cbr said:
chickencoupe16 said:
I think the real way to success is to be liberators instead of conquerors like the Nazis. Had the Nazis treated the populace better, they would have had far less partisan actions to deal with and plenty of soldiers willing to fight the Soviets and they would have had a chance at beating Russia. Maybe the high of beating the Nazis as part of or allied with the Red Army would have been too much to for American good will to overcome. But, the Soviets did turn their back on many of their allies almost immediately after the war (like the Poles).
The trick might be that you have to wait after the war for the Russians to build up contempt and mistrust within their conquered lands but not so long that they get the bomb.
Or maybe it is impossible to wait long enough for unrest. Maybe by '45, the war against the Soviets is already lost due to previous missteps. Maybe if you could go back further and cut Russia out of Lend-Lease and cut their spies out of The Manhattan Project, then you can win a war.
The wehrmacht screwed up bigtime letting the nazis come in and **** all over the populace. The germans were hailed as liberators and cheered like we were in france at first. Not really what our popaganda wanted to highlight.
It doesn't really make sense to say that the Wehrmacht should not have "let" the Nazis come in and do things in occupied territories. The Wehrmacht was an instrument of Nazi power and despite some (seriously overstated among some amateur historians) resistance to Nazi ideology among a small minority of the officer corps, most of the Wehrmacht was either fully on-board with the Nazi program or apolitical and ready to follow orders from the Nazi leadership. There was never a moment until the end of the war when the Wehrmacht was not fully under political and operational control of the Nazi government. And the Nazi government sent the Wehrmacht to invade those countries because it wanted to eliminate or enslave the local populace and create a broader German colonial empire within the European landmass. Liberating the locals from Communist oppression and then letting them live freely was never on the Nazi agenda and thus never on the Wehrmacht's agenda; you might as well argue that the Nazis should not have been Nazis.
A reluctance to accept that military power is and always has been an instrument to achieve and serve political aims also underpins the idea that the United States could have declared war on the USSR in May 1945 or turned North Korean or Chinese cities into "glass" with nuclear weapons. The American populace simply would never have accepted a declaration of war in 1945 against the USSR absent serious Soviet aggression or blatant violations of agreed upon terms-- neither of which happened. The U.S. government had spent four years mostly rehabilitating the Soviet Union as an Allied power and convincing the population that the primary war aim was to defeat Nazi Germany to achieve peace in Europe, then defeat the Japanese in the Pacific. 1945 America was not an Orwellian dictatorship where Truman could simply switch to "we have always been at war with Eurasia" and attack an formerly Allied power, much less bring on board the defeated German Army to help you do it. It's not within the realm of reality-- it wouldn't even have been in the realm of reality for the Soviet leadership to try to attack the Western Allies and they were far closer to that sort of 1984 fantasy. The countries were tired of war.
As far as the Korean War goes-- people forget that that the Korean War was not technically the U.S. and South Korea versus China and North Korea with the USSR as a semi-proxy party. Thanks to some nifty diplomatic work, the United Nations was the actual party at war with China and North Korea, with the United States supplying most of the military power for UN forces. Killing huge numbers of Chinese or North Korean citizens with nuclear weapons would have destroyed all international credibility the United States had, and would have completely undermined the broader political interest-- which was to make the United States and democratic governance a more attractive ally and system to the broader world which was watching the behavior of Allies with intense interest. Ditto with Vietnam-- the United States could have achieved limited battlefield aims but would have destroyed its credibility internationally and turned itself into a pariah state once it started killing massive numbers of civilians. And at at home, there was no political support or appetite for either option, the American public in general does not want to support war crimes and was under no illusions that the safety and security of the homeland was at risk in either of those conflicts.
After the first use of nuclear weapons, Truman instinctively understood that they existed in a realm beyond ordinary battlefield weapons and needed to be placed under civilian control because of the dramatic political consequences their use would bring. Interestingly, even totalitarian dictatorships came to the same conclusion. Although different nations have different command and control structures in place for their nuclear forces, I am unaware of a single nuclear power that has completely delegated control over their use to military brass-- they are first and foremost political and not battlefield weapons.