that Stalin could imagine (and he had quite the imagination in that regard) couldn't offset the resources the Soviets had to generate to keep the Red Army supplied and those countries supplied to the point of them being worthy war booty in the first place. The USSR badly needed some years of peace to recover and reconstitute itself.
Furthermore, Stalin generally had what he wanted. Germany was beaten and subdued (although, always paranoid, he worried incessantly about a western Germany being revived and anti-Soviet). He had the buffer he wanted, mostly (he didn't have Finland, but if unable to completely subjugate them he did manage to ... well ... Finlandize them). Also, he wasn't an idiot. Stalin generally chose to attack only when conditions were overwhelmingly in his favor. Stalin was prone to bad choices (in many ways he blundered his way through the pre-war years, the Winter War was ill-advised, and he made a lot of poor decisions in the immediate wake of Barbarossa) but he had gotten more strategically astute during the course of the war (even as his paranoia was increasing).
Recall that Soviet forces liberated (with local support) Finnmark in northern Norway, as well as the very strategic Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic - closer to what would become East Germany than to Denmark or the western part of Germany. Yet the Soviets withdrew from both of these regions. Not out of any benevolence by Stalin, of course, but due to the pragmatic reality that trying to hold them would be far more costly than surrendering them.
In a nutshell, there just wasn't much in an attack on the Western Allies for Joe. Remember, Stalin created the whole self-serving 'Socialism in One Country' idea as an alternative to Marxist dogma of world revolution/permanent revolution, because endlessly antagonizing powerful countries would ultimately threaten the most important thing of all - Stalin's personal position. That was ultimately the bottom line.
Note: The Cold War: A World History, by Odd Arne Westad is a useful source for Stalin's thinking in 1945, drawing heavily from Soviet archives.
One of the docs where they rpesent the german point of view. Hitler never considered England to be his enemy because of their whiteness and being european. and reluctantly went to war with them. And there are enough evidences presented as to how churchill begged for americas help . In fact even in first world war, America helped turn the tide while germans were nearly about to win.
Well of course he asked for help. That shows how heroic Churchill was: he stood alone against Hitler when Hitler was at the peak of his power. There was almost no hope for the UK and evil Hitler was bombing its cities nightly, murdering people in their homes, and surely the UK figured that eventually it would be bombed back into the Stone Age. What kind of leader would do that today? None that I know of.
And Hitler's positive views of the UK are irrelevant. He was so barbaric that he attempted to level London and murder its civilians.
There is no leader more courageous than Winston Churchill. Without him, the world would have been subjugated to dictatorship.
re: the Battle of Britain.
The RAF beat back the Germany attack, they shot down more Luftwaffe machines than they themselves lost, and the UK was producing significantly more replacement airframes in 1940 than was Germany. In addition, they marshaled their reserves more conservatively than did Germany. This allowed the UK the option of digging deeper if necessary - cancelling rotational leave, recalling instructors, etc. The Luftwaffe, throwing everything they had into the British skies, did not have the ability to do that. Their best pilots all flew instead of instructing, and they did not take care to keep their pilots fresh through regular R&R.
There's this myth that the UK was this close to being conquered. That is hardly so. Germany never came remotely close to the air supremacy that would was a minimal prerequisite for invading Britain.
And even had they achieved complete dominance in the skies, then what? The mightiest navy in the world (arguably - the USN was closing fast in 1940, but still) stood between France and British shores. And the Luftwaffe had almost no ability to take on the Royal Navy. First, they lacked torpedo bombers. Nazi Germany produced only two types of torpedo bombers. One was a biplane, of which only 14 were ever manufactured. The other was a seaplane - the He 115 - which was fairly effective against materiel convoys, but it was slow and lightly armed and dead meat against any sort of fighter opposition. Mostly, it dropped mines and carried out reconnaissance. A mere 138 were produced (compare that to 9000+ TBF Avengers). A dive bombers? The Stuka wasn't very effective against armored and moving warships. So Germany simply had no way to cross the Channel. The Sealion plan was to float an invasion force across in Rhine river barges. A few RN destroyers could have taken out such a flotilla simply by sailing through it - the wake would have done the job!
Also... 'the world'? Germany had no way to project its power to the western hemisphere, and zero ability to project it further south than North Africa or further west than the Urals or the nearest reaches of the Middle East. Nazi Germany was a scourge than needed to be eradicated, but 'world domination' was never going to happen. Even Hitler's grandest delusions didn't extend all that far beyond Europe.
Note:
This post is in no way an endorsement of shanv3's fantasy of the USSR defeating the UK, a truly repugnant thought. The idea of the Soviet Union reaching the Channel in 1945/46 - to say nothing of crossing it - is even more ludicrous than that of Nazi Germany doing so in 1940, which itself was a pipe-dream.
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