@Herr:
As far as France is concerned - if they would have responded in force to the remilitarization of the Rhineland, World War II might have never happened. With hindsight - but then again, it’s always easy to write about what everyone should have done - not sending their military into the Rhineland at that moment to enforce the Locarno treaties, was their biggest mistake. After that, it became more and more obvious that Hitler could get away with a lot.
A Franco-Soviet plot to take out Germany? I don’t see it. There was a treaty, yes, but Europe was a quagmire of treaties at the time. Some of them held for a while, others weren’t worth the paper they were written on. If France wanted to after Germany, it could very well have done so by keeping its promise to Poland, and making the phoney war a real one. Second big French mistake.
Did the Soviet Union plan to conquer Europe? Doing so would have been consistent with early communist doctrine, but the whole idea was abandoned at some point in time, when their dream of forcefully “liberating” the world’s oppressed workers (who typically didn’t want to be liberated in the first place) gave way to more traditional considerations of power and safety. If Stalin ever intended to rule the continent, he could have gone for it in 1945, when the Soviet armies massively outnumbered the western Allies. . . .
Nothing ever changes. Saddam and Gaddafi were allies of the West as long as they were useful. People with high moral standards rarely lead nations, be they democratic or not.
Thanks for the time and effort you’ve put into your posts. This discussion is turning into something interesting!
You wrote that France’s non-opposition to Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland was a mistake. I would be willing to accept a modified version of that. I would argue that given France’s decision to pursue a pro-Soviet, anti-German foreign policy, with an end goal of the elimination of Germany’s military power, France’s decision to allow Germany to reoccupy the Rhineland was a mistake. I would also argue that the larger strategic goals France had selected were unnecessary and unjustifiable. There was no reason for France to become involved in the cold war between the Soviet Union and Germany, or to take the Soviet side.
You correctly asserted that France had an excellent opportunity to invade Germany in 1939–an opportunity which it failed to take advantage of. I think that failure stems from French military planners’ belief that offense is far more costly than defense; a belief forged in the trenches of WWI. France’s entire military strategy was based on the concept of fighting a defensive, WWI-style war very well; and it had equipped itself to do exactly that. Once a person–or in this case, a military institution–become set in a certain way of thinking, and has developed a holistic strategy based on that mode of thinking, it can sometimes be difficult to shift gears on short notice.
As you pointed out, the Red Army’s European force, in May of '45, was several times larger than its Anglo-American counterpart. In the past, I had thought that this meant the Soviets could easily have pushed the Western democracies into the sea, had they chosen to do so. But then, I learned that General Patton had wanted to attack the Soviets almost immediately after the German surrender. I have enormous respect for General Patton’s military judgment, so hearing of his opinion caused me to rethink my earlier view.
Toward the end of the war in Europe, discipline in the Soviet army began to break down. Soldiers devoted an increasing amount of attention to raping, stealing, murdering, and vandalizing. Germany had been a much wealthier nation than the U.S.S.R., and one of the foundations of communist propaganda is to foster and encourage the resentment and hatred wealth disparity can bring. The German military had attempted to foster and encourage this breakdown in discipline by leaving large quantities of liquor for Soviet soldiers to find. The (female) author of A Woman in Berlin described this as, “something that only men would cook up for other men.” Adding to these problems was the fact that the Soviets’ supply lines had become overstretched by their rapid advance. That did not necessarily cause hunger among Soviet soldiers–they took what they needed from the starving German population–but it did imply severe short-term difficulties in their ability to provide their front-line forces with the ammunition required to deal with an Anglo-American attack.
Another factor which would have worked in the democracies’ favor was air power. In 1944, the United States produced over twice as many military aircraft as did the Soviet Union. British and American planes could have attained air superiority or outright air supremacy. Large numbers of P-47 Thunderbolts could have proved devastating against Soviet ground targets.
Dramatic changes occurred over the next several years. The Soviets solved their supply problems. The massive numbers of WWII-era piston-driven craft on both sides had become obsolete. Even early jets–such as the Americans’ Shooting Star–were obsolete by the Korean War. The U.S.'s only worthwhile air superiority plane in that war was the F-86 Saber. The Saber was a better plane than the MiG, albeit not nearly as much better as the U.S.'s inflated exchange claims would seem to suggest. Also, the MiGs used in the Korean War were flown by badly trained Chinese pilots, instead of their well-trained Soviet counterparts. The Soviets had ten times as many MiGs as the Americans had F-86 Sabers. America would have been much less likely to achieve air superiority in an early '50s WWIII than a WWIII which occurred in 1945.
WWII had given the Soviet Union considerable institutional expertise in . . . motivating soldiers who were less than fully willing to fight. Typically, Soviet officers were given the responsibility of shooting any soldier who ran away in combat. The Soviet method resulted in very large numbers of soldiers–albeit soldiers who were only 33% as combat-effective as their German counterparts.
The postwar era had given the Soviet Union the opportunity to apply its recruiting methods to Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the other territory it occupied. Soldiers from Warsaw Pact nations swelled the communist forces’ ranks, and helped make good the losses the Red Army had sustained in its war against Germany.
The Western democracies lacked a similar source of manpower. France was considered a highly unreliable ally in any war against communism, which meant the main U.S. European ally would have been Germany. However, most of the German POWs who had fallen into Anglo-American hands had been sent to the Soviet Union after WWII had ended.
During the postwar years, America’s level of military preparedness declined, while the Soviet Union continued to prepare for war. By the late '40s or early '50s, the Truman administration had realized that it could not resist a Soviet invasion of Western Europe by conventional means. Had the Soviets invaded, the Truman administration’s military plans would have called for a fighting withdrawal from Germany, in combination with the use of nuclear weapons against the invading Soviet forces. Germany (the U.S.'s main ally in such a confrontation) was less than thrilled with this plan, because American nuclear weapons would have caused millions of German civilian deaths as collateral damage. The U.S. did not yet have ICBMs, which meant it had to rely on air superiority to be able to deliver nuclear payloads. America’s ability to attain the required air superiority was precarious and doubtful.
It has been said that Stalin allowed the Korean War to go forward as a test of American military readiness. This was a test the U.S. failed, which meant Stalin felt comfortable with his plans to go forward with the invasion of Western Europe and WWIII.
Stalin was a paranoid man, and was deeply disturbed by what he believed was Jewish influence over, or even Jewish control over, the United States. He was also very concerned about the alliance between the U.S. and Israel, and feared that Soviet Zionist Jews might betray the Soviet Union in order to help Israel and its American ally. Moreover, “Stalin’s secretary Boris Bazhanov stated that Stalin made crude anti-Semitic outbursts even before Vladimir Lenin’s death.[2][4]” Also,
In a December 1, 1952, Politburo session, Stalin announced:
“Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA (there you can become rich, bourgeois, etc.). They think they’re indebted to the Americans.”
According to one source, Nikolay Nikolevitch Poliakov, Stalin purportedly created a special “Deportation Commission” to plan the deportation of Jews to these camps.[29][30][31] Poliakov, the purported secretary of the Commission, stated years later that, according to Stalin’s initial plan, the deportation was to begin in the middle of February 1953, but the monumental tasks of completing lists of Jews had not yet been completed.[29][31] “Pure blooded” Jews were to be deported first, followed by “half breeds” (polukrovki).[29] . . .
Four large camps were built shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953 in southern and western Russia, with rumors swirling that they were purportedly for Jews, but no directive exists that the camps were to be used for any such effort.[36]
Stalin died in 1953. Whatever plans he may or may not have had for exterminating the Jews, or launching WWIII, remained unfinished. Stalin’s replacements proved to be more cautious men, and did not move forward with either of the two main prongs of Stalin’s apparent plans.
Nevertheless, the Soviet government in general, and Stalin’s regime in particular, left behind a ghastly legacy. If the victims of Soviet mass murder were lined up from head to foot, the resulting line would make two complete circles around the Equator. As you pointed out, morality among political leaders, whether democratically elected or otherwise, is the exception, not the norm. Nevertheless, there are times when a difference of degree is large enough to create a difference in kind. A pro-Soviet foreign policy, and long-term pro-Soviet political and diplomatic goals, represents an indescribably greater moral lapse than an alliance of convenience with a standard-issue military dictatorship.
