@Private:
Not sure about the USSR vs France as Hitler’s no. 1 target. Could go to one of my books, but am sure others have the facts.
Am confident that G had no designs on the UK and its empire. There was an underlying belief/hope that the UK would accept G domination of Europe, as some in the British government were to advocate.
So the UK could have avoided the war. But I can think of a number of reasons why to do so would have been wrong.
1. Europe was dominated by dictatorships - Franco, Mussolini, Stalin & Hitler. Democracy was at bay. It is hard to imagine the democracy under siege feel of the time. Somewhere a line needed to be drawn. It was not a question of which monster had killed the most, nor of accepting collateral damage in the hope that “we” would escape whilst those we might have called friends were targeted one by one.
2. The UK’s constant policy since Marlborough was to defend a balance of power on the continent. G were the immediate threat to that balance, not R.
3. It is far from certain that the UK & USA could have beaten a victorious G (or R) + J.
I nearly started an analogy to Europe today, but history is safer!
1. Europe was dominated by dictatorships - Franco, Mussolini, Stalin & Hitler. Democracy was at bay.
A good point. But how much did democracy really gain as a result of its decision to go to war?
In August of 1939, France, Britain, Greece, and Scandinavia were under democratic rule. Germany and Italy were fascist, and Poland was a military dictatorship. By 1948 (as the dust from the war cleared), the democracies controlled everything they had in August 1939, plus Italy and western Germany. Almost every European nation east of that line had fallen under Soviet dominion. So it’s not like the democracies gained very much–especially not when compared with the sheer scale of Soviet gains.
2. The UK’s constant policy since Marlborough was to defend a balance of
power on the continent. G were the immediate threat to that balance, not R.
I agree that defending a balance of power is typically a sensible policy for democracies to employ. However, I feel the Soviet Union was the true threat to that balance of power.
Germany’s prewar population was 69 million, as opposed to 169 million for the Soviet Union. The Soviets had about 2.5x as many people as the Germans.
In Marx’s writings, he described a one world communist government. The stated long-term goal of Soviet foreign policy was world conquest; and that goal was reiterated in publications such as Pravda. Every nation on the Soviet Union’s western border in August of 1939 had been partially or fully annexed by May of 1941. Soviet expansionism predated the Nazi-Soviet War.
In June of 1941, Germany had 3,000 tanks on its eastern front, as opposed to 23,000 tanks for the Soviet Union on its western front. The Soviets also had a commanding advantage in terms of artillery, infantry, and planes; albeit not to the same extent as their advantage in tanks. The reason Stalin did not expect a German invasion was because he knew Germany could not defeat the Soviets in a quick war, and was not well-positioned for a long war. On the other hand, the Soviet Union was superior to Germany in terms of industrial strength, access to oil, farmland, and raw materials. Its supply of manpower (available for infantry) was much, much greater than Germany’s.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was in many ways a desperation move, taken after he’d correctly determined that Stalin was planning an invasion of Germany. Hitler struck a month before the Soviets’ invasion preparations would have been complete. Every Soviet officer had a packet of information, to be opened in the event of Nazi-Soviet hostilities breaking out. Every Soviet officer opened his packet, and found plenty of information on what to do if the Soviet Union invaded Germany, and nothing at all on how to respond to a German attack against the Soviets. The Soviets were thrown into confusion. Adding to that confusion was the fact that in many cases, tank crews and artillery crews were hundreds of miles from the machines they were supposed to be operating. That was one of the problems the Soviets intended to solve during the month they thought they had before beginning their invasion of Germany. Due to the Soviet Union’s lack of preparedness for any sort of defensive struggle, it was possible for Germany to make excellent initial gains; while achieving an astonishing 10:1 exchange ratio in combat against Soviet soldiers.
Later in the war that ratio declined to 3:1. Due to the fact that the Western democracies pulled German attention away from its eastern front; and given the Soviets’ massive advantage in manpower, that 3:1 ratio was not sufficient for Germany to achieve victory. Also, the Soviets came very close to achieving a 1:1 exchange ratio at Stalingrad. German losses were close to a million men in that battle–over 1% of its entire prewar population.
In 1941, Germany’s army had 150 divisions–slightly larger than the French Army had been in 1940. By the end of 1941, the Red Army consisted of a staggering 600 divisions. Not only that, it added 500,000 new men every month for most of the rest of the war. That was a replacement rate far beyond anything Germany could possibly hope to match.
In preparing for its invasion of Germany, the Soviet military had developed light tanks capable of traveling across rivers. These tanks had even traveled across Lake Ladoga. The next generation of that particular tank was planned to have the capacity to cross the English Channel. Stalin had hoped Hitler would conquer England in 1940, so that the Red Army could later “liberate” it from Nazi occupation. He would then have established a communist dictatorship.
3. It is far from certain that the UK & USA could have beaten a victorious G (or R) + J.
During the Cold War, Truman recognized that if the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe, American and German forces would be no match for their Soviet counterparts. Had the Soviets attacked, the main defense would have been to use nuclear weapons against advancing Soviet troops. Stalin intended to counter the American nuclear threat by using MiG jets to shoot down American bombers before they could deliver their nuclear payloads. Stalin had a lot of MiG jets. However, he died before he could put into effect his plans to launch WWIII.
It’s hard to imagine that a German or Japanese victory in WWII would have resulted in a weaker American postwar position than the one described above. Germany and Japan had very limited populations. During the war Japan expended a great many of its soldiers in its war against China, just as Germany lost many men against the Soviet Union. These losses, in combination with their relatively small population sizes–would have prevented them from overwhelming the Western democracies with sheer numbers. (As the Soviet Union could easily have done.)