"Could/should we have attacked the Soviets in '45? " Topic

What has neo-con have to do with anything I've said.
I've said that there is no way the West would start a war simply because the was no political will. Truman and Churchill or whoever would be out on their buts in a week.
Stalin couldn't because his country and army were spent.
I'm sure the Soviets had a million men in Russian. Depot troupes, trainers, high level maintenance, etc. The Brits had that themselves, which has always been a knock on their complaint that they were running short of infantry.
US Army(just the army) – May 1945 8.1 million men. Ground forces 2.7 million and another 1.2 in the Army Air Corp, leaving over 4 million sitting around, about 3 times what you claim the Soviets had lying around. And total loses of less that 1% of the population vs 25% of the Soviets.
Turkey (esp. with lend lease and allied naval and air support) would do everything in their power to keep the Soviets from getting behind them. It would be critical to their national interest.
Oh, any why would the Russians waste troop to take out Iran and Iraq. In 1945, the US was producing 60 million metric tons of oil per year (about 23% of total world production), Iran and Iraq combined 5.4. and the 2.7 that was being produced in South East Asia was back in Allied hands.
USSR fields were producing just over 9 MMT, plus they had the Romanian fields.

Why would Turkey care one way or the other whether the Soviets were behind them or the British Empire? I'm not familiar with their politics at the time. But even if they were interested, would that interest be enough to go to war?

Also, I don't think one can have both re-armed German troops AND expect the Poles, Czechs, and other occupied peoples' support. I don't even think you could count on British support if that were the case.

I've read elsewhere that Japanese troops were re-armed to suppress the Indonesia independence movement (so much for the Free World there), but I doubt that the average person in Europe cared much about what happened to a people they no doubt felt little connection to. But Germans? Armed and ready (again!) in Poland?

Also: for all that it may have been a moral imperative to free Poland, we know that simple moral imperatives have not always been enough. Certainly, whatever moral imperative there may have been to protect Czechoslovak interests had already been disregarded since, well, nobody raised a fuss about it when it was occupied (neither the western part nor the rest). There are plenty of moral imperatives that everyone involved ignored, repeatedly and willfully. So the 'should' argument is somewhat plausible, but in practice irrelevant.

Moreover, 1945 was not now. Whatever you or I may think of their politics, not-insignificant proportions of the populations of various states in Europe were socialists or communists or social democrats or what have you – and in an era where everyone (and that's all of us – our governments in the west refused fleeing refugees, the German civilian population certainly swore up and down they didn't know) and their dog jumped up and down proclaiming they had no idea about Nazi villainy, I expect that any claims about Soviet villainy would have been given a great deal of skepticism. Moreover, Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia had plenty of committed Communists, as did France. I suspect that, whether or not they went with the Yugoslav line of independent leftism or toeing Stalin's line, they'd be unlikely to want a war that would almost certainly be fought much closer to their homes than it would be to America.

Another point regards nukes. Where are they going to be used? Certainly, nobody wants to drop them in western Europe. Do they drop them in the centre, in the very countries that Patton's Posse wants to say they're liberating? Do you fly them over to Moscow, and can you deliver them that far unhindered? Would that even stop them? ESPECIALLY if you armed the Germans alongside this. Troops from Russia, Ukraine, and other regions knew intimately what they thought about Germans with guns and jackboots, and what that meant for their homes. I'd suspect that, at least on the mass level, they didn't find out what Russians in uniform really meant until after the war.

All that said, IF Mark 1 is wrong in his analysis and the Americans (and MAYBE the British, though I fail to see why any British politician, be it from the Churchill cabinet or from Atlee's postwar cabinet, would go for this) after sparking off a continuation of the war so quickly aren't pushed off the continent in the first few months (assuming the US doesn't want to drop nukes on western Europe, or alternatively that they can get them onto Moscow and that it causes the Soviet military to collapse rather than continue to fight), then American industry is probably going to wipe the floor with Soviet industry in the not-so-very-long-run, if the population at home is willing to pursue this plan. Keep in mind that there WAS an era before the word 'socialist' became a bad word in the American consciousness, and this was BEFORE the Cold War made us all think of the Soviets as the baddies. It was also BEFORE the Cold War made us think of (west) Germans as our buddies, too.

Soviet population did not grow in 44 and 45. They lost 25% of their pre-war population, Poland included. That from the information that has come out since the 1990 from the Soviet archives. I don't care how many casualties your willing to take, at some point you can't grow food, make rifles or even spears.
I sorry, but your ideas just don't stand up to facts. You have to able to still run a country while you fighting or everything breaks down.

The population under control of the Soviet government, and so the population from which they could "recruit" (conscript) their military, did indeed grow in 1944 and 1945. It grew quite dramatically.

Soviet "archive" documents (not archival, btw, any more than US census data is "archival") show the Soviet population:
- Pre-war 1941: about 197 million.
- Post war 1946: about 170 million.

Wow. Terrible population loss. And the casualties were even more than these numbers show, as there were millions of births during the war years to contribute to that 170 million number. (The population of pre-1941 born … of the people who made up the 197 million … declined to about 156 million. But there would be some normal mortality during any 5 year period, so that loss is not all war-related.)

Still, 197 down to 170. Big loss. Surely they were very low in manpower in 1945, right?

No.

Why not?

Because the population under control of the Soviet government in 1943 was about 100 million. The populations of Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and several other regions were not under Soviet control -- they were under German control. So the Soviets were left with a population reduced by almost 50%. That was the pool from which they generated the army that the Germans saw as "unlimited reserves of manpower".

By 1945 they had about 70 million more people in that pool. And that is not counting the Poles and the Czechs.

So that pool grew pretty substantially from 1943 to 1945.

Whatever we may say about Soviet available manpower in 1945, the basis of comparison should be 1943, not 1941. The Soviet army of 1941 no longer existed in 1945. The army that rolled over eastern Europe and Germany was built in 1943 and 1944. And by 1945 the Soviets had substantially more manpower available to them to build and sustain that army.

I'm sure the Soviets had a million men in Russian. Depot troupes, trainers, high level maintenance, etc. The Brits had that themselves, which has always been a knock on their complaint that they were running short of infantry.

The force R Mark Davies described … the 1 million men sent to the Far East for war against Japan, were not depot troops. They were full, trained, well equipped combat formations.

The US Army of WW2 had the highest ratio of "staff" to "point" for its spear. It took about 9 men to support each frontline combat troop in the US Army. We had the longest (and best developed) logistics trail of any army in the world. BTW that 9-to-1 ratio only counts men IN the US Army, it does not count manpower in the Navy, the merchant marine, the railroads, etc. that supported the Army. It just counts Army personnel.

The Brits and the Germans operated at about a 6- or 7-to-1 ratio. By late war the German ratio was lower, as depot troops were often conscripted into combat formations. The Germans made more extensive use of non-Wehrmacht support manpower (the "hiwi's"), but also detailed many Wehrmacht men to run or support railroad operations. For most of the war the Soviets operated at about a 3.5- or 4-to-1 ratio. Later in the war the ratio grew, as the higher levels of mechanization and support forces pulled manpower from the infantry.

So there were, in all cases, a lot fewer surplus "depot" troops available for the Soviets to pull towards combat. Their log trail was lean lean lean.

German wartime writings often described the massive Soviet manpower advantages. This was usually an artifact of their own failure to understand how well the Soviets concealed the thinning of some fronts to concentrate for their attacks. But … it also is an artifact of the difference in the Soviet approach to manpower. As with the production of tanks, the Soviets viewed manpower as a flow, not an asset. They seldom had an overall overwhelming advantage in manpower at any one moment in time. But they did have an overwhelming advantage in manpower generation … they generated soldiers far faster, in far greater numbers, than anyone else.

Consider … from June 1941 to December 1941 Soviet military casualties amounted to about 100% of their pre-war force structure. Yet in January of 1942 they had a standing army that was about as large as their army of June 1941. By mid-1943 they had lost again about 100% of their June 1941 force size. Yet in July of 1943 their army was substantially larger than their army of June 1941.

(And this, when they were at the low-point of population!)

The Soviets generated and re-generated their army faster than any other combatant. Creating another 1 million men for their force was a 6 to 8 week task, at worst.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

I've often wondered how the Soviets kept coming up with new divisions as fast or faster than the Germans could wipe out the old ones. My guesses: They didn't feed many replacements into the old divisions; they just let them melt away while they build new ones. And they didn't waste time on things like training, at least not much more than the bare minimum -- they'd learn from the cadre and from experience.

Wow I missed this. I guess I spend too much time on the Horse and Musket boards. The answer is the Soviets would have been in Paris in less than a month. We would have been lucky to stop them at the channel. We couldn't build Atomic Bombs fast enough.

Each bomb was essentially a hand built experiment as if you were building one in your garage. All the Silver Plate B-29s we had were in the Pacific. So it would be a while before we could get enough bombs and delivery systems together. We would have been fighting a two front war.

The Soviets heavily out numbered and out gunned us. You couldn't reach Russia with a B-29 from England, so you would be using them on large Soviet formations in Western Europe. I don't think our Allies would like that much.

Then there are real supply concerns for both sides. The U.S. was having difficulties supplying it's Armies in Western Europe. Imagine supplying them further East. Same issue in reverse for the Soviets.

The American people might not have stood for it. War weariness was a huge concern in the Pentagon. It was a real factor in deciding whether or not to use the bombs on Japan. The Soviets would not ally with the Japanese. Stalin wanted Manchuria and even the Soviets could not afford a two front war. Any talk about the US and Russia going to war in April 1945 is IMHO, just crazy talk.

The original question didn't specify what month, just '45. Waiting until Japan surrendered (and the Soviets had committed troops to the Far East) would surely have been a minimum requirement.