Did Franklin Roosevelt unintentionally agree to the creation of North Korea and Communist China?

We could have succeeded but it would have almost certainly required nuking their major cities.

The allies simply weren’t in a position to fight another conventional ground war of that scale at the time and succeeding.

Oddly, the Russians would have been defeated by 43, 44 at the latest had we stayed out of Europe and not provided them the logistical support to survive from 41 on.

The only other thing they really had going for them was the vastness of the country and so much of it still being so primitive lacking the infrastructure to move large armies.

I love armchair general threads.

They had two other things going for them.

  1. Hitler. He made extremely questionable decisions from the moment the Wehrmacht marched into the Soviet Union. They had many missed opportunities to win decisively early due to Hitler’s interference. The most serious misstep being the delay of the operation to take Moscow. By the time the Germans got there the Soviets had heavily reinforced their positions with battle hardened Siberian divisions.

  2. Can’t discount the Soviet soldier’s willingness (in some cases through the threat of violence but in others just a pure drive of patriotism) to suffer and self sacrifice. From late 41 at Moscow until mid 1943 at Kursk the Soviet soldiers made the Germans pay dearly for every inch of Soviet territory they inhabited at horrific costs to their own units. The Red Army was basically the WWI French Army. They sacrificed far beyond what could be imagined to defeat the invaders.

The Soviets would have been fighting with sticks and clubs by January 42 without our aid and those that were left would have been starving, too weak to fight.

From the moment we started launching bombing missions out of England we were able to tie up over half of the Luftwaffe keeping them out of Russia.

Additionally with our entry into the war in Africa the Germans had to start shifting resources from the Eastern Front or that would have gone to same to carry on the fight in Africa and the Med.

Without our entry into the Mediterranean theater the one resource Hitler needed desperately and lacked, petroleum, he’d have had a near inexhaustible supply.

Without the US providing nearly half a million 2.5 ton trucks, and building the Russians an entire railroad system they had no mobility for their divisions much less the supply train to provide logistical support for them. Those Siberian divisions would have never made it to the battle nor would they have had the mobile anti tank and artillery capability so essential to their eventual victory.

It has nothing to do with the resolve of the Russian soldiers or their skills, it’s simply about the math.

You have a good point about the Japanese reaction. I found this interesting article that supports the idea that the Soviet declaration of war and invasion was the deciding factor in the Japanese surrender:

Points from the article:

  1. The Japanese government was aware of Hiroshima atomic attack on August 6, but it caused no panic. They had already seen greater losses in conventional bombing raids.

  2. In contrast, the government met to discuss surrender early in the morning of August 9, which was after the Soviet invasion but before the Nagasaki attack.

  3. The Soviet Union not only invaded Manchuria, it also overran Japanese positions on Sakhalin Island, which is just north of the Japanese northern island of Hokkaido. Stalin was prepared to invade Japan itself within two weeks after declaring war, but he did not follow through based on conversations with Truman. The Japanese government realized that they were vulnerable to a Soviet attack from Sakhalin Island.

If the facts presented in the paper are correct, the idea that the atomic bombs were the primary reason for the Japanese surrender looks more like an urban legend than actual history. Paper suggests that the governments of Japan, US, and the Soviet Union had reasons act as if the bombs were the deciding factor even if they were only a minor part.

The real question is why did the US drop the bombs on Japan if they did not end the war? My opinion is that it looks like the reason was to prevent Soviet occupation of Japan. The timing of the two atomic attacks is also very suspicious; they may have been planned to coincide with the planned Soviet declaration of war to maximize their effects.

It would have failed miserably.
Europe was a complete mess. The logistics of moving everything from the Channel to the front would have been complicated by the coordinated efforts to steal anything that could be eaten.
Plus, the folks at home wouldn’t have supported any such war effort. No, any continuation of WWII against the Soviets would have failed. (Even Patton would have lost against General Mud.)

My observation is that Americans tend to underestimate what the Soviets did in World War II. US aid to the Soviets certainly helped to end the war more quickly, but the US was not even in the war when the Soviets launched their counteroffensive at the gates of Moscow in November/December 1941. The vast majority of the US aid came after the turning point Soviet victory at Stalingrad.

The Soviets defeated the Japanese in border conflicts in the 1930s, which led to the neutrality pact. The Japanese were well aware of what had happened to the German army on the Russian front. Japan had been looking to the Soviets to act as a mediator to end the war, but it was clear that Japan was in no condition to fight the Soviets once they declared war and started to overrun Japanese positions.

A huge amount of very essential aid began in 1941 starting with building them an overland railroad supply line up through Iran and over a hundred thousand 2.5’s to then move goods from the rail heads.

In 42 the country was starving and many millions more would have died without the millions of meals we provided them.

The millions of pairs of winter boots kept them from losing their feet to frostbite.

They didn’t have the goods, the food, the infrastructure, or the modern transportation system necessary to carry the war on absent US intervention.

Without the Brit’s carrying them through 41, largely supplying them with goods directly from the US they could not have made it through the summer of 42.

It isn’t “we’re better than them” it’s simply about the lack of infrastructure and basic necessities. Again, it has nothing to do with their resolve, tenacity, or quality of their troops either. An army that is frozen, starving, and has nothing left to shoot with simply isn’t much of an army in a fight.

A large amount of American aid certainly went to the USSR. The question is timing.

The Soviet counteroffensive of December 1941 occurred before any significant aid had arrived. That was the first time the German army had been forced to retreat. Many of the Soviet troops in this vital battle had been transported from the Far East based on the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941. The German army was within sight of Moscow before the battle; it never got that close again.

While significant aid arrived by the turning point Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, the vast majority of US aid arrived later. While US aid certainly sped the defeat of Germany, it is impossible to say whether the Soviets would have still won without US aid. Given the Soviet counteroffensive of December 1941, there is a reasonable case that they would have still beaten the Germans even without US aid.

Interestingly enough, most non-lethal aid such as food and fuel went to the Soviet Union across the Pacific in Soviet-flagged vessels. This route was only possible because of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact.

The importance of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact is rarely mentioned in American history books. Likewise, the effect of the Soviet declaration of war that repudiated the pact is also ignored.

The Brits started transferring massive amounts of aid coming to them directly from the US as early as 1940.

The Soviets simply lacked the logistical capability to sustain the offensive on their own. Remember they were paying dearly for every foot as they advanced losing millions of men and massive amounts of equipment.

They had the same problem in 41 that the Germans had in 44, they had what the needed to launch a massive offensive, they simply lacked the ability to sustain it for any length of time without a huge amount of help.

I’m not taking anything away from what they accomplished, they did the fighting but without us they’d have been fighting with clubs in 42 and would have starved and frozen to death in the winter of 42/43.