[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
atypical,
it’s rather doubtful such a campaign would’ve lasted very long, so bombings would have little impact (as they had on the war).
Bear in mind the soviets were already IN Germany pillaging and raping like …well, like 1945.
US forces dealt only with a small fraction of german forces in E.
They consistently fought with much more strength and material versus an exhausted enemy.
Soviets spend years perfecting their Deep Battle Doctrin against the other best army while the US started to perfect their strategy of fighting weaker foes.
Flag Football vs NFL
Compare the bafoonery of Market Garden, which is time and again displayed as some epic battles with the vile meatgrinder Bagration, which took place roughly at the same time.
Again: a few thousand dead vs hundreds of thousands.
I know some of you guys never had to question the stuff they teach you in school, but did you honestly know that India has more men fighting the Japanese then the US? That Canada or New Zealand lost way more men compared to their population?
No doubt, the US is militarily the strongest heavyweight on the planet who benches a ton and has a beautiful chest with sculpted abs.
But his chin is made of sparkly china and he’s never been even properly hit.
And his possy talks mad shit all day how great he is.[/quote]
Compared to their population sure–but Canada’s population is 30 million TODAY, and New Zealand’s is miniscule, so that’s not really a big deal. If you have less than 1/10th the population of the US, it is not hard to take an equal or greater % of casualties to your total population if engaged in fighting. Their population was only 12 million in 1945.
You overestimate the strength of the Russians to withstand air and sea dominance. Air dominance especially, combined with the total and instantaneous loss of all material and logistic aid. You say a campaign would not have lasted long and therefore our air power would not have made a critical impact—but you do not properly take into consideration that our bombers and fighters were already there EN MASSE, ready to sortie on a few hours notice. We had tons and tons of munitions to provide them, we had infinitely better logistics, and the Soviets relied on rail transport. Further the Soviets had very little in the way of AA because, of course, Britain and the US had taken over the skies. The amount of carnage we could have wreaked from the sky would have very seriously hurt them. Also, truck convoys may change route but rail transport does not.
As a final note, your comments on Vietnam are entirely off base. Our military was fully capable of stomping them, and we did stomp them–only to have our politicians fuck everything up repeatedly. Were we to simply make a command decision to dominate our enemy, we could have done so. Instantaneously? No, of course not. Jungle warfare was new to us. But it would have happened if we were not hamstrung by elected people.
Besides which, you are seriously underestimating the amount of aid in supply, logistics, military aircraft/units, military training, and even “boots on the ground” that the VC got from both China and Russia. This was a proxy war, not simply the VC holding of a glass-jawed USA.