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Discussion Question: Did We Need to Ally with Stalin?
There’s a line you get all the time in debates: “After all, we allied with Stalin to beat Hitler.” I don’t like it much as an argument because the implication is that anyone who isn’t worse than Stalin is fair game, and there are very few people who can’t clear that bar. But never mind that, what about it as a historical question; should we have allied with Stalin?
Take the same history right up until June 22, 1941. The Wehrmacht rolls Panzers into the Soviet Union. Roosevelt cables Churchill, “The important thing is to beat Hitler, but do we really need to supply the communists?” Churchill cables back, “If Hitler invaded hell, I wouldn’t invite the devil to tea.”
What happens from there? How do you think history would run? Do the allies still win the war? Spin out your own alternate history and let me know what you think.
Published in History
A lot more Soviets would have died, but it is unlikely to have done much more than prolong the war. The western supplies were not critical at Stalingrad. Only slightly at Kursk. Those were the turning points of the war.
When I traveled to the Soviet Union long ago, there was a middle-aged woman who thanked me for the food she had received as a child as a result of Lend Lease. Food was probably the most critical item the people received from Lend Lease. The Soviets could make their own munitions and beat Germany.
I’ve noted this before, but both Stalin and Khrushchev stated that without American aid, they would have lost the war. Admittedly, Holodomor Joe’s comment was at a diplomatic event, but the shoe-banger’s was in his memoirs, where there was no real need to say that.
There is the interpretation that almost all of the aid supplied to Stalin – all the stuff beyond the first few months – did nothing for the outcome of the war, but an awful lot to cement Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
Without an empire, would the USSR have had the influence it did over Asia, Africa, Latin America and the State Department? Would China have gone red? Would Harvard?
In complete hindsight probably not. I’ll get into why in a minute but first we have to deal with what each side brought to the table.
The Russian’s contribution was to kill 4 of 5 German soldiers in the war. That is a pretty stark fact right there. The question is would they have been able to accomplish that without the support of the Allies. I think the answer is no, but in later years some historians and Russian apologists have claimed that they didn’t need the allies to defeat the Nazis. That basically a combination of the Russian winter and mobilization on its own was sufficient. Of course two people who probably better positioned to understand the Russian situation in World War 2, namely Zhukov and Stalin, believed that allied support was a crucial part of the Russian’s defensive and later offensive effort. Also the shear volume of supplies sent by the US to the Soviets is pretty much incredible. They were supplied with 17.5 million tons of equipment and supplies throughout the war. Americans used more on the their side of the European war about 22 million tons, but if we assume that 17.5 million was needed then Russia can’t defeat Germany without the aid of the US and UK (Commonwealth).
Now let’s look at the converse. If Russia doesn’t bleed the Germans on the eastern front can the Allies win. My assumption is without supplies from the US Russia collapses defensively before the German army is seriously degraded. This gives Germany access to oil fields, strategic resources, and means they are no longer engaged in a two front war. In this scenario the Americans and the British need to kill the entire German Army without Russia’s help. Also Germany doesn’t have some of the logistics difficulties that it historically had in the European campaign. Normandy is probably incredibly reinforced. Germany Aircraft loses on the Russian front aren’t as significant making strategic bombing much more difficult and depending on when the Russians fall it is possible that Rommel could have been reinforced changing the African campaign’s complexion. Still I don’t think the Germans can mount a cross channel invasion of the UK and the UK and US can still win the tonnage war in the battle of the Atlantic. I think the US and UK still can outproduce Germany. I expect the air war is much more protracted and that Allied loses are much higher. I don’t expect Normandy happens, as the positions would be too reinforced. It is more likely that the allies concentrate on going up from Italy. It is a lot more hard fighting. I am not sure that they can win. I am pretty sure we don’t see the fall of Berlin in the dramatic fashion we did. In fact the Germans without the problems of a two front war and without supply worries may be able to fight the Allies to a stand still.
Why then do I say in complete hindsight the allies still win. Because the Allies developed the Atomic Bomb first and the path the Germans were on to develop the bomb probably wouldn’t have worked, so in the end the Allies could eventually engage in an Atomic bombing campaign and beaten the Germans in any event.
This is complete hindsight with the kind of perfect knowledge only looking at the past can bring. In the here and now of the actual events of World War 2. I think that Churchill has the right of it. The alliance was the best way to guarantee the defeat of Germany as the US and the UK assessed the situation at the time.
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
Seems to be the accurate quote: Churchill per Goodreads
That also is my memory of how Dr. Arne (?) of Hillsdale, who helped write the definitive Churchill biography renders the quote.
As to my personal take, I think that if Hitler hadn’t lost a major army including massive armaments in his failed attempt to invade Russia and take Moscow the war could very well have had a different outcome. Probably something like a peace agreement leaving Hitler and his successors in possession of most of Europe and the U.S. and G.B. having to live with an uneasy truce for a century or two.
Different? Assuredly, Better? Worse? We would have been dealing with a Nazi power in possession of nuclear arms since we couldn’t have invaded Europe when we did so….
Actually the quote was “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
And it is not apocryphal since Churchill quoted himself in The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 370.
Hitler made a strategic mistake in 1941 by invading the Soviet Union and creating for himself a two-front war. It would have been malfeasance not to supply the Russians with arms. Pro Soviet camps love to point out that the USSR took the brunt of the war. But they also inflicted the highest casualties on the Germans – by some estimates 80% of all German losses occurred along the Eastern front. Every man lost in the streets of Stalingrad was not defending the beaches of Normandy or Anzio.
Yes, we had to support Stalin. If the Molotov-Ribbentrov pact had held as one example, then all those troops that went into the USSR would have instead have been available for action in North Africa, or an English invasion. While an English invasion would have been extremely difficult to pull off, with over 4 million more troops available to the Wermarcht it might have been possible.
But let’s instead assume that Germany still invades with Operation Barbarossa but the US and UK decide to cut them off and let them won or lose on their own. Most of what the US sent was support equipment like trucks but we also sent tanks and airplanes that proved to be crucial to the Soviets. Absent those trucks, supplying front line troops becomes more difficult. Looking at two critical battles that turned the tide in WWII on the Eaterns Front, Kursk and Stalingrad both were won by the Soviets, but absent adequate supply would they have been won? That is an impossible question to know for certain but since in both cases the Soviets were using humans to carry supplies to the front, how much less would have been there? Enough so that the offensive by Zukov might have lacked the critical mass to sweep away the Nazi forces on the flanks (primarily Hungarians). It’s also an open question if Stalingrad could even have held with less resupply from across the Volga. Had the Germans been able to size all of the western bank of the Volga, the Soviets would have been hard pressed to strike across the river.
Kursk, much like Stalingrad, turned on the Soviet’s ability to supply their troops enough to slow down the German operation Citadel. Had Citidel not been stalled by the Soviets and the Kursk salient been cut off, a similar fate to Stalingrad, but reversed, could have occurred.
One other aspect of Allied support is that it assisted in their ability to produce war materiel. The T34/85 was superior to the older German tanks, even in the hads of the ill trained Soviet tankers. Their heavy Ioseph Stalins that saw use after Kursk required massive investment of resources to build and design, resources that US trucks delivered.
Might the Soviets still have won? Sure, butbthe war might also have drug on much longer and the scary part there is that with the Manhattan project underway, it might have been Europe that felt those bombs as opposed to Japan, and it likely wouldn’t have been two that were used, but many more. The British and the Germans were both pursuing nuclear weapons after all and an extension of the war by 2 years could easily have given them time to develop them.
I’ve never understood why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, or why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
What on earth did they hope to accomplish? And what did they think their odds of success were?
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they needed to make a play for the Dutch East Indies. They need the oil resources there for their war effort in China. Their hope was that by destroying the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor they would be able to slow the US’s entry into the war and accomplish their objectives before the US could stop them and then would be in a position to negotiate a peace treaty that would recognize the facts on the ground. They underestimated just how upset the US would be after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hitler thought that since the Slavs were inferior peoples to the Aryans that he could easily take the Soviet Union. This is what happens when you start with a dumb idea and decide to carry it on to conclusions it doesn’t actually support. In fairness up to this point he hadn’t really had much trouble with invading other countries. The German war machine seemed to be pretty solid in the early days of World War 2 and even early in Barbarossa.
EJ, as usual, speaks for me on this.
One should read Sean McMeeken’s Stalin’s War…..he addresses this question and presents some very interesting thoughts.
Hope to have time to return to this question as I’ve thought about this a lot….but we are in the middle of a blizzard here in eastern Kansas and I have to get back out and deice/ck the property I manage…..
Take care everyone….
One result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal was that the Soviets shipped raw materials to the Germans. According to John Erickson, the Germans allowed a Soviet train to cross the border before they opened up with their assault.
When the Germans reached the Caucasus where the Soviets had their oil rigs, they found that the Soviets had rendered them useless.
I agree that it was unlikely the Germans could mount an invasion of Britain. And, they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943 as the American and British tactics and material proved effective.
I think the following quote (attributed to Stalin; most likely apocryphal) is about as close to accuracy regarding each of the Allies’ principal contribution as we’re ever going to get:
“The British gave time, the Americans gave money, and the Russians gave blood.“
If the U.S. didn’t have the Philippines, Japan likely would not have attacked Pearl Harbor. The PI are just too close to the Dutch East Indies for Japan to be comfortable attacking the DEI without crippling the U.S. fleet.
And Japan was unlucky that all the U.S. carriers were at sea when they attacked. Doubtful that Midway happens the way it did if most of the carriers were sunk or damaged at Pearl.
Japan needed to expand its resources gathering in the Pacific rim. The US was the wild card with its large naval presence. The British were spread to thinly to truly stop the Japanese and their decision to take the Philippines and Malaysia and New Guinea were to secure access to those resources. Their plan was that if they destroyed the Pacific fleet and presented the US with a fait acompli that the US would acquiesce tongue loss of the Philippines because moving forces from the Atlantic would be too difficult and building a new gleet too time consuming. They felt the US was weak and lacked the resolve to fight over possessions so far away. I remember writing a paper on this for a Japanese history course I took and in my research I learned of a theoretical attack against the Panama Canal during the 1939 World’s Fair when the US Pacific Fleet was planned to make a move to the Atlantic and a visit to the World’s Fair. The supposed Japanese plan was to detonate a freighter in the locks of the Panama Canal forcing the Pacific fleet to sail the long way via the Drake Passage and allowing the Japanese to quickly seize territory. As I remember it (this was a long time ago) the US fleet made it as far as the Outter Banks before they turned around and headed back to the Pacific.
As for Barbarossa, Hitler always was going to betray the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, it was a question of when. He viewed the Russians as inferior, and in 1941 their Army was in shambles. Any competent leader had been purged. The initial successes the Germans enjoyed reinforced their decision to invade. The Soviet Army was decimated in the opening months and the Germans goggled up massive amounts of territory. Remember that the Germans had, by this point swept all the way to the Atlantic coast and were threatening Britain. They were sweeping across North Africa as well with few setbacks. In 1941 Hitler figured that it was time to take Russia. They figured they would sweep in and take it over in a couple of months. They almost did. Had Barbarossa not been delayed a few times sonthat its start was so late, they might well have taken Moscow before the winter. It’s easy to look back now and say it was dumb, but considering how close it came to working…well, if it’s stupid and it works it isn’t stupid.
If the aircraft carriers had been in port and if the USS Nevada not have headed out to open sea and drawn the second wave from their intended targets of the tank farms and the submarine pens, it just might have worked. The pens were virtually untouched, and it wouldn’t have taken much damage to set all that fuel alight.
The Red Army had performed so poorly in their invasion of Finland during the Winter War that it seemed a safe bet that they would crumble when attacked. They did in fact crumble, but Russia is a big place and the Russians could trade space for time while they got their game together.
I’m pretty sure Hank purposefully altered the quote in the OP, so as to kick off his proposed alternate timeline.
What I get out of it is that, sometimes, winning the war is more critical than your personal vanity.
You don’t ally with them if you can win without them. You ally with them because you can’t win without them. And when you have thousands of innocents behind you and that guy shares a common adversary, then you do it. There’s nothing virtuous in sacrificing thousands of innocents for your personal virtue.
I hadn’t considered that about the PI being that actual key element that the Japanese need to neutralize.
Agreed on the carriers but to be honest the Japanese targeting plans were flawed to start with. They really needed to knock out the fuel supplies, repair depots, and infrastructure of Pearl. Targeting the battleships was showy and certainly hurt the morale of the American Navy, but I think all but two of those battleships were back in action before the end of the war. Pearl was still an effective base of operations after the attack. If they had concentrated on the shore facilities instead of the fleet they might have been able to force the fleet back to San Diego, which would have left more of the Pacific to them for longer.
I believe that the bigger factor ended up being that FDR was a lot more willing to accept Stalin and even more trusting of him regardless of what the cause of it was. We did need to supply the Soviets not just to divide the German War effort but to deny them the natural resources that were the objective of the invasion to begin with. Stalin was never to be trusted to begin with and to have acted otherwise was the problem and ended with a Soviet empire in Eastern Europe which might well have been headed off.
It’s in the English version of Khrushchev’s memoirs. Is it in the Russian?
I don’t know. I don’t read Russian.
The English version was edited by Khrushchev’s son who was looking for exile in the US.
I have little to say that hasn’t already been said. I agree with almost all of the comments. This is a brilliant post that needs to be elevated to the Main Feed; it represents the best that Ricochet has to offer. I will add a tangent from Winston Churchill’s magisterial opus on the Second World War, immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which while dealing with the United States entering World War Two, notes the contribution of the Soviet Union:
“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment, I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran [where the English sunk the French Fleet]; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war — the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s-breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen month of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war. England would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to power. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonist. No doubt it would take a long time. I expected terrible forfeits in the East; but all this would be merely a passing phase. United we could subdue everybody else in the world. Many disasters, immeasurable and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end.”
Since you have questions about the veracity/completeness of the English translation, I suggest you make do the research to satisfy your doubts. You can report your findings here, I suppose, and if I’m wrong I’ll be happy to admit it.
He wasn’t wrong. Once the US chose a side that side was going to win. The type of war that was World War 2 depended on production. The US not only had tremendous productive capacity. Its capacity was almost entirely immune from Axis attack. Once the US joined the fight it was over for the Axis. The only real question was how long was it going to take and how many lives would be lost.
The Soviet Union would have likely lost. I discussed the importance of Lend-Lease in my book Arctic Convoys 1942: The Luftwaffe cuts Russia’s lifeline. About a quarter of the Soviet tanks at the 1941 Battle 0f Moscow came from Britain. Unloaded at Arkhangelsk, they were taken by rail to Moscow. Absent those tanks the Soviets would likely have lost that battle. In turn it would have led to the collapse of Stalin.
Incidentally, I dedicated the book to Boss Mongo.
I have no idea whether you are wrong or right. I would not be at all surprised if there were changes made to appeal to different audiences. But I don’t know. I always found Khrushchev’s son to be a VERY slippery character.
The memoirs were dictated into a tape recorder. Yevgeny Yevtushenko heard the tapes; he said they were authentic.
The Red Army had performed so poorly in Finland. And so well at Khalkin Gol shortly before. Because of that performance, the Soviets were not faced with a two-front war. It was the commanding general at Khalkin Gol who would pull Stalin’s chestnuts out of the fire.