Italy 1944

[128shot]

If instead of the Allied forces linking up from Italy into southern France, what if the allied forces in Italy turned the other way and went into the Balkan states and up to Possibly Romania Bulgaria or the Ukraine?


would the post war future been more Allied dominant instead of the sheer split between the USSR and eastern block and the USA/UK and Western capitalism?

 

[MickB]

That would have been pointless. Fascist Italy would still have been around to act as a base for the Axis to harry the Allied forces and from which to threaten Malta and the Straits of Gibraltar. The obvious choices were to have invaded Sicily and Italy in 1943 or France a year before D-Day actually took place.

With World War 2 the priority was to win the thing before worrying about the Soviet menace.

Hitler erroneously thought that when he invaded Russia in 1941 that the British would either have to back him or see their last hope destroyed.

In fact, Britain's hope was the USA, though the invasion of Russia took a whole lot of weight off our backs.

Stalin may have been just as evil a bastard as Hitler, but the fact remains that Hitler was the biggest threat to the West at that time.

 

[Trajan Octavian Titus]

If instead of the Allied forces linking up from Italy into southern France, what if the allied forces in Italy turned the other way and went into the Balkan states and up to Possibly Romania Bulgaria or the Ukraine?


would the post war future been more Allied dominant instead of the sheer split between the USSR and eastern block and the USA/UK and Western capitalism?

Yep, they should have let Paton move on through to Eastern Europe, we sold out the Poles to Soviet tyrants, it's a black mark on our record.

 

[MickB]

The Yalta debates on Poland were a little pointless insofar as the Russians had over-run the place anyway and that the Soviets being the Soviets, they were going to do just what they were going to do.

Churchill argued for the Poles as much as he could. Stalin conceded to democracy, but Poland still became a satelite. Stalin knew he couldn't be punished because most ordinary people, politicians and soldiers were exhausted from war and wouldn't have been able to stomach a new Russian Front. They saw what happened to the Germans.

Besides, the Americans rebuffed Russia's attempts at influence in the Western sphere, so they were hardly going to take notice of the Americans tryingto tell them what to do.

Yes, there's no moral equivilence between Western libertarian values and Soviet totalitarian 'values', but in the twisted logic of Communism they were superior to us and acted on that logic.

 

[Iriemon]

Yep, they should have let Paton move on through to Eastern Europe, we sold out the Poles to Soviet tyrants, it's a black mark on our record.

Eastern Europe and Poland was not so much a give away as a recognition there was little the Western allies could do about. Poland (and much of the rest of Eastern Europe) was in the SU's control by the time the took Paris. It was all the Western allies could do to keep Austria and Greece out of Soviet domination.

If you are talking about post-war, a US attack on our former ally, aside from being politically unthinkable would probably have beem militarily unfeasible or at least extraordinarily costly. The Red Army in Europe at the end of WWII, consisting of battle toughened vetrans, was significantly larger than the US. For the US to undertake a war with the SU at a time when the US war with Japan was far from over would have been insane.