Could the Western Allies Win Without the USSR?

No :without a British/French DOW (which totally surprised Hitler),Hitler would not attack in the west .There was no German plan to attack in the west .The aim of the pact with the SU was to attack Poland .

 

The Schmundt Notes
Report on a Meeting on 23 May 1939

Participants: The Führer, Field Marshall Göring, Grand Admiral Raeder, Colonel General v. Brauchitsch, Colonel General Keitel, Colonel General Milch, General of Artillery Halder, General Bodenschatz, Commanding Admiral Schniewindt, Colonel at the General Staff Jeschonnek, Colonel of the General Staff
Warlimont, Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff Schmundt, Captain Engel,
Corvette Captain Albrecht, Captain v. Below.

Subject: Information about the Situation and Political Goals.

....There can thus be no question of sparing Poland, and the decision that remains is to attack Poland at the first appropriate occasion.

A repetition of the Czech case we cannot believe in. There will be fighting. The task is to isolate Poland. The success of isolation is decisive.

Thus the Führer must reserve for himself the final order to strike. There must be no simultaneous confrontation with the West (France and England).

If it is not certain that in the sequence of a German-Polish confrontation a war with the West is to be excluded, the fight must be mainly directed against England and France.

Principle: Confrontation with Poland – beginning with attack against Poland – will only have success if the West stays out.

If this is not possible it will be better to attack the West and to liquidate Poland at the same time....

 

Interesting,but it proves what I am saying
1)Hitler had no intention to attack the West
2)A war simultaneous with Poland and the West had to be avoided
3)Poland had to be isolated :an intervention by the SU had to be prevented:the SU was the only country that could help Poland,it would not admit that Germany would conquer the whole of Poland,with as result that Hitler(=Ribbentrop) would be obliged to make ,with the hat in the hand, the journey to the Kremlin.

 

Hitler directive No I on 31st August also tells a different story than that Hitler was not ready for Allied offensive. And this was one day before the Polish invasion started so these decisions were not after the declarations of war by the West. Yes, he wanted to gather as many units as possible to crush Poland, but at the same time he had plans to start the war in the west, or as he call it , respond to Allied attacks. Hitler´s response was not peace offering as you can read from the directive. The man was a liar, and after Munich Conference he said that this was not what he wanted, he wanted war and in the future no one can stop him.

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In the West it is important to leave the responsibility for opening hostilities unmistakably to England and France. Minor violations of the frontier will be dealt with, for the time being, purely as local incidents.

The Western frontier of Germany will not be crossed by land at any point without my explicit orders.

Should England and France open hostilities against Germany, it will be the duty of the Armed Forces operating in the West, while conserving their strength as much as possible, to maintain conditions for the successful conclusion of operations against Poland. Within these limits enemy forces and war potential will be damaged as much as possible. The right to order offensive operations is reserved absolutely to me.

In operations against England the task of the Air Force is to take measures to dislocate English imports, the armaments industry, and the transport of troops to France. Any favourable opportunity of an effective attack on concentrated units of the English Navy, particularly on battleships or aircraft carriers, will be exploited. The decision regarding attacks on London is reserved to me.

Attacks on the English homeland are to be prepared, bearing in mind that inconclusive results with insufficient forces are to be avoided in all circumstances.

Fhrer Directive 1 | World War II Database

 

Unfortunately the logics in your post are up side down.

M-R pact was first - 23.(22.)8.1939, the Winter War was after - from 30.11.1939 onwards. One CAN NOT reason the previous pact with the war that the SU started afterwards! Therefore: Stalin DID NOT make the M-R pact because of the bad performance in the WW!

Stalin was not expecting a German attack in 1939 because that could not have been possible. Poland was between the two countries with quite a big army. Any invasion operation against the SU by sea was ridiculous to even think about.

In 1941 the German tanks were inferior when compared to the soviet ones - and in much smaller numbers. A German "Katyusha" did not even exist.

Originally Stalin did not plan to attack on June 1941 but maybe a year later. The German preparations did not allow him that time - he HAD TO attack on summer 1941. He didn't believe though, that the Germans could and would launch their attack so soon - which of course WAS too soon for Germany too.

I repeat: in 1939 Stalin DID NOT think he needed any more time. BEFORE the Winter War he had no reason to think his army was nothing less that invincible.

 

Surely you have heard of a Pyrrhic Victory? I'm not sure if a loss of 20+ million citizens and half of a country totally destroyed could be called "a victory" - especially if you had started it...

No doubt the Western allies would NOT have been willing to a similar "victory".

 

There is little evidence that Stalin planned on attacking at all. Now he may well have desired the capability to attack and wanted to exploit any golden opertunities but 41 doesn't look like one to me.

 

1)during the period (summer of 1940) that the Red Army had a real chance to obtain success,Stalin did not move
2)a year later,the Red Army still had NO offensive capacity(with/without some exageration,it was a paper tiger)
3)there are no proofs,even no indications,that Stalin would attack after the summer of 1941
4)no body has given a reason why Stalin would attack in 1941
IMHO,in 1941,Stalin did not know what to do :attack or not ,nor when .All would depend on 2 points
a)the development of the war (which was from the POV of Stalin,a capitalist civil war)
b) when the Red Army would be ready for a big offensive against the WM(IMHO,this would take years,a lot of years)

 

The casualites sustained in the east were horrific and a direct representation of the following: The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler



With that said, hanging the Soviet flag over the Reichstag is certainly not a defeat. The price was very high yes but the SU did emerged as a super power after the conflict.

 

But you can't separate that from the Western participation. Just the Lend-Lease, JUST it, historians debate if was decisive or not for the Soviet success. You have endless more considerations however, some Pro-Soviet, like the possibility of a different Soviet initial reaction due to the new geopolitical reality.

Other point I would like to make is, if the West is neutral in a German-Soviet war, I suposse they would be somewhat pro-Germany. That means a Red Europe woud probably not be accepted.

Alternatively, perhaps the Soviets would not let the Allies invade the territories of their Nazi puppet.

 

I dont. Yet, reality remains...

 

Victory of Russians in the Great Patriotic War is the greatest and the most important in the history of Human Kind. Without the Russian victory we would have to live or die under the miserable Nazi regime.

The reason for enormous number of Russian victims is that Russia wasn't attacked by regular armies but by hordes of ordinary murders who have focused primarily to killing of unarmed civilians. After the invasion of the Russian Republic of Karelia, Finish army was directly involved in cutting supply lines and starving large number citizens of Leningrad to death. That's shame!

That's all I can tell you.

 

No wish to bellittle Soviet heroism or German ferocity but cutting supplies to a besieged city has been standard operating procedure for sieges since walled (fortified) cities appeared. Global blockades against a non food self sufficient country like what the RN did in WW1 and WW2 are also conductive to famine, it always shocked me to see edible oils as part of the cargoes of German blocade runners. IMO a lot of the civilian losses in the USSR are to be attributed to the scorched earth policies, quite possibly the Germans would have looted everything anyway, but finding hidden foodstuffs in an agricultural area is very manpower intensive while the retreating red army knew were it was stored, the policy made famine inevitable no matter what the Germans did and famine was the biggest killer.

 

Just curious. According to my knowledge the Finnish Army stopped some 20 kilometers from Leningrad due to Mannerheim´s order. The Germans were able to cut the supply lines and did so. Perhaps you can show where the Finns did cut the supply lines?

Siege of Leningrad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Dear Kai!

I am sincerely sorry for the entire last sentence of my previous post. It was my stupid response to an inflammatory, extraneous, off-topic post, which was posted with the primary intent of provoking emotional response or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

I will never let myself respond to trolling again. I promise that.

I am sure you will accept my sincere apology.

 

Apology accepted,Tamino!

 

Slonik, I must object to you blaming the excessively high Soviet manpower casualties on the nature of the war on the Eastern Front. This is what we in the west refer to as WHITEWASH.

The Red Army has no-one but itself to point fingers at for their casualty figures. We also fought the Germans ol'boy, and we did not have military tactics that were anywhere near as wasteful of human life as the Red Army.

Yes, I'm aware it was a dire national emergencey, and I'm also aware that intensively training people for the Red Army would have not allowed them to make any sort of recovery from the severe beating the Red Army recieved in 1941. Having said that, I'll go further and suggest that Soviet staff work in the early months of Bararossa was EXCREBLE, and provides a simple reason why so many Soviet troops were surrounded and/or captured.

All this is a product of Soviet DOCTRINE. It really is NOT a result of the 'nature of the war, not being conducted in a knightly fashion".

In WW2, with the possible exception of the Desert Campaign in North Africa, I challenge you to provide me with information about any other front that was "conducted in a knightly fashion."

Your more aware of the facts of WW2 than most Russians we meet here, so why pull the wool over our eyes in such a fashion. We are like you, sir, in that we admire the personal courage and enormous sacrifice of the Soviet people. I fall over myself praising Russians and the sheer GUTS it took to beat those bastards at their own game. But by God, your leaders were butchers, including Zukhov. Georgi was a brilliant general officer and a great military figure, but he was also very expensive and flippant with the lives of the ordinary soldier. his finest performance was surely MOSCOW 1941, with few reserves, outnumbered and outgunned, Zukhov was fighting for territory that he had grown up in, and it was his finest hour. But his reputation for letting forward units be pummelled into nothing was notable, and he was still doing the same thing crossing the Oder in 1945.

The Finns here are not fooled either, and niether should ya'all be.

 

What about the people that lived and died under the "miserable" Soviet regime?

I won't deny that if the war went as the Nazis planned, they would practically kill the whole Soviet population, and millions more in Europe. But ideas of Nazi world domination, and hence "Soviet salvators", are discutible. The Nazis expected Britain would accept peace after the fall of the USSR, and the Americans would not be involved. Hitler had no plans to invade Britain, he actually admired it, and much less the US.

 

I think you, probably inadvertently, do a great disservice to many with such comments. It was hardly a "Russian" victory but one of the Soviet Union. To single out the people of one of the "Republics" even if it was the most important is wrong IMO.

 

VB, I was not referring to military casualties but civillians. The Soviet citizens were not treated in the same way as the western population had been The Slav's were considered second class citizens at best and were to serve the German population as slaves in Hitlers conquered Russia. Belarus lost as many as 9k villages alone (wiped of the map) how many did all of Western Europe lose?

The war in Soviet Russia was so ruthless because of German policies not Russias military doctrine. This is not whitewashing.