I knew WW II vets...

Post #207,126 by ben_tilly 5/12/05 1:59:19 PM Reply	I knew WW II vets... who said that at the end of WW II they fully expected to be asked to invade the Soviet Union next. After all while Stalin and Hitler had a falling out, plenty of people remembered that they had cooperated in the first few invasions in WW II, and Stalin had taken advantage of WW II to aquire a few territories that people didn't think he should have. I don't know what the pros and cons of doing that were, but I do know that the US military was equipped for it. (We were producing significantly more armnaments than the rest of the world combined.) But manpower and exhaustion might have been more of an issue. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #207,134 by GBert 5/12/05 2:49:37 PM Reply	Hitler was counting on it AFAIK Hitler was counting on the Alliance between the anglo-americans and the soviets falling apart before Germany ceased to exist. I bet FDR's death brought him one last ray of hope. A continuation of the war effort after Germany's fall, this time against the Soviets, would not have been any kind of cakewalk for the angloamericans. My impression is that there were many more forces deployed in the East than in the West in Europe at the end of the war. Remember also that the US was still planning for a full-scale ground invasion of Japan into 1946 at least. Have whatever values you have. That's what America is for. You don't need George Bush for that.
Post #207,143 by Andrew Grygus 5/12/05 3:07:57 PM Reply	Well, Paton wanted to turn the Germans around . . . . . and send them back into Russia with no Western Front to wory about. At the end of the war the German army was about as powerful as it had ever been (they started the war with next to nothing) and would probably have taken the job willingly. Long long ago I used to listen to Radio Moscow, back when it was fun (they later learned too much about the outside world which ruined the act - so I switched to Radio Peking/Vietnam/Havana (all the same station with the same staff)). Radio Moscow always attacked the U.S. with the phrase, "Unrepentant Nazis in Bonn and their allies overseas". They held that WWII was still on (legalistically defensable), but on the very eve of victory the U.S. had changed sides. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]

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