Operation "Unthinkable"

[chuck]

Churchill proposed 1 July 1945 as D-Day for WW.III in the West. The Americans, British, French and 45 freshly organized German divisions would cross the Oder, and East from Austria in the South.

The USAAF and RAF based in Iran would smash oil fields in the Caucasus.

Perhaps Mountbatten would attack North from India....

So you mean the Soviet attempt to build a large buffer zone around itself was even more immediately justified than we had been led to believe?

[Werner]

It is an interesting thought that conditions on the "new" Eastern Front may have bought the Japanese some concessions, including a form of cooperation against The USSR or an armistice which might release Chiang to attack in the far East. I could conceive of a four-party conflict in with the Kuomintang + Americans with air bases in Japan vs PLA and USSR.

[Werner]

So you mean the Soviet attempt to build a large buffer zone around itself was even more immediately justified than we had been led to believe?

Ancient American proverb: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

[Werner]

[Lesforan]

If that plan of Churchill's is real, I've never heard of it.

The time to deal with the Soviet Union was not in 1948, but in 1945.
The German Government itself expected the Western Allies to keep the Soviets out of Eastern and Central Europe, and attempted to negoiate a seperate peace with the Western Allies to do so. Eisenhower's directive to allow the Soviets into Berlin ahead of the Western Allies was as incomprehensible to the Germans as it is to me today.

The dust had literally not settled before the Soviets were carving out vassal states for themselves. By 1948, when the Soviets attempted to take over all of Berlin, it was quite unambiguous what they were trying to do. Perhaps that is what inspired Churchill to his Dr. Strangelove scenario. Or, perhaps he was just trying to cling to power by sabre-rattling.

The sad fact remains that all of the material help we gave Stalin was ultimately used against us. My father, and the rest of his generation that repeatedly risked their lives to free Europe from Fascism, had to stand by helplessly while Eastern and Central Europe was handed to the Soviets on a platter. As I said in an earlier post, a most unsatisfactory conclusion.

[Werner]

That board's comments are mostly a load of conspiracy clap-trap.

It looks like the clap traps have made a trans-species leap into this forum.

What board? If you examine the title sheet's properties, you can see it's sourced out of the History Department at NorthEastern University.

The full text of the proposal for operation "Unthinkable" (with kick-off in July, 45) can be read there. BTW, the /48 number is some clerk filing the document away.

http://www.history.neu.edu/

http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/

[MartinJQuinn]

Churchill proposed 1 July 1945 as D-Day for WW.III in the West. The Americans, British, French and 45 freshly organized German divisions would cross the Oder, and East from Austria in the South.

The USAAF and RAF based in Iran would smash oil fields in the Caucasus.

Perhaps Mountbatten would attack North from India....

So you mean the Soviet attempt to build a large buffer zone around itself was even more immediately justified than we had been led to believe?

Buffer zone my ass - as Les said it was a blatant land grab. The Soviets wanted the territory to launch THEIR invasion of the West from.

[MartinJQuinn]

It looks like the clap traps have made a trans-species leap into this forum.

What board? If you examine the title sheet's properties, you can see it's sourced out of the History Department at NorthEastern University.

The full text of the proposal for operation "Unthinkable" (with kick-off in July, 45) can be read there. BTW, the /48 number is some clerk filing the document away.

http://www.history.neu.edu/

http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/

The reference to another board, originally made by Les, refers to a post on the forum at the Bismark Class website run by John Asmussen of Denmark.

There is a thread on that forum called PQ17 It's causes and effects. It is THAT thread that Les refered to, and which Phil said was "a load of conspiracy clap-trap". I tend to agree with Phil - the thread is a boon to conspiracy theorists.

[Werner]

Interesting to read the comments of US commanders Eisenhower and Spaatz. They evidently foresaw the need for B-29 bases both on the continent and in Iceland. Perhaps the Icelandic bases would be for nuclear bombers.

Eisenhower was keen not to "tip the hand" too much with much reorganization or change at the front lines. I imagine a large air assault with a massive parachute commitment would have bought the time to get the main line moving properly.

According to the official US Army History of the Great Patriotic War, except for shock units, most Soviet Tank Armies were about the strength of a German division, and infantry brigades were approximately company strength. The West might need to move fast depending on whether the Soviets refit these units or demobilized them.

According to Richard Rhodes, Stalin concluded he could lose fifteen cities before he would be forced to accede to the demands of a nuclear power. I am certain that number of bombs would be available during 1946.

Despite NYT's correspondent Walter Duranty's faked reports of Soviet mechanization, the USSR was a 17th Century farm economy and needed nearly every possible hand for the harvest.

This being July, Stalin would have to strike a balance between his army and the very labor intense harvest he would be facing in weeks.

I don't know if the Soviet people could endure another year of starvation in the winter months, with no supplies at all from the Allies this time.

[Guest]

Interesting to read the comments of US commanders Eisenhower and Spaatz. They evidently foresaw the need for B-29 bases both on the continent and in Iceland. Perhaps the Icelandic bases would be for nuclear bombers.

Eisenhower was keen not to "tip the hand" too much with much reorganization or change at the front lines. I imagine a large air assault with a massive parachute commitment would have bought the time to get the main line moving properly.

According to the official US Army History of the Great Patriotic War, except for shock units, most Soviet Tank Armies were about the strength of a German division, and infantry brigades were approximately company strength. The West might need to move fast depending on whether the Soviets refit these units or demobilized them.

According to Richard Rhodes, Stalin concluded he could lose fifteen cities before he would be forced to accede to the demands of a nuclear power. I am certain that number of bombs would be available during 1946.

Despite NYT's correspondent Walter Duranty's faked reports of Soviet mechanization, the USSR was a 17th Century farm economy and needed nearly every possible hand for the harvest.

This being July, Stalin would have to strike a balance between his army and the very labor intense harvest he would be facing in weeks.

I don't know if the Soviet people could endure another year of starvation in the winter months, with no supplies at all from the Allies this time.

I don't believe you've talked to Russians who lived during WWII.

Incidentally, in 1945 a German panzer division had about 30 - 50 operational tanks. If the "official US Army History of the Great Patriotic War," was to be believed as you have quoted it, then Soviets would have had to deploy 100 tank armies to reach the actual tank strength thrown against the Germans in the final Berlin offensive.

[Guest]

So you mean the Soviet attempt to build a large buffer zone around itself was even more immediately justified than we had been led to believe?

Buffer zone my ass - as Les said it was a blatant land grab. The Soviets wanted the territory to launch THEIR invasion of the West from.

Everyone thinks his own acts of aggression are really defensive in nature. We manage to defend our way into Mexico city, Philippines, Cuba and now Baghdad.

[Laurence Batchelor]

If that plan of Churchill's is real, I've never heard of it.

The time to deal with the Soviet Union was not in 1948, but in 1945.
The German Government itself expected the Western Allies to keep the Soviets out of Eastern and Central Europe, and attempted to negoiate a seperate peace with the Western Allies to do so. Eisenhower's directive to allow the Soviets into Berlin ahead of the Western Allies was as incomprehensible to the Germans as it is to me today.

The dust had literally not settled before the Soviets were carving out vassal states for themselves. By 1948, when the Soviets attempted to take over all of Berlin, it was quite unambiguous what they were trying to do. Perhaps that is what inspired Churchill to his Dr. Strangelove scenario. Or, perhaps he was just trying to cling to power by sabre-rattling.

The sad fact remains that all of the material help we gave Stalin was ultimately used against us. My father, and the rest of his generation that repeatedly risked their lives to free Europe from Fascism, had to stand by helplessly while Eastern and Central Europe was handed to the Soviets on a platter. As I said in an earlier post, a most unsatisfactory conclusion.

I think the West felt some sympathy towards the Russians at that time.
They had borne the full brunt of Hitler's war machine for years.
They and the Russian winter had made final victory possible as quickly as it was.
Also I think the Allies felt some sympathy towards the 13million troops or whatever it was they lost, plus around that again in Civilian casualities.

I agree in hindsight though, we gave into another tyrant who we should have played hard ball with right from the get go!

[Lesforan]

My, this thread has really grown legs!

I have to agree with Lawrence for the reasons the Allies harbored some sympathy for the Soviets. Churchill himself had said he was willing to make a deal with the Devil himself to stop Hitler.

To his credit, Churchill was able to figure out the true nature of Stalin eventually, after it was too late. Roosevelt never did get it. I believe he thought Stalin was benign until his dying day.

Before we feel too sorry for the Soviet regime for the loss of all those troops/civilians, we should realize that Stalin was responsible for more Soviet casualties than Hitler. I also doubt if he would have worried too much able having available manpower for the harvest. Having used starvation as a political tool against his own people.

I hate to have to use a film as a reference, but do you all remember the movie "Enemy at the Gates?" This was supposed to be based on a true story of rival German and Russian snipers. The story shows a stark contrast between the way the respective governments treated their troops in the field. The Soviets were shown killing their own troops en masse for things such as not getting off a troop train fast enough, abandoning a boat that was being sunk by air attack, falling back in the face of an infantry charge. This was all supposed to be factual, and I think it was, based on written accounts I have read. It certainly made clear to me why the Germans were initially hailed as liberators in Soviet-occupied territory.
Anyone working on the "lesser of two evils" theory needs to seriously consider who were the barbarians.

Soviet troops who were captured by the Germans and repatriated were welcomed back with a trip to the Gulag for the indescretion of not dying for their cause. Large numbers of Soviet officers were periodically executed whenever Stalin thought they may constitute a threat to his power.

The Allied policy of returning German POWs to their hometowns resulted in many humanitarian problems when those places became located in Soviet-held territory. There have been cases of German POWs escaping camps in the US, not to return to Germany, but to avoid it.

Even the Nazi treatment of the Jews vs. the Soviet treatment of them does not justify the aid given Stalin. The USSR, and the Russian Empire for centuries before that, was infamous for its anti-Semetism. Jews who tried to work within the system were faced, at best, with a "glass ceiling" preventing upward mobility. At worst, they were subjected to treatment comparable with their brothers in Germany. Many were sent to the gulag and disappeared, others were subjected to internal banishment to the "Jewish Autonomous Region" in the Far East.

The uncomfortable fact is that the Germans, as nasty as they were under the Nazis, were still a part of Western Civilzation. Their economy and culture were the same as the rest of the West. The Nazis had carefully played on ancient fears and xenophobia, and exploited these to control their own population and justify a regional war. The superficiality of the Nazis was revealed by the success of Germany without them. The Germans, the British, and the Americans are very much the product of the same culture, and share (and I suspect always have) more common attitudes and beliefs than they differ on.

The Soviet economy and political system, on the other hand, could just as easily have dropped in from Mars. The very being of the Soviet Communist culture was antithical to that of the west, and represented a threat to Western Civilization from the very beginning. This was the justification for the little-mentioned (a victum of political correctness) Western Intervention in Russia in 1919. Maybe someday the story of this covert war will be revealed. It has been only recently that we have pulled the Spanish-American War out from under the rug, so there is still hope.

[MartinJQuinn]

Great post, Les. There are some books on the Allied intervention in Russian in 1919, but the one's I have seen are very dry and hard to read.

[Pieter]

Both were evil. None were 'barbarian' in the sense of non-western. Stalin was acting using a very western ideology, marxism, based on the terror/state infrastructure of a country which considered itself the '3rd Rome" , Russia. The Gulag was older than communism, and so were the practices you mention about the treatment of the armies' own soldiers. Famine warfare for example was practiced by both sides of the russian civil war against at least one of their common enemies, Makhno's anarchists. Famine warfare during the civil war also produced a whole generation of full orphans (normal warfare only produces half orphans) sometimes called Trotsky's children. These formed the social class out of which the cadres of both the russian mafia and the security system were formed. They're in power nowadays.
Hitler's nazi variant of fascism was far from conservative and also far from superficial (as the traditional conservatives found out by first being sidelined and then being killed late in 1944) and can be described as a mixture of western technological and organisational modernisation combined with cultural conservatism and racism (which was also seen as quite 'modern' and 'westernl at the time -> eugenics).
Both were western, both were evil. Roosevelt and Churchill supported the weakest of the twe evils, not the lesser one.
[quote="Lesforan"]

Anyone working on the "lesser of two evils" theory needs to seriously consider who were the barbarians.

Soviet troops who were captured by the Germans and repatriated were welcomed back with a trip to the Gulag for the indescretion of not dying for their cause. Large numbers of Soviet officers were periodically executed whenever Stalin thought they may constitute a threat to his power.

The Allied policy of returning German POWs to their hometowns resulted in many humanitarian problems when those places became located in Soviet-held territory. There have been cases of German POWs escaping camps in the US, not to return to Germany, but to avoid it.

Even the Nazi treatment of the Jews vs. the Soviet treatment of them does not justify the aid given Stalin. The USSR, and the Russian Empire for centuries before that, was infamous for its anti-Semetism. Jews who tried to work within the system were faced, at best, with a "glass ceiling" preventing upward mobility. At worst, they were subjected to treatment comparable with their brothers in Germany. Many were sent to the gulag and disappeared, others were subjected to internal banishment to the "Jewish Autonomous Region" in the Far East.

The uncomfortable fact is that the Germans, as nasty as they were under the Nazis, were still a part of Western Civilzation. Their economy and culture were the same as the rest of the West. The Nazis had carefully played on ancient fears and xenophobia, and exploited these to control their own population and justify a regional war. The superficiality of the Nazis was revealed by the success of Germany without them. The Germans, the British, and the Americans are very much the product of the same culture, and share (and I suspect always have) more common attitudes and beliefs than they differ on.

The Soviet economy and political system, on the other hand, could just as easily have dropped in from Mars. The very being of the Soviet Communist culture was antithical to that of the west, and represented a threat to Western Civilization from the very beginning. This was the justification for the little-mentioned (a victum of political correctness) Western Intervention in Russia in 1919. Maybe someday the story of this covert war will be revealed. It has been only recently that we have pulled the Spanish-American War out from under the rug, so there is still hope.[/quote]

[chuck]

There is no question that Germany was stronger, more competent, more productive, more developed, more advanced, more immediately and violently ambitious, and thus a more dangerous threat. If you didn't like 50 years of cold war with USSR, try 50 years with a Nazi Germany in possession of much of European Russia, Ukraine, Baltic, and eastern and western Europe.

Germany in control of these regions is immediately breast of the US in development, rivals US in immediate productive capacity and exceeds the US by a considerable margin in resource and potential future economic growth.

Soviet Russia was greatly inferior to the US in immediate development and productive capacity, and while it does exceed the US in resource and notional potential as well, it started far behind and was only able to make up a portion of the gap in the 50 years of cold war.

A US-German cold war would start with both sides being roughly equal and Germany possibly pulling ahead by gathering the resources of Euro-Asian industrial heartland. A US-Russia cold war started with Russia far behind and only making up some of the gap before being outspent and thus unable to make further headway.

[Lesforan]

My comment on Nazi "superficiality" refers to the fact that the Germans were able to do much better for themselves without the Nazis than with them. So, any advantage the Nazis represented to the German nation was superficial, unnecessary for success.

Marxism could be considered Western only in its point of origin. Despite its clap-trap of being the scientific outgrowth of a heavily industrialized society. In fact, it was put into practice in the least-industrialized nation in Europe, and only then after its economy and political system was weakened by war. Communism has arisen only in agricultural societies least suited to it by Marxist theory. Communism in industrialized societies has only come about by outside occupation.

A collapsed Soviet Union capitulating to the Germans would not necessarily have prevented Allied occupation of Western Europe, nor would it have prevented defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany. Stalin's policy of destroying his own country's industrial capacity rather than surrendering it to the Germans would have left Germany in possession of raw materials and little else. I can see this scenario resulting in both Germany and the USSR going down in defeat.

Would the USSR have to have been a more desirable postwar adversary than Germany? I don't think so. Both Germany and the Western Allies shared not only common cultural ties, but their economies were interlocked by common multinational corporations operating on both sides (see the thread about Henry Ford's award). Weigh this against the Soviet Union's patent opposition to the West's economic and political system, and general opposition to everything the West wanted to do.

[chuck]

Both Germany and the Western Allies shared not only common cultural ties, .

You attach far too much significance to similarity of culture. The most inveterate hatred and the most vicious conflicts in history are usually between people of fairly similar cultures, traditions, and religions. We may have substantial contribution from the disreputable xenophobic gene, but we reserve our most visceral hatred for those that are quite like ourselves.

We approach complete difference intellectually. But we approach hair splitting difference viscerally. If someone is totally unlike yourself, intellect and analysis takes over and we act in a more intelligent and enlightened way. If someone is quite like ourselves but not completely, then we throw away restraints of the mind and hate them with our guts.

[Lesforan]

Having grown up in the American Midwest in the postwar era, I don't feel there was the latent hatred against the Germans that was exhibited in countries that suffered German depredations in the war.

German attacks against American soil were haphazard and infrequent. Anti-German sentiment was pretty much confined to big cities with large immigrant populations. These people's home countries were being attacked while America remained neutral.

Out in the Midwest, German military conquests were met with indifference, and a desire not to be involved in another continental war.
Americans were not about to go to war to save the Jews. In the heartland, while not really anti-Semetic, no particular sympathy for Judism existed.

On the contrary, Germans were generally highly regarded. Half the population was of German descent, many families spoke German at home.
What resentment there was toward the Germans was directed at the Nazis for hijacking the fatherland.

My own father, involved in the invasion of Germany, has told me stories of men in his unit finding relatives in the towns they were taking. These German-American troops were disgusted by Nazi excesses, considering it a black mark against their ancestral homeland.

I think the multinational corporations, doing business both in Germany and America, could have resulted in trade relations in a postwar world that would have facilitated normalization of relations. If peace were allowed to break out, perhaps pro-democratic elements could have come to power within Germany, as finally happened in the Soviet Union. With the defeat of International Communism, opposition to the Nazis would have come from the center (perhaps with a big push from the CIA!).

What mobilized the Americans for war was nothing the Germans did. The pro-war sentiment was directed at the Japanese, and then had to be re-channelled against the Germans. As one person told me, "We made war against the Germans, but we hated the Japanese".

[JoeA]

Ugh so much misinformation here. Gotta run but first of all the most repatriated Soviet POWs did not end up in the Gulag. The Nazis victimized more people than just Jews.