"the American and British armies would have been no match for the Soviet Red Army".
U.S. , Britain, Canada and France had millions of battle hardened troops, too ... and air and sea supremacy.
U.S. , Britain, Canada and France had millions of battle hardened troops, too ... and air and sea supremacy.
I also think, but can’t find hard numbers, that the USSR had more soldiers than the other allies combined (some strategists thought the allies would need the remains of the German army to help fight the Russians, if it were to come to that)
What they may not have had enough was technology. The USA provide them with lots of material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease)
I think there is some truth in saying World War Two in Europe was won with American materiel and Russian blood.
That could have been their weak point. The western powers might have been able to hold of the larger USSR army by gaining air superiority. I’m not sure of that, though, as the time the USSR really needed US tech to survive was gone in 1945.
About a third of the total casualties of World War II were in Operation Barbarossa, 25 million out of 75 million, about 14% of the Soviet population, mostly within a few months in 01941. The battle hardened troops of the US and even France could mostly go back home to their families, barring Jody; the Soviet troops had, in many cases, had their families killed or starved to death by the Germans. And, when it came to land combat, the Soviets were enormously outproducing not only Germany, though not the US; in 01944, the last full year of war, they produced some 17000 tanks, and nearly 20000 in 01943. (The US numbers were 37000 in 01944 and 27000 in 01943.)
However, Russian tanks had a significant advantage over US tanks for combat in Europe: they were in Europe. And so were the farms that fed their crews.
So, I'm not sure if they "would have been no match for the Soviet Red Army", but I'm sure glad they didn't have to find out.
That's one of the reasons this article is very important.
Rather, my primary tank-related claim was that the USSR was producing enormous quantities of war materiel, as exemplified by tanks; in 01943 they outproduced Germany almost 2:1 in quantity of tanks, and even in 01944 when Germany was catching up, they still outproduced them. The quality of that materiel was merely adequate, but it still would have represented a very significant military threat to the US's position in Europe, as it had to Germany's.
My second claim was that the USSR was in a better logistical situation with respect to Europe than the US was. I don't think that's controversial, since Moscow is in Europe, and so was most Soviet farmland and much Soviet arms production.
U.S. + British + France GDP was 7 times bigger than Russia at end of the war. Western allied air supremacy ( including a nuclear monopoly ) would have obliterated Soviet logistics.
The West had the upper hand and Stalin knew it.
I wonder if those GDP numbers capture everything relevant to military advantage. The USSR produced as many tanks in a year and a half as Britain did throughout the whole war, despite having the same GDP.
Certainly it is true that with the nuclear monopoly the US had the upper hand; what we're discussing here is what Stalin would have believed if the bomb had remained secret, or perhaps only been demonstrated on uninhabited Pacific atolls, so the nuclear monopoly would not have figured into his calculations, or been a more theoretical factor. Or, more precisely, what Truman believed Stalin would have believed.
Remember that the rest of western Europe and North America stood by and let Franco overrun Spain while the communist movement (small c and big-C) actively tried to fight him.
So there were in fact forces on the ground in many parts of Europe that would not have seen potential Red Army invasion forces as the same kind of invasion force as the Germans. At least for a period of time.
They also allied with them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Remember this stuff also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communis...
I am not an apologist for Stalinism, I am not saying any of this was a good thing. I am mostly accused of being a Trotskyist, or whatever.
But the role of the Communist movement in resisting Nazism in Europe is something not widely understood in the Anglo-American sphere. To the point where some on the right in the US have now started to conflate the two. Which is... nonsense.
Anglo-American post-war triumphalism is/was ridiculous. My father grew up in the rubble of the end of the war. There were no winners, it was tragedy all around.
Listen, all those people are fucking dead!
Hirohito was the last surviving World War II leader; he died in 01989, 33 years ago, at which point the other leaders had all been dead for decades.
There's nobody left to blame or punish!
The youngest WWII soldiers were born around 01930, which is 91 years ago; there are very few of them left alive either.
I have the unpleasant feeling that some people are commenting on this thread because they support one or another of the belligerents in that bloody slaughter, as if it were a sportsball game, rather than because they are interested in what is true and what is false. How could you go about debugging a program if you had to argue with advocates of one subroutine or another, intentionally feeding you unreliable information so you'll blame a different subroutine for the bug? How could you go about analyzing a chemical reaction if you had to argue with people who were fans of one or another chemical compound, and tried to argue that their favorite compound would be produced from any reaction, whether or not the necessary elements were present? This is an excellent example of what I mean when I liken HN to the intellectual equivalent of the impoverished slums where I used to volunteer.
The relevant point to the factual question being discussed is that the European Resistance was, as you say, led by people who supported Stalin, and they had largely been put in charge of their various countries under the occupation of the United Nations. At the point that we're talking about, in 01945, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had been dead for four years, and Europe was full of the tales of noble sacrifices and terrible suffering the Russians had experienced in order to resist the Nazis. So Stalin could reasonably anticipate a lot more popular support and a lot less government resistance for setting up Communist governments in them, should he push his military advantage further, than Hitler ever had for setting up Nazi governments.
As your own link states, this wasn't an alliance. Also if you read the "background" section of the article, you'll see that they very much saw Nazi Germany has a major threat and wanted to contains them early by allying France and Britain.
But France and particularly Britain instead prefered trying to appease Germany until the last minute with the results we know.
The non-agression pact might seem cynical from the west point of view, but if you put yourself in the soviet shoes for a second, it was a logical move.
As for your second link it's really not very assertive, most of the claims made early after the war were rebutted by historians later on.
I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about. There were disclosures about Nazi-Soviet secret protocols in 1946 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... though Soviet attempts to deny this were not credible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Alliance would mean joint fighting, not joint parading. Yes they secretly divided Europe on a map, and agreed not to fight over it, that not an alliance.
> I'm not sure what specific "rebutted by historians" you're talking about
Your second link on the French communist party activities during 39-41. It's like you didn't even read what you linked as source:
> but later historians have downplayed the PCF's role in any such actions, stating that they were isolated cases