What if U.S. invaded Soviet Union?

Strangely enough. USSR actually ignored targets in Alaska if WWIII ever kicked off. I know a handful of nuclear weapons would of went that way but it wasn’t seen as a breaking point to try and invade it right off the bat.

Brad Meltzer’s show Decoded on the History Channel had an episode devoted to this topic. Its a good episode, if any of you get a chance watch it.

The second Italian Facist regime : la Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) was set up today, with its capital, not in Rome, but Salo, a small town in Lombardy on Lake Garda,  Northern Italy, where the RSI had his Foreign Office.  
Mussolini was its head, but it was nothing more than a German puppet, dependent on its military and financial support.
Mussolini had been rescued from captivity in a daring raid by a soon to be famous German SS Colonel, Otto Skorzeny on September 12th.
Italy had  surrendered on the 8th and the Allies had  landed at Salerno on the 9th and were fighting the Germans in the south of Italy at this time, though they had not yet captured the city port of Naples.

The defeat of Leningrad would have been easier than Stalingrad.

The loss of Moscow would have been much greater loss than Baku and resulted in a shortening of the front of which a latter southern drive could succeed without fear of getting cut off because at that point all logistical support for Soviets would be coming entirely east of the Don and this country is not too developed. The last Soviet Factories would be in range of Axis bombers and the front would have rolled up more easily, than committing the 6th to Stalingrad with all other Soviet logistical and political objectives are intact allowing easy reinforcement from rail heads running south from Moscow.

I suppose that if you’re a POW, there are worse places to be held than that camp. I wonder if any of these men stayed in Canada after the war, if that option was available.

@KurtGodel7:

@Octospire:

You make some ineteresting points, the strategic alliances between the French and Soviets basically doomed Germany to either fighting WW2 or being a sitting duck when the Soviets came a knockin’. Chamberlain could of been bigger than Churchill in the current popular imagination if he had of engineered a successful alliance with the Germans and then defeated the Soviet Union. You are very much correct that forging an alliance would of been very difficult considering the Pro-Soviet sentiments amongst the worlds elites, however I think with the right propaganda they could of turned the tide. In reality it wouldnt even have to be propaganda just the truth about the Soviet Union under Stalin, the labour camps and purges that were reality long before exterminating the Jews was even a thought on the Nazi parties planning table.

Germany and Britain had ties going back centuries that could of been rekindled in spite of French protests, the Soviets werent going to sit within their borders forever especially with their massive advantages in manpower and industrial capacity.

What is facinating about this whole era is how accomodating Hitler tried to be with the British at least at first, he wanted an Anglo-German alliance so badly just like the alliance between the Prussians and the British during the Napoloeonic era. Had the British been receptive to these offers or at the very least not signing their way into world war 2 by alligning themselves yet again with the French things could of been very different.

As I previously said I think the key would be proganda making the Nazi’s seem like the lesser of two evils and demonising the Soviets to the point where it would be essential for the British to side with Germany. It really shouldnt of been that hard as the atttitudes of the late 1940’s and 1950’s Western world illustrated. There was already communist uprising in China undermining the Nationalist government, how hard would of it been to demonise the communist way of life and show the world what life in the Soviet Union was really like.

Good post! :)

From a purely ethical standpoint, several differences between the Nazis and the communists occur to me.

The Soviet government had murdered tens of millions of innocent people even before WWII began. (And added considerably to that total both during and after the war.) Conversely, the Nazi government did not begin killing large numbers of people until its food situation precluded feeding everyone within its borders.

The Soviet government was bent on world revolution. Outside of communist-controlled areas, their focus was primarily on tearing down the existing social order and anything which supported it. As an example of this, David Horowitz (an ex-communist who’d been raised as a red diaper baby) noted that shortly after he got married, his wife attended a meeting of communists/radical feminists. She came home in tears: the radical feminists/communists had harshly judged her for choosing to stay home and raise kids instead of putting her career first. That was the last such meeting Horowitz’s wife attended. He went on to add that within a year, every woman who chose to continue attending those meeting had had her marriage end. Communists felt that stirring up trouble between the sexes was a good way to harm the existing social order. In contrast, the Nazis were generally pro-family, and even brought Mothers Day to German-occupied France.

Recently, a relatively well-known Canadian journalist decided to quit her career, and become an artist instead. She went back to school to obtain her art degree. She was successful in obtaining that degree, but she said it nearly killed her as an artist. The postmodernist (read:communist) opinion is that until the world’s sexes and races are equal, beauty has no place in art. Consequently, no effort should be made to make art beautiful. This journalist chose, as her subject matter, to paint the people who cleaned up the art room after the art students were finished using it. She felt such people were too often unnoticed. Her postmodernist professors harshly condemned her for this, and asked her what she, as an educated and well-off white woman, could possibly know what it was like to be a poorly paid racial minority. While the politicization and perversion of art to suit a twisted and evil political agenda may seem like a minor thing in comparison with the mass rapes and mass murders for which communists are responsible, I still see this as significant. In contrast to this, the Nazis tended to prefer traditional to modern art, and believed that it was perfectly appropriate for art to be beautiful or visually pleasing. They sometimes censored depictions of the nude human form, which they saw as decadent.

If the common people could be made to see these and other difference between the Nazis and communists, I firmly believe that most people would respond by becoming significantly more anti-communist than they were anti-Nazi. The problem was that Western elites tended to sweep communists’ crimes under the rug, while focusing excessively on (and often exaggerating) those of the Nazis. Outright lies were told, and believed. For example, Walter Duranty of the New York Times told a number of pro-Soviet lies, including the whitewashing of the Ukrainian famine. (A forced famine that the Soviets committed in the early '30s, which resulted in deliberate starvation and death of 7 million innocent people.) Against such a backdrop, it is possible to tell the truth without necessarily being believed.

While these things would have represented an obstacle to a NATO-style Anglo-German alliance, they were not necessarily an insurmountable one. But it would have been an uphill battle, even if both Hitler and Chamberlain were both fully committed to the idea, and even if the Nazis had been as good at understanding political considerations outside Germany as von Bismarck had been.

While with hindsight we can see what the Nazi’s were capable of, but we forget they were up against the wall and fighting for their very existence who knows what the British or Americans may of done in the same position. The fire bombing of Tokyo killing up to 210,000 a single night is just a preview of what the allies were capable of when faced with the massive casualties possible with an Invasion of mainland Japan.

The Germans in the early 1930’s were an intolerant towards Jews and other minorities such as gypsies but in reality they were not that much more intolerant towards Jews than the Americans in the early years of Nazi rule in Germany. Had the Nazi’s got their alliance and not surrounded on practically every side by Anti-Nazi nations it is likely they would not of comitted much of the atrocities they did in reality. As Kurt Godel quite correctly said the Soviets were already an evil regime long before the Nazi’s put the first Jew in the gas chamber. Had the Germans had alliance to maintain with the British they couldnt take the hard line with ethnic minorities and under take the actions they did in reality, I think carving up the Soviet Union would of been seen as more than worth the trade off of not so publicly persecuting ethnic minorities in the eyes of the Nazi leadership.

I agree that it would of been difficult for Chamberlain and Hitler to forge a NATO style alliance but as you say it wasnt entirely impossible and looking at the reality of World War 2 in a lot of cases the highly improbable did actually end up occuring. For instance the quick fall of France and decimation of Allied armies and also the suprisingly successful early U-boat campaign against Allied shipping in the Atlantic. I think if the Nazi’s had of been less agressive and built up their strength perhaps even getting a treaty where by their armies had free passage through Poland to the Soviet Union, that combined with a continued anti-communist propaganda campaign in Britain may very well of turned the tide of public opinion and made Hitler look like the possible saviour of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Of course had the Alliance materialised the peoples of the Ukraine and Soviet Union been treated fairly and with compassion as the invasion continued its likely that the Soviet Union would of crumbled under the weight of internal revolution and Anglo-German attack.

In some of my other posts on this forum, I’ve described how even in 1940 (when the U.S. was still technically at peace with Germany), it had devoted a significant amount of industrial potential toward winning the air war against Germany; with plans to considerably expand the effort over the next several years. America’s strongest single asset was her industrial potential, as Hitler clearly understood. But that potential was going to be increasingly turned against Germany, whether the U.S. was technically at war or not.

Hitler’s plan to counter this was to expand Germany’s industrial output over the short-term, so that he could at least keep pace with the air war over Germany in the long haul. His method of expanding Germany’s output included industrialization and conquest. The industrialization aspect of his plan meant that instead of putting everything he had into weapons output for 1941 or 1942–in a massive effort to crush the Soviet Union–he had to divide his nation’s economic activity between short-term military production and long-term output increases. The result of all that industrial investment was that Germany increased its aircraft output from 16,000 planes per year in 1941 to over 40,000 planes per year by 1944. It also increased its military production in other categories, such as tanks and V2 rockets.

In late 1941, Hitler knew that his window of opportunity to win the war was relatively slim; and that 1942 would be critical. Germany had to win a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in that year, both to take pressure off its eastern front, and to provide it with the raw materials and manpower it needed to hold its own in the air war over the long haul. Hitler believed that the overwhelming majority of America’s naval strength would be needed in the Pacific to counter the Japanese; at least until the end of 1943. That gave him what he believed was a two year window with which he could sink the American Lend-Lease Aid pouring into Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Sinking those ships would increase Germany’s chances of obtaining the victory over the Soviet Union it desperately needed.

However, the Japanese Navy proved less adept than Hitler had hoped. The Battle of Midway occurred six months after Pearl Harbor. That battle took the naval pressure off the U.S. in the Pacific, and allowed it to focus more of its efforts on convoy protection in the Atlantic. More generally, the failure of the Japanese military meant that Japan would be far less successful in taking military pressure off of Germany than Hitler had hoped.

In 1942, the Soviet Union outproduced Germany 3:1 - 4:1 in tanks, artillery, and other land combat categories, and even 2:1 in military aircraft. It also fielded a much larger army than Germany. Thus evaporated Hitler’s hope of a decisive victory on his eastern front.

Had Hitler not declared war against the U.S., large amounts of American Lend-Lease aid would still have flowed to his enemies in Europe. Over the long-term, he still would have needed to devote a significant portion of his military production to defending German skies and German cities against American-made bombers. He would have lost out on the Second Happy Time (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time ), which would have resulted in a stronger Soviet war effort for 1942. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the U.S. invasion of Algeria in 1942, its invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943, or the Normandy invasion of '44. It’s easy to say in hindsight that the harm of the American invasions exceeded the benefit of sinking that Lend-Lease shipping in '42. But that distinction was less obvious at the time.

A year since the last post