Realistically, who would have won Operation Unthinkable?

Could the USSR really have held off against the allies? Would it collapse before the allies even entered Moscow? Or could the USSR have somehow won?

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It can go down however you want it to go down

Oh, its this thread again. How original.

Still better than the thousands of how can Germany win threads. Deal with it.

Anglo-Americans. US had the A bomb, and the Soviets wouldn't have been able to invade the UK or the US.

Russia would have made clear gains early on, maybe even pushing the Anglo-Americans off the mainland, but then they bomb Moscow and a few other Russian strong holds and the bankrupt Soviets collapse.

I'm not a huge fan of those either.

If by "better" you mean 0.05% better, maybe.

Considering the lack of will to even fight an all out war between Capitalism and Communism when the shooting started in Korea, I vote, and will almost certainly be ignored like the other 3,000 times I've posted this sort of thing in threads like this, that the most likely outcome is to shoot at each other a bit and then settle for a peace, more or less with the status quo ante bellum.

Nobody wanted to have WW3 so soon after WW2.

People want to hear you explaining in great detail how their favourite side is going to win despite all challenges, not this sort of thing.

>Who would win if x and y fought
>They wouldn't want to fight
>That's not the question
>Why is everyone ignoring me????

>what would happen if a sun made of ice would collide with our son

And can fly over most of the VVS's planes effective flight ceilings.

But, to be honest, first generation nuclear weapons aren't *that* powerful. Comparing the devasatation of the two dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima puts effective destructive power at around one of those 1,000 plane big raids. While they're painful and will certainly be used to nasty effect, they're not enough to win a war on their own. Germany didn't crumple from things like Gomorrah, and the Soviets aren't going to crumple from aerial bombardment either. The war, such as it is, is going to mostly be settled by conventional weapons in a series of large running battles in Central Europe.

I think the American people, after seeing how fast the nuclear bombs brought the Japanese to their knees and without having to worry about a Soviet nuclear retaliation,would be in a much better position.
There's also the fact that the American economy in 1945 was doing pretty well compared to the Soviets.

Obviously the didn't want a fight, otherwise it would have happened. But if it did happen, is what we are talking about.

There's destruction, and then the radiation sickness that is going to sap a lot of people's will to keep up the fight. Especially when they don't know how many more bombs the Americans have.

I'm real big on this era. I think the conclusion of most scholars is that the US had an absolutely splendid first strike capability until later in the 1950s. They had planes capable of delivering nukes and a large enough arsenal and production to take multiple shots at getting through. They lose on land but Russia's major cities and industrial sights get nuked while the US retains a very secure home front.

I think odds are that the US wins, but the cost would be incredibly high in credibility and it would ruin Europe.

>Lend-Lease stops
>Half the soviet union starves to death

If we're talking an Unthinkable scenario, war with the USSR breaks out sometime in late June or early July. There is not going to be an atomic bombing of Japan. Those bombs are going to be committed to the real war.

Radioactivity sickness was unknown at the time (Seriously, read this, it's horrifying how little of an idea the people contemplating using these bombs had, let alone anyone else nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf ), and takes time to manifest. Besides which, in the historic bombings, you had a hell of a lot more people killed in the initial blast than you did dribbling in of cancer over the next 4 decades. I don't see it causing that much more of an impact than the actual blasts.

>Especially when they don't know how many more bombs the Americans have.
And Germany didn't know how many or how often the British and Americans could mass-blast cities either. They didn't give up from just the air attacks, you had to dig Hitler's corpse out of a bunker in Berlin

The Nazis probably didn't give up because the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, same with the Japanese after Midway.

I don't think the Anglo-Americans are going to demand the same from the Soviets.

>Lend Lease ends instantly and all Sov trucks, rail locomotives, rail cars have been coming from this source, as well as metals, rubber, copper, armor plate, electronics, refined petro products, food, boots and much else
>Sov tactical air forces overwhelmed in 2-4 weeks
>Sovs face a strategic bombing campaign, based in Western Europe, that that they have never seen and are completely unprepared to defend against, crushing them 1,500 miles behind the front lines
>and then we get to the 3-4 nuclear weapons being produced every month, which will preclude any Sov troop concentration and zerg rush Red Army tactics, the only way they know how to make war
>within 3-6 months, the Sovs peace out and go back to Moscow
>you'd never get anybody to advocate this war in 1945, but it would have been successful if prosecuted

>And the Allies had overwhelming air superiority over the Soviets.

citation needed

also that was air superiority near to the frontline (which is discussed too) how you will reach air superiority near to the soviet industrial centers.

Total production of aircraft in 1945
>US 45,852
>USSR 20,900
>UK 12,070

US B-29 can fly out of range of most AA guns. And the US had way more different types of aircraft for different roles. The Soviets usually just tried to bumrush the Germans with Yak variations. The Anglo-US forces have aircraft carriers, from which to strike any Russian territory except Central Asia.

What an idiotic notion , who do you think supplied the Russian war machine? Even without nukes the allies had clear air superiority , they would just fire bomb you into Oblivion

Citation needed? Are you retarded? War thunder isn't accurate you nigger , the Russians could hardly keep planes in the air

>675px-Allied_army_positio(...).png (247 KB, 675x427)

Just a reminder that all those Soviet “armies” on the map are in fact corps sized formations or smaller, (armies are made up of multiple corps) so the balance of power was more or less on par.

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>world is tired of war, everything is fucking ruin
>people are happy that war is finally ended are fucking exhausted, so just want to rebuild
>Soviets already signed all treaties to back off from Greece, Finland, W.Germany and the rest of continent as long as there would be peace and non aggression against them
>Anglo-Americans autists declare war on their former ally who you shilled for past 4 years as a great friend and peace lover
>All of the sudden most despised war fucking continues and it's clear fucking sight that "Democracies" are being aggressors, proving commies right
>Create millions of upset people who sympathise with communism and anti-war movement, demanding immediate fucking peace or else.
Allies would be fucking insane to disenfranchise their entire population who is extremely anti-war to start another war.

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The point of strategic bombing isnt to break the enemy's will but his ability to fight. American bombing would hit Soviet production and affect their warfighting capacity much harder than the human losses did vs Germany, we would actually see 1 gun for 5 people types of scenarios.

>American bombing would hit Soviet production

Soviet production facilities and Lend-Lease transshipment points were too far away for anything except maybe the B-29 and even then, it was still too far.

Western Allied heavy bombers would have been used against Soviet field formations, logistic lines and supply depots and as the Soviets didn’t have jack-shit for an airforce, Western Allied airpower would run amuck.

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The USSR, but the longer the war went on the more it would favor the western allies, though I imagine the general public in the west would lose the stomach for war rather quickly and most of Europe would become part of the Russian sphere

>Western Allied heavy bombers would have been used against Soviet field formations, logistic lines and supply depots and as the Soviets didn’t have jack-shit for an airforce, Western Allied airpower would run amuck.

which would get them in range for the former targets pretty quickly.

there's also the possibility of the US mobilizing into Russia from Japan, tilting the Chinese civil war and basically ending communism right then and there.

> Could the USSR really have held off against the allies?

No. If the Western Allies attacked, all Lend-Lease would have been cut off and the Soviets were critically dependent on it and were at the end of a very long logistic line that they could barely maintain against the Germans.

> Would it collapse before the allies even entered Moscow?

The Western Allies wouldn’t have invaded the U.S.S.R., or at least not held any territory there for long. The goal would have been liberating Europe, not overthrowing the U.S.S.R.

> Or could the USSR have somehow won?

They’d have had to attack first and even then, they’re going to lose.

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> which would get them in range for the former targets pretty quickly.

It was still too far and any airfields in Poland and eastward, would have been bombed to fuck and unusable.

> there's also the possibility of the US mobilizing into Russia from Japan,

There ain’t nothing in Siberia worth fighting over and what is, is even further away.

> tilting the Chinese civil war and basically ending communism right then and there.

The U.S. had little faith the Nationalist Chinese and as we saw, this was justified so any attack against the Soviets is going to happen in Europe, though Western Allied bombers would have also been flying out of Iran, which eliminates all the Soviet oil supply.

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The only partisans worth a damn in France and Italy were the Communists. If the western allies declared war on the USSR, then both France and Italy would immediately become communist governments. The Communists were the only indigenous forces with any measure of organization cohesion or combat experience in 1945. The western allies would be driven off the continent in weeks, and all the bombs in the world wouldn’t be enough to beat the soviets. They’d be off the continent for good- there’s no way in hell the western allies could pull off a D-Day sequel without the opposing army being distracted by an immeasurably more important front to the east.

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>The only partisans worth a damn in France and Italy were the Communists.

yeah but French and Italian partisans were hilariously bad which means they still sucked shit

the Polish and Greek ones? now those guys would be hardcore shit but they'd likely not want to help the Soviets

>French and Italian partisans receive tons of US support
>Still practically worthless
Oh shit, watch out for the French resistance

Also the UK and US would have Spain and Portugal both of which wouldn't be keep with a communist nation on their border, no matter how many cities need to be bombed.

>The point of strategic bombing isnt to break the enemy's will but his ability to fight.
Douhet Theory literally was that strategic bombing would break the enemy's will.
iwar.org.uk/military/resources/aspc/text/theory/douhet.htm

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And because even with cities being burned off the map, it actually didn't break down their war machine to the point of utter helplessness. It hurt, no two ways about it, but they were still supplemental actions to the ground war, not a replacement for it.

MacDonald, C (2005). (page 497) The Last Offensive: The European Theater of Operations lists Allied air strength at the final assaults on Germany in March at 28,000.

"The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster, lists VVS overall strength in May of 1945 at 14,386 across all fronts.

And not all strategic bombing proceeded along Douhetian principles. In fact, Curtis LeMay was very critical of Douhet and advocated for an economic-centric strategic bombing focus.

>Soviet production facilities and Lend-Lease transshipment points were too far away for anything except maybe the B-29 and even then, it was still too far.
Considering the ranges at which B-17s and B-24s operated, no, not really.

>Western Allied heavy bombers would have been used against Soviet field formations, logistic lines and supply depots and as the Soviets didn’t have jack-shit for an airforce, Western Allied airpower would run amuck.
In all likelihood they would do both.

“Even so, the level of AK [Polish partisan] activity deemed necessary far out reached that of Western underground troops. Average German monthly troop losses to Polish partisans were 250-320 in 1942 and 850-1700 early in 1944.”

“both practical and political difficulties had limited Allied air-drops to the AK to only some 350 tons by this period [1944] compared with 10,000 tons dropped to the French resistance during the war and 5,000 tons even to the small Greek movement.”

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we have a son?!

The Soviets envisioned various strategies to do this, i'd say if they wanted to pull this off it would start at late night with the destruction of all rhine bridges and atacks on all in range airbases focusing on ones that are known to have more planes or more runway size, this could be followed by an massive mechanized assault around the fulda gap with an diversionary atack focused on it, US troops should be pinned and confused the more confusion you could pull of the better the soviet infiltration tactics could aid them in this part but still their main force is their mechanized corps.

By the next at least they should've reached the Rhine at least in one part of the River if not the operation would probably be deemed a failure as american reinforcements would be on their way using pantoon bridges and such.

Take this with a metric ton of salt this is just IF the soviets even broke US defences and it fully ignores italy or the atlantic ocean.

easy Soviet victory in continental Europe followed by status quo peace deal

Depends , an british-french-american offensive right after ww2 wouldn't have massive successbut neither would the soviet counter offensives, at maximum they would reach teh rhine and have to retreat after heavy bombardment.

If the Americans/British could build an airbase in Iraq and bomb Baku, the soviet would be unable to wage war once their oil is gone

Yes, like how they bombed Ploesti once and the Germans just collapsed with their oil gone.

>Germans just collapsed with their oil gone

That is basically what happened

Try reading the entire sentence next time. The Allies bombed at Ploesti for two years, mostly ineffectively, and the spigot was only shut down when the Red Army moved in and took over the place. But it'll work differently this time around, right? You'll just be able to shut down Baku from the air, and not have to move in a couple dozen divisions.

Without the Lend-Lease Soviets would collapse, they might make good gains early on but not only would the resistance network cripple them but America and friends could easily rebound

Given that the USSR was mainly able to recover economically via use of remittances in its newly acquired western puppets and that its dependence on the lend-lease meant that almost all of its high-octane fuel came from the US and UK I believe that it would've come down to whether or not the allied powers had the motivation to really continue the war.

It wouldn't have been easy, sure. But given almost total air superiority and the capacity to completely out-produce the USSR while having sustained far less losses coupled with the A-bomb I can't see the soviets winning the war of attrition (espscially when most of the eastern states like the poles, czechs, romanians hungarians etc would've done what they could to fuck the soviets up in the process)

>Western Allied bombers would have also been flying out of Iran, which eliminates all the Soviet oil supply.
Yes, this would have crippled the Sovs quickly.

>The Allies bombed at Ploesti for two years, mostly ineffectively
That was from North Africa, from extremely long range. The bombing attacks in 1945 would take place from many miles East and North of North Africa, likely including attacks from aircraft carriers in the Black Sea. The Sovs would be facing types of warfare that they'd never experienced or dreamed would be waged against them.

And any attacks from Baku would also be from extremely long range until literlaly years into the war when they can advance thousands of kilometers to set up bases in places like the Ukraine.

> The bombing attacks in 1945 would take place from many miles East and North of North Africa,
The distance from Alexandria to Bucharest in a straight line by air is about 1,500 km. Ploesti's actually a little further.

Meanwhile, the closest base you're likely to get to Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus would be in Iraq. Mosul to Baku is a bit shorter, but it's still a bit over 1,000 km.

>likely including attacks from aircraft carriers in the Black Sea.
That's retarded on several levels. Carrier planes are tiny and make crap strategic bombers, and the Turks are going to close the Dardanelles with their neutrality policy like they did in the war against Germany.

>The Sovs would be facing types of warfare that they'd never experienced or dreamed would be waged against them.
Again, you can say the exact same thing about Germany in WW2. They were not envisioning the sort of air war that was waged against them, but they adapated.

2500km just to land in okinawa or iwo like another 500km.

the round trip moscow to london is 5000km, of which they could only be escorted as far as western poland.

bombing raids on the SU are one way trips, but you could still effectively bomb the newer production centers that would pop up in Ukraine and Poland.

then you have attrition rates from flak which the soviets had a lot more of than either the germans or japanese, you would see 1942 scale losses in the air.

The US advances were against a Wehrmacht conducting a fighting retreat.

B29 cannot fly out of range of most AA guns, the US lowered the altitude during the raids on Japan because the Japanese had a hole in their coverage at around ~22-25k feet

you guys are seriously overstating the effect of planes in general, yeah they are good but these aren't modern precision guided munitions, these are bombs with a CEP of over a mile.

Seriously the Soviets were equal or better at the tactical level,head and shoulders better at the operational level, and more or less equal at the strategic level.

set piece counter attack, encircles most allied troops in Germany, while the soviet reserves push unopposed into France. war is over in 6 months tops. finishing up there the soviets could make more moves to secure their ports, (turkey / denmark ) but the bulk of the fighting would be over.

the allies do not have the required 3 - 1 advantage in troops, to even hope for a successful attack, the soviets are enjoying a 4 -1 advantage in troops, 2 - 1 in tanks.

Well the Soviets didnt have a working nuclear warhead until 1949 so there's automatically a massive advantage to thr allies.
Secondly the Germans devastated the soyiet union whilst the US was still at full strength, in terms of superior industrial output, infrastructure, and manpower.

No, the Atomic bombing missions were launched from Tinian. The distance from Tinian to Hiroshima was 2,526 km. google.com/search?q=Distance from Tinian to Hiroshima&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-ab

Those bombers made it back.

>The US advances were against a Wehrmacht conducting a fighting retreat.
Can you read? That has nothing to do with what I said.

>the allies do not have the required 3 - 1 advantage in troops, to even hope for a successful attack, the soviets are enjoying a 4 -1 advantage in troops, 2 - 1 in tanks.
[citation very badly needed]

its literally from the declassified british to churchill document explaining why it was a bad idea

#27

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It would have been the end of the world through the use of nuclear weapons

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Hmm, interesting. Did not realize.

>Turks are going to close the Dardanelles with their neutrality policy like they did in the war against Germany.
The Turks are going to do what they're told, once it's clear the war is against the Sovs.

The Germans adapted, but remember, the subhuman slavs never did. They zerg rushed throughout the war, and traded blood for ground(and they were incapable of fighting at sea). That tactic fails when you bump up against a capable opponent, fighting on one front.

>The US advances were against a Wehrmacht conducting a fighting retreat.
The Wehrmacht marshalled all of their armor production in 1944 for the Ardennes offensive. Doesn't sound like a retreat.

the pentagon war-gamed this exact scenario with US generals commanding the sides, and the conclusion was the Soviets would march all over the allies.

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That's bong documentation. The bongs were militarily incompetent. The US took the Marianas and were quickly mounting massive strategic bombing raids on Japan, from very long range. Yes, the bongs were incapable of imagining such warfare, let along executing it, much like the subhuman slaves were incapable.

>the pentagon war-gamed this exact scenario with US generals commanding the sides, and the conclusion was the Soviets would march all over the allies.
Your image doesn't support your claim.

web.archive.org/web/20101116160324im_/http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/images/024.jpg

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Again, bong documentation and analysis isn't suitable for discussing modern military action in 1945. They were incapable of it, or even thinking of it, much like the subhuman slavs.

what are you talking about, they did this in the 80s. Its actually one of the ways they test them.

Not sure what you're talking about here, or how/why you're jumping from 1945 to 1980

they conducted a wargame in 1980, that simulated an attack by the allies on the SU after WW2.

this even happened in 1980.

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event*

Over 10000000 casualties can cause some pretty serious social turmoil.

I'd need to see that link.

>if the war is justified - it can go on indefinitely
The longer a war lasts, the harder it becomes to convince people that the war is justified.

At the same time, the longer a war lasts, the harder it can become to convince people that anything short of total victory is worth finishing the war over. Go look at the Palestinians for an example of that, or why all the peace initiatives in WW1 around 1916 failed.

By 1917 though, you had groups like the Bolsheviks having great success in turn public dissatisfaction with the war into a political force.

The Bolsheviks could very credibly say that it wasn't their fault the war started, nor are they even a continuation of the czar's government, and are thus in no way responsible for the war.

Unless one or both of the principal power governments collapse in this situation, that's not really a card either of them can play. And I'm pretty sure either of them would view "collapse of government and replacement with a radical new ideology" as a bad end.

>And any attacks from Baku would also be from extremely long range until literlaly years into the war when they can advance thousands of kilometers to set up bases in places like the Ukraine.

The Allies held Iran and would have shut down Soviet oil production in the Caucasus via bombing attacks from there.

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The British held the southern coast of Iran bordering Iraq, the Soviets controlled the north. Allied airbases in Iran would be no closer to Baku than northern Iraq.

The British held roughly half of Iran and the Soviets the other half but the only Soviets troops in Iran were railroad and logistic personnel related to Lend-Lease shipments and if the Western Allies had planned on attacking the Soviet at the end of WWII, they would have transferred army and air force units to Iran specifically to attack Soviet oil facilities in the Caucasus (which would have been well within range).

And as bulk of Soviet forces were in Eastern Europe and the Soviets had no air force to speak of, they wouldn’t have been able to prevent it.

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>Moscow (and most important Russian centers) couldn't have been bombed.
What are aircraft carriers and long-range bombers?

Where? Show me one? Show me literally fucking one you braindead moron

> > Moscow (and most important Russian centers) couldn't have been bombed.
> What are aircraft carriers

Carrier aircraft have a shorter range and what costal facilities did the Soviets have that were worth attacking? With no Lend-Lease coming in, Arkhangelsk was meaningless and Vladivostok was even more irrelevant.

If there had been any direct Western Allied naval action, it would have been to steam into the Baltic Sea and attack/invade Poland, the Baltics and Leningrad in support of land attacks.

> and long-range bombers?

Moscow is too far away and Soviet production centers, moved to the east during the war with the Germans, were even further away. Allied heavy bombers would have been used against Soviet field formations and logistic lines.

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