Yeah I mean, Stalin did stop at Berlin because there wasn't much steam left to keep going after Berlin, but the idea that the Western Allies could keep going in the same situation is completely laughable.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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i think that steam would be forced back in if the allies started doing a total war against them.
the pro west side is filled with racists, nazis, and propagandized morons who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag
70% of their industrial capacity was destroyed in Barbarossa. In terms of morale I definitely agree, but you can't fight a war on morale alone. Thankfully that applies to both sides so the Western side still could not have possibly made that work without using nuclear weapons.
An invasion by the west might've made it necessary to do stuff like support the Greek communists and would've foreclosed making a deal with the capitalist imperialist west - you don't get "peaceful coexistence" as a possibility when they're coming to kill you right now. And the soviets had been fighting for like 30 years at that point, they were ready to hunker down and have some peace after a generation of struggle. But the exigency of war would've made it so that maybe they lose the immediate industrial output of the US but they gain the ability to flip this invasion into a general global classwar back when the west had way more sympathizers with the Soviets and the 2nd red scare hadn't happened (and also the complete institutional failure of capitalism as a going concern in the 30s was still quite fresh in peoples' living memories along with violent labor struggle that the people won)
soviets had been fighting for like 30 years
Are there any soviets who fought in WWI, the Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and WWII? If you were 20 in 1916, you'd only be 49 by 1945. You still had another decade before compulsory retirement.
Patton basically wanted to continue the war of extermination against the Soviets even suggesting using German prisoners to fight them. he has some wild quotes about it. off the wall antisemite too.
I'm sure anyone who's even halfway familiar with this scenario has seen this map before, but I'm including it anyway because it hammers home how absurd the notion is that the rest of the Allies stood a chance against the Soviets. Even without taking the actual combat readiness of these units into account, the numerical disparity is simply obscene, as is the disparity of experience (recall that 8 of every 10 German casualties in this war were inflicted by Soviet troops; the scope and intensity of fighting on the Eastern Front is simply beyond the experience of the American and British armies, at that or at any point.) My off the cuff assertion is that this would've ended with mass American casualties and a rapid loss of political will, rendering superior American manufacturing capacity moot.
There is the A-bomb factor to consider, once the allied armies start retreating to Paris. Though at that point the US could only drop one as fast as they could make it, and I'm sure nuking downtown Moscow or Kiev would only hasten the Soviets' own nuclear program. Regardless the nuclear terrorism precident set by the US would be horrifying. States would probably be dropping nukes at the beginning of every war after that. Humanity might not survive that reality. Yeah, people who want that are fucking insane.
Seuss Stalin emoji when
what also isn't being considered is that the contradictions at home in Western countries were being pushed to the limits and people were living very insecure existences - ripe for disorder - so there was a lot of communist support at home in the west.
You try telling these people who have just witnessed the triumph of the red army that you're now doing ANOTHER war and going on the offensive against them for no reason that matters to a civilians life at home.
Perhaps they are underestimating soviet forces and are imagining the grand encirclements of 1941 by the Nazis against an unprepared Soviet army or something.
Man, I wish they would have tried.
General Patton having his "oh shit" moment hunkered down in Paris at 2 am before the partisans shot him.
The KPRA helping General MacArthur do his best 
impression.
The shocking realizations among the Western Allies that their local fifth columns are a lot larger, better armed, and dedicated than they had anticipated.
A Pyrrhic victory would look much more like a loss than they ever could have anticipated. The British had an entire empire to lose and they absolutely would have. Nuking Moscow would have been impossible, nuking Paris or Berlin would only have led to a more unilateral opposition from the rest of the world as this became a global war of class struggle.