#55
Post
by historygeek2021 » 18 Feb 2021, 23:08
The USA would have crushed the Soviet Union. The Red Army might score some initial victories and push deep into Persia and Iraq, maybe all the way to Kuwait, but the USA would have come roaring back with overwhelming sea, air and (eventually) land power. The Soviet Union was in terrible shape after WW2 compared to America (which hadn't been harmed at all other than casualties that, in comparison with what the USSR sustained, were insignificant).
First the U.S. Navy would secure ports in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to supply American forces in the region. The Soviet Union had no navy whatsoever in this region, so this would go unchallenged.
Then the U.S. Air Force would cut the Red Army's supply lines, and U.S. strategic bombers would obliterate Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus and Central Asian Republics and Sakhalin. Combined with a total naval blockade of the entire Soviet Union upon the outbreak of war, the Soviet economy would rapidly collapse. The USSR was dependent on U.S. lendlease to survive against Nazi Germany during the war, and there would be no such aid in this war. Soviet manpower had been decimated by 28 million deaths (including 10 million military deaths) and countless more wounded.
While the U.S. Navy strangled the Soviet economy and the U.S. Air Force destroyed the USSR's only sources of oil, U.S. forces would methodically build up in the Middle East. Turkey would not want to be left alone in the Middle East with the USSR, so American troops and bombers would begin pouring into the country and be in position to launch attacks from across the Black Sea.
Red Army units in the Middle East would eventually find themselves without oil, cut off by U.S. air strikes and all but helpless in the face of an eventual U.S. counterattack.
The only question is: Where would the U.S. Army stop? The U.S. public already hated communism. This would be the final straw. At the insistence of Senator McCarthy and General MacArthur, the United States would settle for nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the entire Soviet Union. Red Army units in the Middle East would be annihilated. The U.S. Army would invade the Soviet Union from across the Black Sea, up the Caucasus and through Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The smoldering remains of Soviet oil fields would be captured by the U.S. Army. In the open terrain of southern Russia, the now oil-less Red Army relying on foot soldiers and horses would be easily outmaneuvered and destroyed by the fully mobilized U.S. Army.
All of the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan and the Volga and Ural region of Russia would fall to the U.S. Army. Russia would be split in two and desperately sue for peace. But Stalin would know what fate awaited him after what happened to the Nazi high command at Nuremberg. Either his subordinated would finally betray him or he would attempt to flee to China, but communist rule would be at an end in Russia.
With the Soviet Union liberated from communism, communist forces elsewhere in the world give up. There is no Cold War. No nuclear buildup. It is the end of history. Humanity lives in peace and prosperity for the rest of time.
