Polish flag over the Reichstag first?

It was a great idea.

I think trying to keep Russia under control would have been far more difficult than defeating them militarily..

Maybe some realized that Patton was dangerous with this ideas of his...people wonder till today if his demise was really an accident.

foxnews.com/story/0,2933,469688,00.html

car-accidents.com/general-patton-car-accident.html

Oh man and you're moving to Russia soon, LOLOLOLOL

I go in peace...

He was at least smart enough to realize that the Germans are way more dependable and way less dangerous than the Soviets in the long run. Not to mention that the Germans are obviously way smarter than the Russians.


I hope the best for you but I know, I'd never make this decision myself.

Yeah , it was a very odd accident...a pretty minor traffic accident that reulted in a broken neck....

There were certainly a lot of Americans who considered him a dangerous and embarasing liability...

We have never tried to set up a puppet for a country that large.

It would have cost huge numbers of American lives to defeat the Red army , and huge numbers to keep a lid on them...

Would they then have felt obliged to rebuild the Soviet union , as they did with Germany...

The American public would never have stood for that...It would have been a nightmare that they would probably be still stuck in to this day..

What if during the conflict the Russians had produced an Atomic bomb..? They were not so far behind the USA on that score...

Having the Russians in control of much of eastern Europe was not an ideal situation , especially for the occupied countries....but it could have been even worse...!

Right you are. It was unavoidable at the time. Roosevelt was convinced Stalin wouldn't annex land while Churchill had a lower opinion of him. Roosevelt believed Stalin would cooperate later if given what he asked for at Yalta.

Alot of german soldiers believed in a soon forthcoming alliance with the West allies, many of those surrendered to them so easily because of that belief.

In some cases the surrenderd units were kept intact by the Americans with weapons and under the orders of their officers (because they hadn't been alone with these thoughts)....being ready and willing any time to go to war again.

But it didn't happen.

Several million german troops, highly motivated with the material support of the US and only fighting at one front anymore...they would had have a big chance to threw the Red Army back.

It wasn't any more to get to Moscow but at least out of Germany (and that was possible!)...who knows what would had happened if they had reached Poland...

Of course the west simply thought the Russians were grabbing land in a quest for world domination , but there were more practical reasons behind the occupying of Poland and other countries....

The Soviet union had suffered huge numbers of killed and wounded in the war , and total destruction of many cities , far higher than any other country in the war..

Comrade Stalin decided that if there was going to be another European war , the Russians were going to fight it in Poland , Rumania , East Germany etc not in the Soviet union...

Stalin promised free elections in Poland at the Yalta Conference but later fell short of this. Americans accused Roosevelt of selling out to the Russians.

At the time of the conference the Red Army was three times larger than that of allied forces.

Face it, the Red Army was enormous and unlike what anyone else had. It influenced the US to get its act together and work on it's own military.

I think Patton spoke out what many thought...he wasn't alone in this. He might have been seen as dangerous because he was NOT the lone nutter.

The german army + the west material and air force would had been more than a match for the Red Army.

At the time Roosevelt thought Stalin would cooperate so he wasn't going to jeopardize what he hoped would be the groundwork for world peace.

I know how history did go PP! ;)

I'm just saying that from what I could gather in memoirs and biographies and witness reports from both sides, the idea to go together against the Soviets was not Pattons alone but quite farspread on the ground.

But Patton was the one most outspoken and most high up...then he died.

That's Churchill's "Operation Unthinkable", a liberation of eastern Europe from the Russians using help form the British, Americans, Free Poland, and remaining German Forces. Honestly I think that the allied superior air force would pretty much win them the battle, even thought the Soviets had the "manpower".

absolutely but she doesn't understand that more is sometimes less.

I think Patton was the best general the Americans had, but as we know in the Army you have to listen to your superiors, therefore he wasn't always in command or in the middle of the action.

Who knows what the outcome would have been. What if the Red Army retreated only to reemerge ten times stronger a little later?

There is no doubt that the German army would have been willing to carry on the fight against the Russians with American support , if for no other reason than to rid the German lands of Russians...

When the Germans began the Battle of the bulge , it was not an attempt to defeat the British and Americans , they knew that this was no longer possible , but they hoped that they could force a stalemate in order to make a ceasefire , and turn all their efforts against the Russians who they knew would not ever make any kind of deal...

Many of the senior German generals did believe that an alliance was possible with the USA and UK against the Russians , but Hitler was an obstacle in any possible alliance...

If the Germans had been allowed to reform the army , and did join the USA in the fight against the Russians...AND , if they did get as far as Poland....would the confused Poles have seen them as liberaters from the Russians , or merely another occupier in a familiar and unwelcome uniform...???

The West got nukes soon! The Soviets got them much later.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a strong warning to Moscow too...

So...it could have worked! The Iron Curtain would had gone up much more further East...

True enough.

Not in this crucial time...

they used em all up on Japan...i don,t think there was any spare ones available at the time...

I know, you edited it already. (Scroll up?)

I didn't know there were only two. So, what was the effect on Stalin, seeing atomic bombs detonate in Japan? Did he wonder if USSR would be next?

Stalin didn't knew either...and he had only nil...

So he probably did think USSR was a candidate for a future bombing...

Neither did the Japanese . or anyone else...

It was a game of bluff...the Japanese fell for it...

I think they might have had the material for another one but there certainly wasn,t a huge supply of them for a major conflct...

We seem to have strayed off the original topic a bit...but hopefully the mods will let it go , its a very interesting discussion...