General Patton's quotes on Russia and the Russians

We stopped at the river Elbe and waited for the Russians to rape and pillage Berlin.

 

How does this statement counter my point?

BTW, the Soviets were already in Berlin by the time we reached the Elbe.

 

No I'm not. I'm responding to someone who thinks that the Americans would have been stomped by the Soviets, citing for example the relative weakness of the Sherman tank (a poor point, since the Sherman - our mainstay tank - was weaker than their mainstay tank, all of our tanks we're relatively alike).

The air superiority would have come at a cost, but relatively speaking it wouldn't be so severe a cost. I just checked this recently and hey, let's talk 1945. The war was over in mid 1945, so the last 'real' year we have that we can compare product is 1944. We're in agreement that the Americans had the edge on aircraft quality - and in 1944, the U.S. aircraft production was about 2.5x that of the Russians, and already superior in number (I earlier said it was around 4x the production, mistakenly).

As for the rest of it - we all know the Americans were better equipped and were outproducing the Russians. Better equipped: everyone has heard that Stalingrad story about two men, one 5round clip each, one bolt action rifle shared. The Americans had better equipment, all around. Compare the Mosin Nagant to the Bar, or the M1 Garand, etc. American equipment, all around, was superior. The only edge that the Russians had was more heavy tanks (not better, but certainly more of them). And it wasn't a vastly superior edge, it was one that would be closed up shortly by vast American edge in production. Americans were never low on food (as I said earlier, they were given nearly 5000 calories per day, not b/c they needed that much at all, but to show the hungry Germans American strength). I maintain that air superiority would not have been the only edge that the Americans had. We can also expect that with a new war developing, German units could easily be put back into action with the understanding (that they essentially already had) that Americans would allow them to keep their independence, and Russians were threatening it. Bet you didn't think about that bit, did you?

Please source. From what I've read, the figures are much different. From earlier, it looks like the figures you've drawn on were total production that extended beyond 45', and the Russians were almost the only nation after ww2 to keep military production at anywhere near wartime levels.

I was actually talking about the 85. From my understanding the Soviets actually had more tanks than the Americans (about 5 for every 4 American), but that included older tanks. See while I still think the T34s were superior to Shermans, they were not as reliable (more general mechanical problems). They were still, for combat purposes, superior to Shermans, but the difference was not so vast. Apart from it's front hull, it could be penetrated by a Sherman with ease.

But the important thing, which I hinted at earlier, is that air superiority was key. The Russians not only had heavier tanks, but MORE tanks than the Germans through the entire war. This is something that most people forget. It was the German air superiority, as well as better equipped troops, that allowed them to win through blitzkrieg. T34-85s don't handle a shelling from bombers that well. And we had LOTS and lots of bombers.

Oh no no no, you're certainly making a mistake here. Because technology outpaced certain tank models, didn't mean they went out of use. If I remember right, like I said, the KV-1 was the most produced Soviet tank and was still very common at the end of the war. They produced some five or six thousand during the war, and it would have still been the most common heavy they had. That's the thing you've got to keep in mind about ww2 - just because the last year the built the KV-1 was 1943, doesn't mean it wasn't in commission in 1945. This goes for nearly all equipment, and because Soviet production was fairly steady and American production skyrocketed when they entered the war and peaked in 1944, we can assume the Americans actually had more 'better' or at least 'later' tanks than the Soviets. Also, the Americans were producing more tanks by the end of the war, too. In 1943 and 1944 alone the US (combining those two years, of course) produced more planes than the Soviets had left at the end of 1945. Tanks were roughly the same - we were producing far more by the end of the war, we just didn't have as many, but it wasn't that far off. Like I said, it was about a 5:4 Soviet edge in number. And Japan surrendered a mere 3 months later. If you're talking about going to war with the USSR the day that Germany surrendered, then that'd be a bit different, but still possible. Again, the key that most people forget there was still a respectable German army at the end of the war, they were just low on food and supplies (I read an article recently that suggested that's why they lost the battle of the Bulge - the German soldiers were living on less than a thousand calories a day while the Americans had nearly 5000!). The Americans would easily put the German army to use, now to save their homeland, and would have little trouble stopping the Russians, if they couldn't push them back. Once the Americans got in gear, with the inevitable help of the Germans and French (probably the Brits and other nations, such as the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians etc.), the USSR's defeat would be inevitable. Air superiority can wreak havoc on nations, that's how the Germans thrust the Russians back nearly to Moscow with far fewer tanks and men. We would likely do the same, except we'd probably (or at least ideally, in my mind) call it good once we reached the actual russian border. Free Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and basically build a wall from the Baltic to the Black Sea and keep the Russians on the other side.

It's worth noting how many nations would have joined in such a war. Finland, having recently lost land, would have been likely, Germany certain, Poland just about certain, France likely, Britain probably, Canada probably (you can imagine the British Commonwealth, including Australia, would join with Britain). If the war wasn't too quick, it probably would have been possible to get other countries to join in. But who'd side with the Russians? At this point, even the Chinese aren't likely to.


Not taking a more firm stand against the Russians was a mistake. The mere threat of war may have been enough to get Russia to allow truly independent sovereignty in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia (and probably to even give back Karelia to Finland).

EDIT: I just remembered that Churchill actually wanted to invade Russia. So we would have certainly had the Brits with us.

 

There was talk during the war of fighting the Russians after. The Americans and British were thinking about it, which is why they took so long. Had they wanted to take the Germans they could easily have landed in Danzig and created a 'land wall' from there and had all of Germany. They didn't expect themselves to let the Russians keep half of Germany, only to wear themselves out in taking it.

 

His response to this missed your point, which is odd, but I'm pretty sure his original point in saying that Patton-types are being pushed out is that essentially all leaders who aren't yes-men are getting pushed out, which itself is essentially true.

 

The Western Allies had already agreed on stopping at the Elbe years before that point. A landing at Danzig would have immediately telegraphed allied plans and the Russians would have immediately attacked the beachhead and continued rolling beyond the Elbe once they reached it.

 

That'd be just retarded for the Russians. Had they attacked American/British forces then, once Germany surrendered (wasn't far off no matter how you look at it) they could have easily surrendered to the western allies with conditions that allowed them to keep all pre-war territory if they continued to fight the Russians. Russians v. Germany+UK+US+France+Canada+Australia+New Zealand? Please.

 

I'm not Aryan, I'm Celtic...or more precisely...I'm American.

Yes I don't take too kindly to folks pointing mega-ton nuclear weapons at my home....
I'm a product of the Cold War....both growing up and as member of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Raised and trained to regard the USSR as a mortal enemy.
Why sugar coat it..

Folks who didn't live during the height of this era would not understand.

Times change, but mindsets do not.

 

The Germans in 1945 aren't the Germans that rolled over France or the Russian steppes years earlier. They are barely holding on by the point. If anything, the Germans would amount to a drain on the Western Allies.

BTW, are you forgetting that the Western Allies are still fighting Japan at this time?

 

Why don't you admit your dishonesty. The I-16 is not a biplane. The I-15 was

And I am glad the IL2 was only useful for ground attack - Because that was what it was designed for genius

 

I just finished reading Ivan's war, and a few Soviet soldiers comment on how fast German clothing and equipment declined in quality by late 1943. They saw that as evidence they were really starting to hurt the Germans

 

No, the Germans still had most of the manpower they had when they were at the peak of their Russian offensive. By 1945, most Germans actually had far superior equipment - a majority actually had machine guns, while most Soviets were still armed with bolt action rifles. If there never was a western offensive, the Germans would not have given up eastern Germany. They had more men defending the west than the east and on their own could have held the Russians at bay for for longer. With the Americans and Brits? please

Nothing personal of course, I don't think anyone really has a partisan goal in this discussion, but I don't think you're aware of the German fighting capacity. They were running low on supplies, namely food (this is a large part of why the majority of Holocaust victims died in the last year of the war - the Germans lost the 'bread basket's in the east), but their army was more skilled, had the best equipment (to include the best tanks, but namely that their units had more far more machine guns, grenades, and mortars than units of any other army in ww2), and still had hundreds of thousands of regulars fighting. They also had the best irregular fighters, which don't appear on the rolls. Some of those stories are just unbelievable, they're so amazing. Irregulars - just kids - who took out dozens of Soviet tanks. Not that that level of achievement was common, but it was achieved, and shocking.

 

I didn't counter your point, I backed it up with fact. Here's more on the subject.:
[PDF]
Why Eisenhower's Forces Stopped at the Elbe
www.jstor.org/stable/2009127

WHY EISENHOWER'S FORCES STOPPED AT THE ... Roosevelt's death and eighteen days before the Russians took Berlin ... the end of March that he should push

 

Well that is the talking point that is being promoted- that much is true.

 

There was Operation Paperclip, which basically "expunged" the Nazi war records of various rocket scientists and physicists so that the Allies could make some use of their intellectual abilities. Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph are among the more notables. Without a few of them, the U.S. would have fallen further behind in the Space race.

I'm certainly not going to defend the Reich, which industrialized killing to the point of nearly eradicating every European Jew who existed at that point...however Stalin was responsible for The Holodomor or "Extermination by hunger;" a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933. This killed up to 7.5 million Ukrainians.

This is why, in large part I am highly critical of Putin's decision to invade Crimea and threaten the Ukraine. Historically the Russians regarded them as lap dogs...Ukrainians were caught between two bookends of murderous intent during WW2. This notion of Putin excusing the invasion as one of defending those in the Ukraine is balderdash...the populous has been propagandized and brain washed while a Soviet satellite....those old enough to remember Stalin are few and far between...death tends to erase memories. The memory of the Holocaust is kept fresh...but the Holodomor is by and large unknown by most younger people...

To sum up...
Stalin was a son of a (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)...

Patton knew he was a son of a (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) and pulled no punches...yes perhaps not politically correct, but compared to the leaders of today a man like Patton, while crude at times perhaps, would be a breath of fresh air as we have the progressive Globalists who think the World is just one big happy place...a big Village.

It isn't.

The World is predominantly organized along tribalistic lines.

 

please fix your parsing here, then i'll read and respond

 

I actually don't think you added anything here, dude.

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I actually don't think you added anything here, dude.

 

Goigle Russian famine 1946

 

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Frankly I am not quite certain what you are trying to say here- but I will reiterate- the Soviets in 1945 had more armor, better armor and better trained armor crews than the U.S. did.

 

Heh- I don't even know how that posted.

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Since I never said what you said I said- i.e. what you quoted me as saying- I could point out that you just broke PF policy.

Instead, I will just point out that I don't think you actually added anything by misquoting me.

 

Difficult to find numbers for 1945.

The Battle for Berlin has interesting numbers

Total strength:
196 divisions[citation needed]
2,500,000 soldiers (155,900 – c.200,000 Polish Army)[1][2]
6,250 tanks and SP guns[2]
7,500 aircraft[2]
41,600 artillery pieces.[3

 

Slightly, slightly, and slightly. And as I said, it doesn't make a huge difference. During the blitzkrieg the Soviets had more troops, more tanks, better tanks, and they still gave up miles daily. A small armored superiority, with a vast air inferiority, is no superiority at all.

http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers/wartime-production.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_armored_fighting_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II

There's some discrepancy, but if you just look at the wikipedia pages, the US had produced 102,253 armored vehicles in ww2, the Soviets 114,256. That's ww2 production. From other sources (don't have the links handy, but I've read up on it prior to this) the Soviets had a greater edge than that in total number of tanks at the end of the war. From memory, the US still had about 85,000, the Soviets about 105,000. The issue with using these numbers is they're production, but it's something. You haven't provided any sources on this matter, so I suppose we can take mine as 'the' sources for now.

The thing is that the Soviets still had pre-ww2 vehicles, most US vehicles were produced after 1942 (look at the wiki page and do a little math, you'll find that the US produced only 4653 vehicles before 1942, the other roughly 100,000 from 1942 to 1945). And, if you want to go strictly by 'end of war' stuff, the Soviets only started producing the T-34/85 in 1944, meaning that the weaker model was still the 'standard' of the Soviet military.

I assume you mean qualitatively and numerically. Qualitively yes, I've already stated this multiple times, but two things you are missing. 1) not by much (qualitatively or quantitatively), 2) it doesn't come even remotely close to making up for the air inferiority.

The Soviets were starting to move away, but the Mosin Nagant would actually remain the mainstay of their army for years to come. I'd dispute the point that the Soviets had better smgs (Americans really had some of the best - the Thompson wasn't superb, but was cheap and effective enough to be fairly common, others were far superior). But even if I didn't dispute it, having better x doesn't mean much if you have far fewer x. The Soviets were only slowly moving away, years later bolt-action rifles were still the mainstay of their army.

Attrition is always a factor, but it wasn't a major factor at the battle of the Bulge, and it seems like you're talking about something different. I'm not talking about the Americans facing off with Soviets at the gates of Moscow. :/ we're talking about eastern Germany, Poland, etc.

I'm actually really well versed on this, dude. I read six books about the treatment of Germans under the Allies after the second world war, and initially there was a concerted effort to prevent food from getting to the Germans, and restrictions were placed on them that made them unable to make the exports they normally needed to pay for food imports. And their eastern farmlands (land that had been 'German' for centuries) was taken, and some 16.5million Germans forcibly moved, during which millions died.

This is all speculation anyways, but yeah I think a lot of Americans would have issue with fighting alongside Germans, but the idea of fighting the Soviets wasn't some fringe idea - it was a sizable minority. The Americans so hated the Germans and liked the Soviets because of the most effective propaganda machine in American history - and it wouldn't be hard, propaganda aside, to get Americans to fight Russians. The war itself was an ideological war.

Shipping tanks to Europe wouldn't take that long. It really only took a week or less to cross the ocean, it wasn't a huge deal.

See above. Since you've provided no source, I assume a rough source is adequate. Yes, the Americans probably would be heavily outgunned locally - but the American Navy was unbelievably strong and with clear waters (only the Germans were any real threat - even at the end of the war the German navy was superior to Russian), and movement of troops and supplies was fairly quick. Like I said, transports could cross the Atlantic in less than a week. They could then get troops to the front, from the states, in less than two weeks, and each ship could be back with more in under a month.

The Russian offensive took over two years - why would the American offensive need to be super-rushed and immediate? Again, the point about the planes is key. Even heavily armored tanks had weak spots. The T-34/85 (<---which were still being built up - at the end of the war the Russians only had some ~14,000, vs. well over 30,000 of the older models, I've already cited a source to prove this) had it's own. It was well armored only on the front hull - that leave the three other sides, the turret and tracks (from the front, easy penetration), but there's something even the heavy Russian tanks lacked good armoring on - the top. The shells that tanks fired were just not even remotely as heavy or powerful as the bombs dropped by bombers, esp. heavy bombers. This is why any armored advantage would be essentially moot and, as I said before, the Russian air force was incredibly weak. They still had tens of thousands of biplanes in use, and they had practically no fighter planes to speak of.

The reliability isn't extremely important - I was just noting it as a weakness. The air superiority would make them all unreliable.

Actually at the end of the war 9/10 Soviet armored vehicles were not heavy tanks. A large chunk were medium tanks - a mixture of T-34 models, mostly the earlier ones, but they had a lot of light and 'other' tanks ('artillery tanks' were pretty common). Air superiority would have been pretty quick, once the Americans had their air bases set. The Russians were notorious for 'rookie' mistakes, mostly because the word 'scramble' basically wasn't even in their vocabulary. They losts thousands upon thousands of planes at the airfields to bombings, but even so the Americans wouldn't need to rely on Russian errors. The US could pretty quickly knock the Russian air force down to size (I'm not talking to 'obliterate' it, but simply enough to secure air superiority).

From a source I earlier cited, at the end of the war the Russians had about 150k planes, the US about 300k. What's important to note here, though, is age. From 1942-1944, the Russians had produced 100,600 planes (which included a bunch of biplanes, as I earlier noted with a source). During that time, the Americans had built 230,050 planes. The Americans not only had 2x as many planes, but 2.3x as many new planes, and the newest of the newest the Americans had even more (in 1944, they outpaced the Russians nearly 2.5:1), and - we've already established that the Americans had better planes, better pilots, better ground crews, and better strategic air command.

'switched' to IS? I assume it means 'started to switch'. At the beginning of 1945 the Soviets had a couple thousand IS's. Their heavies would still be predominantly KVs. The KV-1 (to include the KV-1S) was basically the only heavy they built until 44'. Here, I've provided this and don't want to be redundant, but this has the figures we're talking about right here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II

see previous links. From what I remember, most American tanks were in the European theater (to include Africa, but by 45 they didn't have many left in Africa, they had already moved lots to Italy and western Europe). Tanks were barely used in the Pacific theater, and those that were used were mostly light tanks - stuarts were the Pacific mainstay, if I recall.

I think I already touched on this - this isn't the case. The Americans weren't unable to provide food, they had policies at the end of the war that essentially prevented it. Like I said, the Americans were rationed nearly 5,000 calories/day. Like I said, this is from book-research I've done, but I can provide the book names and authors and probably pages (probably because that's a lot of thumbing and I may not care that much if I don't find it quickly, haha).

It was in bad shape, but the Germans wouldn't resign eastern Germany if they had a chance of getting it back. I haven't read anything to suggest they were that resigned.

Not saying they'd lead the charge, but they were an ally (not of the Soviets, really), and America was never more popular at any point in time in France than the point we're talking about.

It was very costly. The Soviets - er, I mean Russians - still hold territory that was German for nearly a thousand years. They took the historic 'home' of Germany (capital of Prussia really) and kicked out all the Germans and made it thoroughly Russian, just as a way of spitting in the face of the Germans. They still hold onto it. Even today, we're seeing issues drawn from this era. There is a clear economic divide between East and West Germany, Germans are still deprived of thousands of square miles of territory and ancestral homelands, Lithuania has lost so much land and is now just a tiny drop on a map (it's also lost people), the countries are still feeling the economic impact. Latvia today is half Russian, and we can already see today the long-term effects of Soviet policy as Ukraine is about to split.

I'm not so sure about it being 'better.' And fighting the Soviet Unions would not have cost that many lives, not in the manner I'm talking about. You're assuming the Soviets would never give up an inch - that's just not how it would have been. They would have given up ground pretty quickly, they did it before - and they'd do it again, but we wouldn't be pushing for Moscow, we'd be pushing for the return of Finnish territory, liberation of East Germany, liberation of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria? (<--can't remember how it went down there), Ukraine, and maybe just splice off Ingria for Sweden -

Well we agree at least that Finland could be counted on. I think that Germany would be a given, and I think that we could easily count on the support of the countries we'd seek to liberate (Poland, Lithuania....), and I think you underestimate the Brits. Churchill himself didn't actually lose, his party did, which is a matter of how their politics work. But the conservatives lost because of domestic policy issues, not foreign policy - they were still very popular on that bit. Just months before the election, Churchill himself had an 83% approval rating.

The point I'm making in that we could easily have beaten the Soviets is not that we should have, but that we could have, and I think the Soviets were well aware of it. I think had we given Stalin an ultimatum, he would have agreed to release most if not all of the territory.

Well as I pointed out above^ (with source), Churchill had an 83% approval just before the election. He didn't lose because of foreign policy, his party lost because of domestic issues. According to exit polls, only 5% who voted for Labour (the party that unseated Churchill) cited 'international policy'.

 

^_-

Don't get pissy, your response was quite literally a copy and paste of my entire post. When I quoted you, what I was quoting was quite literally what I had said, hence "what I said."

Source? I assume this is for the Soviets, right?

The numbers seem a bit odd because I know that the Soviets had far more tanks at that point in the war (though not necessarily committed to the battle of Berlin). I'm assuming that's in the "theatre" of the Battle of Berlin, not the battle itself. Other sources I read earlier tonight had the Soviets at nearly 1,000,000, the Germans at a few hundred thousand. But the source also noted that the KDR (<-- yeah i know, so sad to use in real figures, but essentially what they were talking about) was about 4:1 for the Germans, and the Germans actually had a majority dedicated to their western front.

One of the odd things you've got to notice about the war is this: the Germans never, at any point, had more troops than the Soviets. They had better troops, better equipment, better command, and were dependent on just being better. It's part of what fed into their racial superiority beliefs.

 

1945 =/= 1946.