Allet Klar Chefs wrote:The Sotoan Union wrote:Millions of Soviet troops poured into Germany. Did those troops just disappear when the war ended?
No, they were demobbed to work in the fields and factories, as they absolutely needed to be.
Could the Soviet Union not have mustered those troops again?
Basically no. I don't know if you're up on the post-USSR investigations into the economic and demographic damage the war did (I'm just guessing you aren't), but the country was gutted, and its economy was reduced to a similar state to how it was in the early-mid 1930s.
But the core argument here was that the United States shouldn't have funded the Cold War and should have left the Soviet Union alone. This is based in the grounds that the Soviet Union was too weak from the war to take over Europe or become the dominant superpower. Well maybe so, but because of the war. The Soviet Union had to undergo a period of economic recovery. But so did the US. So did Europe.
The US came out of the Second World War better than unscathed, economically. There was no threat to any of its domestic infrastructure, and it profited from the first two years of the conflict without really getting involved.
The USSR on the other hand had its territory completely laid waste in its richest regions. You have to remember this is a country where in the thirties, just prior to the conflict, millions died due to grain shortages. It wasn't an evenly-developed economy (Russia still isn't, but that's maybe the nature of the place), and the "best" parts were fought over several times. Eastern Europe was often scorched twice or more times by the anti-Soviet locals, then the Soviet Union, and then the Nazis.
Western Europe was mostly somewhere in the middle, but the idea that the USSR and US came off anything like similarly is ridiculous.
In this alternate reality where the US refuses to fund a Cold War, there is no Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was crucial to rebuilding Western Europe. Without it the devastation of the war takes a massive toll on those countries.
The Marshall Plan or something like it was always going to be a thing, because it made the US a lot of money. The UK has only just paid back its Lend-Lease and Marshall Plan loans.
Without US military backing they can't defend themselves from the Soviet Union. Again the millions of Soviet soldiers at the end of WWII don't magically disappear, nor does the Soviet Union magically lose boys who will soon grow into combat worthy men. By 1959 the Soviets had over 4 million troops in the Soviet bloc. Western Europe can't match that.
On paper, yeah?, the USSR might have had millions of soldiers in 1945. That didn't necessarily mean that it was real strength they could reliably deploy where they needed it, or that they had anything left after that, in what amounted to a barrel-scraping exercise. You can only lose so many million people before there is nothing more.
So with a United States that remains isolated and no nuclear weapons, what prevents the Soviets from taking all of Europe? Ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist? That didn't work so well for the Axis before Pearl Harbor.
The USSR being completely broke and having no means to keep hold of these places prevented it. That's the truth of it.
The Axis was also not ignored before Pearl Harbour, except in the USA (and even then, not really). The Japanese got spanked by the USSR at the Khalkhin Gol, and the British mobilised just about everything they had to fight the Germans. Many of the people fighting in North Africa were Indians or ANZACs. They had Rhodies and South Africans flying for the RAF, and so on.
Just because the Benelux states, Scandinavia and France got taken over doesn't mean it was due to ignorance of the threat, it was a combination of ineptitude in places and a governmental unwillingness to unrealistically try to put up a fight against Germany in others.