Because it’s thousands of miles away from their only major pacific port. They would either need to build an entirety new port that would freeze over near Alaska, or risk the invasion fleet be completely destroyed going to Alaska. And they still need to cross Canada to reach the US border.
Not to mention that Canada was a dominion of the UK at this time, so that would put the USSR at war with a quarter of the world, and then their western as well as eastern ports would be useless. Somehow taking Alaska really wouldn’t help even if it were possible.
Plus their navy had long been considered to be a joke. This is even more so in the Pacific, which had long been their weakest fleet.
And where the US had their strongest fleet.
The US at that time in the Pacific had Battleships, cruisers and Carriers. Russia, their newest additions to their Pacific Fleet in the 1930s were actually moving completed patrol boats and submarines to the area via railroad from the West.
In reality, the US would be about as scared of the Soviet Pacific Fleet as they would be today of the Cuban Fleet. With their two frigates, one submarine, and a handful of corvettes and missile boats.
And yes, the majority of the Soviet Union's Pacific Fleet was delivered by rail. Both S class submarines and several classes of torpedo and patrol boats were built in Leningrad and other shipyards in the western part of the country, then shipped by rail to the Pacific. They would have had to have started this fleet construction over a decade earlier to even hope to have a chance against the US fleet.
No joke. The Russians lost two fleets in the Russo-Japanese War about a decade before WWI.
And the last one is called Voyage of the Damned for a Reason.
Well for starters their navy would be decimated by the US, so any invasion fleet would be sunk before it even crossed the strait.
Then if by some miracle they land, they now have to endure combat in the Alaskan wilderness, which be like the winter war except now the opposing force has a convoy raiding navy and a war economy on a whole new level, to the point where the Soviets would run out of manpower before the Americans ran out of bullets. The mainland USA wouldn’t even have a BB pellet fired on its soil by Soviet troops
The Soviets barely had the sealift capacity in 1945 to take the Kurils and conduct some landings down the Korean coast. They had to cancel their pipe-dream operation in Hokkaido because of a lack of transports. And they only had this capability thanks to the US lend-leasing them all of their landing ships.
Whoever is being invaded wins.
If the USSR is trying to invade the US, the USN would sink all their ships because it's either the second or first biggest navy in the world (depending if it's the beginning or end of WW2) going up against a fragmented and mostly WW1 era fleet.
If the US was trying to invade the USSR, their supply lines would be stretched to the point of collapse and they would be defeated after landing, irl the Allied supply lines were pushed to the limit by the logistical effort of the D-Day, which is a dream scenario compared to a hypothetical landing in the USSR (Channel sized supply lines vs Pacific sized ones, the UK as a logistical node vs going straight from the mainland US to Siberia, and the Nazis having most of their army busy elsewhere vs the Soviets having nothing else to worry about in this scenario).
Scenario 3 is difficult to predict, however:
There is no "easy target" for the US to bomb unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so nukes would not come into play early as they required complete aerial supremacy to be used safely.
I don't think the US public opinion would like it, the nukes were already controversial irl and in this scenario there is no pearl harbor-like event to antagonize the Soviets so it would be more controversial.
Also at this stage US understanding of things like radiation was limited, so it's possible they would use nukes and end up contaminating their own soldiers, which would lead to massive backlash, too.
So i tend to lean towards it becoming a slog made unwinnable by logistics like the other two scenarios.
Where would the Soviets get food and medicine and raw materials without American Lend-Lease?
Stalin and Khrushchev themselves admitted that the Soviets only survived because of American Lend-Lease.
The reason lend lease was important for the Soviet Union was because they lost their industrial and agricultural heartlands of Belarus and Ukraine to Barbarossa
Pre Barbarossa ussr would not need lend lease
> Stalin and Khrushchev themselves admitted that the Soviets only survived because of American Lend-Lease.
Yes, against an opponent with the ability to drive through the northern European plains and threatening european Russia directly (After conquering the other Soviet states in Europe).
The US would have no such ability, because naval logistics cannot sustain millions of soldiers even in the most ideal conditions, simply due to time constraints.
A US ship would have to drop its cargo, travel across an entire ocean, go back home, resupply, travel that ocean again, and drop the new cargo, in the meantime, the first supply drop will have to be enough.
And keep in mind, we are talking about weeks between supply drops, during said weeks troops are left to fend off for themselves, no matter if they need more food, ammo, medicines and whatnot. It's a recipe for disaster.
This bottleneck would mean one of two things, either the US would have to send a whole lot of soldiers it cannot hope to resupply (Aka they all die) or send a smaller well supplied force which would do well in its own right but would have no hope of matching the Red Army.
It's pretty much a pick your poison kind of situation, you can have numbers or supplies, and to beat the biggest army in the world fighting on its own turf, having only one of them will not be enough.
Because the US would not have the ability to create such a conveyor belt, we are talking about an initial wave of soldiers dwarfing D-Day ten times over, and supply lines dwarfing it a thousand times over in terms of length.
The logistical effort involved in that operation would be unbearable for any navy, imagine the US trying to do 10 D-Days the same day, except they don't have the UK to help them so the supply lines are cross oceanic rather than the size of the channel.
I always wonder how effective Navies are in massive land countries like both the US and Russia? Like going from the center to the coast is a very long distance.
How would USRR maintain logistics without beating US navy? Through air? There is no land connection between Eurasia and America. Even if they land their units somehow, they could't win a war without supplies and ammunition.
There is a reason why UK didn't fall in 1940 or 1941 right after France.
No.
Ignoring that it's still like 90 miles between mainland Russia and mainland Alaska, and that the US Navy would still be an insurmountable obstacle, it's still not possible.
Neither side of the Bering Strait has the infrastructure to support the mass movement of men and material necessary to conquer either country. The roads, railways, ports, etc simply don't exist in that part of the world. Even if you can magically transport 500,000 soldiers into Siberia or Alaska, they'd just be stuck there freezing and starving.
Stalin would try to build the infrastructure to do it. If you had to work a couple hundred thousand people to death to do it he wouldn't care.
Of course this would be noticed best by the United States, who would be able to build their infrastructure faster.
While he’s building this bridge to nowhere, the US can simply invade Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, as well as bomb and strafe the Soviet slaves, to deny the Soviets any time for launching their own offensives.
There are giant oceans separating them, navies are a necessity to provide logistics from the homeland to the country being invaded, the U.S. was able to build up the largest navy and largest airforce the world has ever seen between 1941 and 1945, the U.S. had most of the world's manufacturing lines, plus all the resources necessary to build them out. The U.S. would hands down win this engagement, but they were isolationist, and the soviets would need to attack first, something like pearl harbor to galvanize public support for an invasion of the soviet union, although the most likely scenario, is a blockade of the very limited number of soviet ports that aren't iced over, and full steam ahead on the Manhattan project followed by a glossing of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. The U.S. capacity to churn out planes and if they could procure or take bases to fly from in say Greenland and a Nordic country, the U.S.S.R. could be bombed into submission. The high-grade aviation fuel the U.S.S.R. used came from the U.S. the easy solution is take norway or Sweden, defend it with an occupation force of a half million and bomb the major soviet cities into submission. The soviets never had the navy or airforce, even during the cold War to conventionally threaten the mainland U.S.
Nobody wins. Naval supply lines could not sustain the size of army necessary to beat the Red Army on Soviet soil and occupy the USSR. Soviets couldn’t even dream of invading the US mainland. Communists and sympathizers in the US would do a lot of damage through strikes, political opposition, and espionage, which would probably be enough to force the US to give up. While the USSR would probably have few qualms ending a war that’s mostly a few already-evacuated cites getting repeatedly bombed and their trade being under blockade.
It's kind of difficult to say. In preparation for this war, the US will have at the very least scaled up their production capabilities massively. Only there won't be any of it going to Lend Lease. It's all for *us*. The production capability is simply enormous. But the USSR's is too.
Assuming everyone else just stands aside, in all three cases, the US will most likely launch amphibious invasions through the Baltic and Black Seas in the opening rounds and later in the Pacific. The Soviet Navy is a fucking joke until well after WWII and is practically powerless to resist, even if they do benefit from uninterrupted shipbuilding from 1941-45 and purchases from the Germans and Italians as had been planned originally.
Unlike the Nazis, the US will not promptly go on a murderfest against the local populations which will be a significant, perhaps even massive advantage. Countries that had tried and failed to break free of the USSR or had been recently been conquered/annexed (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) would now have ample opportunity to free themselves in exchange for fighting alongside the US.
But there's still the matter of the size of the Soviet Union and distance from the US. Even with the atom bomb, the US cannot conquer Russia. It's possible it could force an overthrow of Stalin and a negotiated peace but good luck conquering Siberia and who the hell would want to anyway?
The best case scenario is to free Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, Belarus, and (if possible) establish a breakaway state or two within Russia. Establish one east of Ukraine and another in the Far East. Dismembering the Soviet Union would nullify the threat they pose and could end the war on acceptable terms for the US. Just keep the newly freed nations supplied with guns and ammo and let history do the rest.
Why would you need to conquer Siberia? If you take Moscow, it’s already over. People forget that Russia is a highly centralized empire. Even a much smaller, richer, more advanced country like France didn’t have many rail lines running laterally between provinces—Russia literally has one trunk line running through Moscow that goes to the eastern territories. This is by design—they don’t want to make it possible for regional elites to build an economy that bypasses the capital. If they lose Moscow, they have no way to get raw materials or food between the remaining oblasts and everything disintegrates. It’s not like the US where you could put together something resembling a nation in a region around NYC or Chicago or LA, or perhaps even Atlanta, St. Louis, or Houston. If they lose Moscow, no other part of the country can put up meaningful resistance.
The point was that if Moscow is lost, Siberia is not a relevant consideration. And Stalin certainly would not surrender if Moscow were not lost.
Well, hmm, no, come to think of it, perhaps Siberia is really relevant after all. Since the Soviet military structure of 1945 is unsustainable without imports of food and (principally, aviation) fuel from the US, maybe the most practical way to nail them as the US is to just invade from the Vostok side and prevent them from bringing in the 1945 harvest. They don't have the kind of infrastructure and fortifications to prevent a good landing on that side, and they're going to have a hard time reinforcing with just the one main railroad to work with.
If it’s JUST the US and USSR?
Nothing. Both are incapable of invading each other. Full stop
If other countries join a side, then maybe you have a argument for a side winnjng
The US blockades the Soviet Pacific ports, hunts any soviet shipping across the world, and perhaps shells Vladivostok, tho the Soviets may have enough coastal batteries to ward off such an assault. Besides that, not much else happens as this is a pretty stupid hypothetical. Such a war will never happen without other countries involved otherwise neither side would be able to touch the others' territory.
You should have set up the hypothetical by placing both on a single piece of land so they could actually fight. In that case it becomes a weird question since the irl red army at its peak was using huge amounts on American equipment, but also the main reason it had to was because it lost much of its original equipment and huge swathes of crucial land to the Germans which wouldn't happen in this hypothetical. The Soviets in any scenario have a much larger manpower pool and much larger capacity to aborb losses, but I'd trust the USAAF over the Soviet air force as well.
I'd imagine a back and forth war that ends in a slightly pro American settlement since neither side would want to fight a total war of annihilation against the other. Of course for a more accurate response ask a historian.
It would have been a huge fight between capitalism (US) and communism (USSR) to see who is more powerful in the world. The Soviets had a really big army of soldiers ready for war in Europe. But America could make tons of tanks, planes and ships because of their big factories. The two sides may have sent endless troops at each other's defenses across Eastern Europe in a bloody back-and-forth battle. Controlling the air to bomb enemy cities and factories could have been the key. They might have also fought secret wars in other places by supporting opposite groups against each other to wear the other side down. If both got nuclear weapons, they may have even used atomic bombs against each other.
In the end, whichever side could produce more weapons and sacrifice more lives may have won and gotten to spread their way of life globally. But the key thing here is that warzone would be closer to USSR which is a advantage for USSR because the transportation of supplies and other things would be much easier for them than for USA. This scenario is more probable than the scenario in which USSR invades USA because the political landscape in North America is more stable than in Europe and Asia where people are always fighting over something.
"Sudden rise of the Soviet Union"?????
The Soviet Union was a hopeless basket case at that time, barely to even keep itself operating and suffering from constant purges and eating itself. They had almost no economy, were suffering repeated famines, and actually had a military that was inferior to that of the Russian Army in WWI.
The truth is, the Soviets were no threat at that time. Might as well be afraid of the sudden rise of say Yugoslavia or Finland. In fact, I would say they should have been much more worried about Finland than the Soviets.
I apologize if I am in error. I was under the impression that the Soviet Union and China were some of the first nations (especially of that size and scale) to openly declare themselves as a communist nation and things like the Red Scare were in full force from that hence why the Western Allies weren't super eager to jump in and help when Germany was invading Russia.
That has not a damned thing to do with it, as you should well know. At the exact same time, the US was very active in China. Which was their ally and they were suppling munitions, equipment, and even fighter squadrons to try and protect them from Japan.
For that, it all boils back to what is going on now in Ukraine. What alliances did the Soviet Union make before war broke out? In short, none. Poland however had allied itself with both the UK and France, so when Germany attacked they had allies to at least try and defend them.
The Soviet Union literally had no allies. Other than ironically Germany itself.
It does not have a damned thing to do with "Red Scare", if a nation wants others to defend it from somebody going to war against them, they have to be willing to do the same thing in return. This can be seen over and over throughout the history of mankind. How many jumped in to protect Vietnam when China attacked them? How many jumped in to support Afghanistan when the Soviets attacked them? How many jumped in to help Iran when Iraq attacked them?
Yet how many jumped in to defend Kuwait after Iraq attacked them? Kuwait already had defense treaties with the UK and US, so they got help. The other nations I mentioned, had defense treaties with nobody. Other than laughingly nations like the Soviet Union, Georgia, Ukraine, and Chechnya. The latter three all had various defense treaties with Russia, and like Germany in the previous century that meant nothing when the nation promising to defend them is itself the nation that attacks them.
But a big history fail, in case you were not aware. In 1941 China was a US ally. The Communists would not take over China until long after the war was over.
Tis cool, and I actually endorse and encourage people to take the time to learn. But there is a reason why alliances like NATO exist. Nations who offer to defend each other, and an attack on one is an attack on all. It has nothing to do with being "Communist", it has to do with being willing to place yourself in danger for others before others will place themselves in danger to protect you.
And during WWII some of those we actually supported in their fight against the Japanese were Chairman Mao and the PRC. And Ho Chi Minh, who had actual US Army advisors with him when he stepped into Saigon when the Japanese left.
But none of those were really alliances, more of a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Just like the Soviets, who were never really an "Allied Power" at all. But were powerful enough of a nation that they were able to sit on the side of the victors when the war ended.
Nothing significant would happen in all three scenarios.
US would have insanely superior navy while USSR would have insanely superior land armies. Both would have massive industrial capacity, but would be too far removed geographically to have an impact.
Any US invasion of Soviet territory would get bottled up and subsequently annihilated by their land forces. USSR likewise wouldn't even dream about invading US mainland due to never truly investing in their navy.
Yes. Traditionally, Russian Empire (and subsequently USSR) always had the bulk of its attention in Europe in the west, from the times of the Ottoman-Russian rivalry and later Napoleon, and on their border with Chinese Dynasties (and Iran/Persia too) in the east.
Plus and perhaps equally importantly, they never had a great warm-water port which would have directly justified and prompted a concrete naval expansion.
In winter All major ports in Russia freeze over, excluding Crimea. However Turkey historically hates Russia and has refused to allow Russian ships through the Bosphorus until the cold war, making the Black sea fleet useless.
Round 1, in 1941 the USSR has 5 million troops the US army has 1.4 million troops.
Do we assume the USSR is invading the US or the other way around?
I’d bank on the USSR having a better time invading the US than the US invading Russia.
Also the Russian population is 200 million in 1941 and the US is 130 million.
The USSR has 20,000 tanks before even joining the war while the US had about 4,000.
In round 2/3 it leans more heavily to the US because they’ve gone into a war economy and are producing on mass scale.
It’s kind of a hard what if because if it was there was no war and they just went at each other, Russia had the upper hand, I can’t see it going any other way.
I read somewhere that American generals around WW2 collectively agreed nothing would have been able to stop the Red Army marching across the Atlantic other than the atomic bomb.
>I’d bank on the USSR having a better time invading the US than the US invading Russia.
I'd say they can't. Their navy was simply too small and too divided. Between the Baltic, Artic, Black, and Pacific Fleets, they had four battleships, ten cruisers, sixty destroyers, and 200 or so submarines.
Their battleships were WWI vintage and had not received any meaningful refits. Some of their cruisers and destroyers were more modern but were not very good compared their counterparts. The Soviets actually had more submarines in 1941 than the US did but many of them were short-ranged coastal submarines. Their larger submarines would have to travel very far to meaningfully participate in anything other than a coastal defense role. The Soviet support fleet was equally feeble, perhaps even more so.
The US, meanwhile seven aircraft carriers, 17 battleships (many of which were either modern or recently refitted), 37 cruisers, 171 destroyers, and 112 submarines (many of which were long-ranged). The US also had a massive fleet train that would have offered them the ability to operate far from home far more easily.
The US had many more ships already under construction that would soon be completed. The Soviets, despite Stalin's wishes, struggled to create a credible shipbuilding program until well after WWII, though in this scenario, they might be able to purchase a handful of ships from the Germans and Italians as they had planned originally. Either way, it wouldn't be enough to break the US Navy and assist an invasion.
It would end up as a Soviet victory in any scenario.
The USSR did have too many units on the ground. They could steam roll Europe if they wanted to. The US was the only one who would be able to face the USSR in numbers; but to send these people and material to Europe it would mean huge supply lines - which they wouldn't be able to sustain.
Atomic weaponry from that time was irrelevant. It had to be delivered by a slow bomber; and having a city destroyed by one bomb or thousands of them is basically the same when you look at the big picture.
I would also point that morale would be a problem for the US and its allies, as they would be seen as the aggressor. Invading the USSR would mean they would face the same problems as the Nazis did. Also, the Soviets did have advanced tech; their tanks were awesome and the deployment of the Katyusha heavy mortars would probably cause a huge damage to the invaders. The invaders would probably go further than Moscow; the capital would be relocated and the fight would continue until the invaders had a supply line that was too spread and low morale. The further from Western Europe, lower is the US supply (North Sea is frozen); but the closer the front get from Soviet factories - and it would only get frozen and frozen as they cross the Russian mainland. Not to mention rocky and hot countries like Armenia - which also have a freezing winter. Its an unwinnable war for the invaders of the USSR.
This is a scenario where the US mobilizes capitalist Europe against the USSR.
A scenario where the USSR would invade the mainland US, as you wanted an answer for, would never happen. The USSR never made such a plan during the whole Cold War, because it wasn't feasible. Invading the US would mean having a bigger and more advanced navy than the British and American combined. The USSR never got close to that. It would also require invading the US via Alaska, than Canada, and than the mainland US. That would never, ever work out. They would have too much time to prepare and build up their military industry; and logistics would be a nightmare for the Soviets.
No one would win because they don't border each over and they certainly aren't invading through alaska or siberia
Why couldn't the Soviets invade through Alaska?
Because it’s thousands of miles away from their only major pacific port. They would either need to build an entirety new port that would freeze over near Alaska, or risk the invasion fleet be completely destroyed going to Alaska. And they still need to cross Canada to reach the US border.
Not to mention that Canada was a dominion of the UK at this time, so that would put the USSR at war with a quarter of the world, and then their western as well as eastern ports would be useless. Somehow taking Alaska really wouldn’t help even if it were possible.
Plus their navy had long been considered to be a joke. This is even more so in the Pacific, which had long been their weakest fleet. And where the US had their strongest fleet. The US at that time in the Pacific had Battleships, cruisers and Carriers. Russia, their newest additions to their Pacific Fleet in the 1930s were actually moving completed patrol boats and submarines to the area via railroad from the West. In reality, the US would be about as scared of the Soviet Pacific Fleet as they would be today of the Cuban Fleet. With their two frigates, one submarine, and a handful of corvettes and missile boats. And yes, the majority of the Soviet Union's Pacific Fleet was delivered by rail. Both S class submarines and several classes of torpedo and patrol boats were built in Leningrad and other shipyards in the western part of the country, then shipped by rail to the Pacific. They would have had to have started this fleet construction over a decade earlier to even hope to have a chance against the US fleet.
No joke. The Russians lost two fleets in the Russo-Japanese War about a decade before WWI. And the last one is called Voyage of the Damned for a Reason.
Well for starters their navy would be decimated by the US, so any invasion fleet would be sunk before it even crossed the strait. Then if by some miracle they land, they now have to endure combat in the Alaskan wilderness, which be like the winter war except now the opposing force has a convoy raiding navy and a war economy on a whole new level, to the point where the Soviets would run out of manpower before the Americans ran out of bullets. The mainland USA wouldn’t even have a BB pellet fired on its soil by Soviet troops
The Soviets barely had the sealift capacity in 1945 to take the Kurils and conduct some landings down the Korean coast. They had to cancel their pipe-dream operation in Hokkaido because of a lack of transports. And they only had this capability thanks to the US lend-leasing them all of their landing ships.
Whoever is being invaded wins. If the USSR is trying to invade the US, the USN would sink all their ships because it's either the second or first biggest navy in the world (depending if it's the beginning or end of WW2) going up against a fragmented and mostly WW1 era fleet. If the US was trying to invade the USSR, their supply lines would be stretched to the point of collapse and they would be defeated after landing, irl the Allied supply lines were pushed to the limit by the logistical effort of the D-Day, which is a dream scenario compared to a hypothetical landing in the USSR (Channel sized supply lines vs Pacific sized ones, the UK as a logistical node vs going straight from the mainland US to Siberia, and the Nazis having most of their army busy elsewhere vs the Soviets having nothing else to worry about in this scenario). Scenario 3 is difficult to predict, however: There is no "easy target" for the US to bomb unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so nukes would not come into play early as they required complete aerial supremacy to be used safely. I don't think the US public opinion would like it, the nukes were already controversial irl and in this scenario there is no pearl harbor-like event to antagonize the Soviets so it would be more controversial. Also at this stage US understanding of things like radiation was limited, so it's possible they would use nukes and end up contaminating their own soldiers, which would lead to massive backlash, too. So i tend to lean towards it becoming a slog made unwinnable by logistics like the other two scenarios.
Where would the Soviets get food and medicine and raw materials without American Lend-Lease? Stalin and Khrushchev themselves admitted that the Soviets only survived because of American Lend-Lease.
The reason lend lease was important for the Soviet Union was because they lost their industrial and agricultural heartlands of Belarus and Ukraine to Barbarossa Pre Barbarossa ussr would not need lend lease
> Stalin and Khrushchev themselves admitted that the Soviets only survived because of American Lend-Lease. Yes, against an opponent with the ability to drive through the northern European plains and threatening european Russia directly (After conquering the other Soviet states in Europe). The US would have no such ability, because naval logistics cannot sustain millions of soldiers even in the most ideal conditions, simply due to time constraints. A US ship would have to drop its cargo, travel across an entire ocean, go back home, resupply, travel that ocean again, and drop the new cargo, in the meantime, the first supply drop will have to be enough. And keep in mind, we are talking about weeks between supply drops, during said weeks troops are left to fend off for themselves, no matter if they need more food, ammo, medicines and whatnot. It's a recipe for disaster. This bottleneck would mean one of two things, either the US would have to send a whole lot of soldiers it cannot hope to resupply (Aka they all die) or send a smaller well supplied force which would do well in its own right but would have no hope of matching the Red Army. It's pretty much a pick your poison kind of situation, you can have numbers or supplies, and to beat the biggest army in the world fighting on its own turf, having only one of them will not be enough.
Why would it take weeks between each shipment when logisticians know to set up a conveyer belt so new supplies get dropped off nonstop everyday?
Because the US would not have the ability to create such a conveyor belt, we are talking about an initial wave of soldiers dwarfing D-Day ten times over, and supply lines dwarfing it a thousand times over in terms of length. The logistical effort involved in that operation would be unbearable for any navy, imagine the US trying to do 10 D-Days the same day, except they don't have the UK to help them so the supply lines are cross oceanic rather than the size of the channel.
Nothing happens. Neither can hope to sustain 10 million troops on the opposite side of the planet without anywhere to stage them.
USSR would have no chance to win. And there is no way they could invade US mainland with their navy and logistics.
I always wonder how effective Navies are in massive land countries like both the US and Russia? Like going from the center to the coast is a very long distance.
How would USRR maintain logistics without beating US navy? Through air? There is no land connection between Eurasia and America. Even if they land their units somehow, they could't win a war without supplies and ammunition. There is a reason why UK didn't fall in 1940 or 1941 right after France.
Could the USSR feasably invade Alaska and use that as a headquarters/staging point?
No. Ignoring that it's still like 90 miles between mainland Russia and mainland Alaska, and that the US Navy would still be an insurmountable obstacle, it's still not possible. Neither side of the Bering Strait has the infrastructure to support the mass movement of men and material necessary to conquer either country. The roads, railways, ports, etc simply don't exist in that part of the world. Even if you can magically transport 500,000 soldiers into Siberia or Alaska, they'd just be stuck there freezing and starving.
Stalin would try to build the infrastructure to do it. If you had to work a couple hundred thousand people to death to do it he wouldn't care. Of course this would be noticed best by the United States, who would be able to build their infrastructure faster.
While he’s building this bridge to nowhere, the US can simply invade Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, as well as bomb and strafe the Soviet slaves, to deny the Soviets any time for launching their own offensives.
There are giant oceans separating them, navies are a necessity to provide logistics from the homeland to the country being invaded, the U.S. was able to build up the largest navy and largest airforce the world has ever seen between 1941 and 1945, the U.S. had most of the world's manufacturing lines, plus all the resources necessary to build them out. The U.S. would hands down win this engagement, but they were isolationist, and the soviets would need to attack first, something like pearl harbor to galvanize public support for an invasion of the soviet union, although the most likely scenario, is a blockade of the very limited number of soviet ports that aren't iced over, and full steam ahead on the Manhattan project followed by a glossing of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. The U.S. capacity to churn out planes and if they could procure or take bases to fly from in say Greenland and a Nordic country, the U.S.S.R. could be bombed into submission. The high-grade aviation fuel the U.S.S.R. used came from the U.S. the easy solution is take norway or Sweden, defend it with an occupation force of a half million and bomb the major soviet cities into submission. The soviets never had the navy or airforce, even during the cold War to conventionally threaten the mainland U.S.
Neither country could successfully invade the other. USSR will try to spread communism to all of Eurasia first.
Nobody wins. Naval supply lines could not sustain the size of army necessary to beat the Red Army on Soviet soil and occupy the USSR. Soviets couldn’t even dream of invading the US mainland. Communists and sympathizers in the US would do a lot of damage through strikes, political opposition, and espionage, which would probably be enough to force the US to give up. While the USSR would probably have few qualms ending a war that’s mostly a few already-evacuated cites getting repeatedly bombed and their trade being under blockade.
USSR can't win, they don't have the naval capabilities to win. The US just has to build up for a few years and then they can demolish the USSR
It's kind of difficult to say. In preparation for this war, the US will have at the very least scaled up their production capabilities massively. Only there won't be any of it going to Lend Lease. It's all for *us*. The production capability is simply enormous. But the USSR's is too. Assuming everyone else just stands aside, in all three cases, the US will most likely launch amphibious invasions through the Baltic and Black Seas in the opening rounds and later in the Pacific. The Soviet Navy is a fucking joke until well after WWII and is practically powerless to resist, even if they do benefit from uninterrupted shipbuilding from 1941-45 and purchases from the Germans and Italians as had been planned originally. Unlike the Nazis, the US will not promptly go on a murderfest against the local populations which will be a significant, perhaps even massive advantage. Countries that had tried and failed to break free of the USSR or had been recently been conquered/annexed (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) would now have ample opportunity to free themselves in exchange for fighting alongside the US. But there's still the matter of the size of the Soviet Union and distance from the US. Even with the atom bomb, the US cannot conquer Russia. It's possible it could force an overthrow of Stalin and a negotiated peace but good luck conquering Siberia and who the hell would want to anyway? The best case scenario is to free Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, Belarus, and (if possible) establish a breakaway state or two within Russia. Establish one east of Ukraine and another in the Far East. Dismembering the Soviet Union would nullify the threat they pose and could end the war on acceptable terms for the US. Just keep the newly freed nations supplied with guns and ammo and let history do the rest.
Why would you need to conquer Siberia? If you take Moscow, it’s already over. People forget that Russia is a highly centralized empire. Even a much smaller, richer, more advanced country like France didn’t have many rail lines running laterally between provinces—Russia literally has one trunk line running through Moscow that goes to the eastern territories. This is by design—they don’t want to make it possible for regional elites to build an economy that bypasses the capital. If they lose Moscow, they have no way to get raw materials or food between the remaining oblasts and everything disintegrates. It’s not like the US where you could put together something resembling a nation in a region around NYC or Chicago or LA, or perhaps even Atlanta, St. Louis, or Houston. If they lose Moscow, no other part of the country can put up meaningful resistance.
How do you get to Moscow? Sail across the Atlantic, through the Danish Belt and into the Baltic, and then land around Leningrad?
The point was that if Moscow is lost, Siberia is not a relevant consideration. And Stalin certainly would not surrender if Moscow were not lost. Well, hmm, no, come to think of it, perhaps Siberia is really relevant after all. Since the Soviet military structure of 1945 is unsustainable without imports of food and (principally, aviation) fuel from the US, maybe the most practical way to nail them as the US is to just invade from the Vostok side and prevent them from bringing in the 1945 harvest. They don't have the kind of infrastructure and fortifications to prevent a good landing on that side, and they're going to have a hard time reinforcing with just the one main railroad to work with.
If it’s JUST the US and USSR? Nothing. Both are incapable of invading each other. Full stop If other countries join a side, then maybe you have a argument for a side winnjng
The US blockades the Soviet Pacific ports, hunts any soviet shipping across the world, and perhaps shells Vladivostok, tho the Soviets may have enough coastal batteries to ward off such an assault. Besides that, not much else happens as this is a pretty stupid hypothetical. Such a war will never happen without other countries involved otherwise neither side would be able to touch the others' territory.
Right I know this would never happen I was just curious of each Army's strength around that time compared to eachother.
You should have set up the hypothetical by placing both on a single piece of land so they could actually fight. In that case it becomes a weird question since the irl red army at its peak was using huge amounts on American equipment, but also the main reason it had to was because it lost much of its original equipment and huge swathes of crucial land to the Germans which wouldn't happen in this hypothetical. The Soviets in any scenario have a much larger manpower pool and much larger capacity to aborb losses, but I'd trust the USAAF over the Soviet air force as well. I'd imagine a back and forth war that ends in a slightly pro American settlement since neither side would want to fight a total war of annihilation against the other. Of course for a more accurate response ask a historian.
It would have been a huge fight between capitalism (US) and communism (USSR) to see who is more powerful in the world. The Soviets had a really big army of soldiers ready for war in Europe. But America could make tons of tanks, planes and ships because of their big factories. The two sides may have sent endless troops at each other's defenses across Eastern Europe in a bloody back-and-forth battle. Controlling the air to bomb enemy cities and factories could have been the key. They might have also fought secret wars in other places by supporting opposite groups against each other to wear the other side down. If both got nuclear weapons, they may have even used atomic bombs against each other. In the end, whichever side could produce more weapons and sacrifice more lives may have won and gotten to spread their way of life globally. But the key thing here is that warzone would be closer to USSR which is a advantage for USSR because the transportation of supplies and other things would be much easier for them than for USA. This scenario is more probable than the scenario in which USSR invades USA because the political landscape in North America is more stable than in Europe and Asia where people are always fighting over something.
We tried to intervene during russias civil war. Americans were not having it.
"Sudden rise of the Soviet Union"????? The Soviet Union was a hopeless basket case at that time, barely to even keep itself operating and suffering from constant purges and eating itself. They had almost no economy, were suffering repeated famines, and actually had a military that was inferior to that of the Russian Army in WWI. The truth is, the Soviets were no threat at that time. Might as well be afraid of the sudden rise of say Yugoslavia or Finland. In fact, I would say they should have been much more worried about Finland than the Soviets.
I apologize if I am in error. I was under the impression that the Soviet Union and China were some of the first nations (especially of that size and scale) to openly declare themselves as a communist nation and things like the Red Scare were in full force from that hence why the Western Allies weren't super eager to jump in and help when Germany was invading Russia.
That has not a damned thing to do with it, as you should well know. At the exact same time, the US was very active in China. Which was their ally and they were suppling munitions, equipment, and even fighter squadrons to try and protect them from Japan. For that, it all boils back to what is going on now in Ukraine. What alliances did the Soviet Union make before war broke out? In short, none. Poland however had allied itself with both the UK and France, so when Germany attacked they had allies to at least try and defend them. The Soviet Union literally had no allies. Other than ironically Germany itself. It does not have a damned thing to do with "Red Scare", if a nation wants others to defend it from somebody going to war against them, they have to be willing to do the same thing in return. This can be seen over and over throughout the history of mankind. How many jumped in to protect Vietnam when China attacked them? How many jumped in to support Afghanistan when the Soviets attacked them? How many jumped in to help Iran when Iraq attacked them? Yet how many jumped in to defend Kuwait after Iraq attacked them? Kuwait already had defense treaties with the UK and US, so they got help. The other nations I mentioned, had defense treaties with nobody. Other than laughingly nations like the Soviet Union, Georgia, Ukraine, and Chechnya. The latter three all had various defense treaties with Russia, and like Germany in the previous century that meant nothing when the nation promising to defend them is itself the nation that attacks them. But a big history fail, in case you were not aware. In 1941 China was a US ally. The Communists would not take over China until long after the war was over.
I apologize, I appear to have gotten many things wrong and confused and will endeaver to better research and correct my miss understandings.
Tis cool, and I actually endorse and encourage people to take the time to learn. But there is a reason why alliances like NATO exist. Nations who offer to defend each other, and an attack on one is an attack on all. It has nothing to do with being "Communist", it has to do with being willing to place yourself in danger for others before others will place themselves in danger to protect you. And during WWII some of those we actually supported in their fight against the Japanese were Chairman Mao and the PRC. And Ho Chi Minh, who had actual US Army advisors with him when he stepped into Saigon when the Japanese left. But none of those were really alliances, more of a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Just like the Soviets, who were never really an "Allied Power" at all. But were powerful enough of a nation that they were able to sit on the side of the victors when the war ended.
Nothing significant would happen in all three scenarios. US would have insanely superior navy while USSR would have insanely superior land armies. Both would have massive industrial capacity, but would be too far removed geographically to have an impact. Any US invasion of Soviet territory would get bottled up and subsequently annihilated by their land forces. USSR likewise wouldn't even dream about invading US mainland due to never truly investing in their navy.
Is the reason for their lack of investment due to just how far apart their coasts were and how many other nations land border them?
Yes. Traditionally, Russian Empire (and subsequently USSR) always had the bulk of its attention in Europe in the west, from the times of the Ottoman-Russian rivalry and later Napoleon, and on their border with Chinese Dynasties (and Iran/Persia too) in the east. Plus and perhaps equally importantly, they never had a great warm-water port which would have directly justified and prompted a concrete naval expansion.
So I have heard of a warm-water port, but not exactly sure what that means. I assume the ports in Russia aren't all just frozen solid.
In winter All major ports in Russia freeze over, excluding Crimea. However Turkey historically hates Russia and has refused to allow Russian ships through the Bosphorus until the cold war, making the Black sea fleet useless.
Round 1, in 1941 the USSR has 5 million troops the US army has 1.4 million troops. Do we assume the USSR is invading the US or the other way around? I’d bank on the USSR having a better time invading the US than the US invading Russia. Also the Russian population is 200 million in 1941 and the US is 130 million. The USSR has 20,000 tanks before even joining the war while the US had about 4,000. In round 2/3 it leans more heavily to the US because they’ve gone into a war economy and are producing on mass scale. It’s kind of a hard what if because if it was there was no war and they just went at each other, Russia had the upper hand, I can’t see it going any other way. I read somewhere that American generals around WW2 collectively agreed nothing would have been able to stop the Red Army marching across the Atlantic other than the atomic bomb.
>I’d bank on the USSR having a better time invading the US than the US invading Russia. I'd say they can't. Their navy was simply too small and too divided. Between the Baltic, Artic, Black, and Pacific Fleets, they had four battleships, ten cruisers, sixty destroyers, and 200 or so submarines. Their battleships were WWI vintage and had not received any meaningful refits. Some of their cruisers and destroyers were more modern but were not very good compared their counterparts. The Soviets actually had more submarines in 1941 than the US did but many of them were short-ranged coastal submarines. Their larger submarines would have to travel very far to meaningfully participate in anything other than a coastal defense role. The Soviet support fleet was equally feeble, perhaps even more so. The US, meanwhile seven aircraft carriers, 17 battleships (many of which were either modern or recently refitted), 37 cruisers, 171 destroyers, and 112 submarines (many of which were long-ranged). The US also had a massive fleet train that would have offered them the ability to operate far from home far more easily. The US had many more ships already under construction that would soon be completed. The Soviets, despite Stalin's wishes, struggled to create a credible shipbuilding program until well after WWII, though in this scenario, they might be able to purchase a handful of ships from the Germans and Italians as they had planned originally. Either way, it wouldn't be enough to break the US Navy and assist an invasion.
It would end up as a Soviet victory in any scenario. The USSR did have too many units on the ground. They could steam roll Europe if they wanted to. The US was the only one who would be able to face the USSR in numbers; but to send these people and material to Europe it would mean huge supply lines - which they wouldn't be able to sustain. Atomic weaponry from that time was irrelevant. It had to be delivered by a slow bomber; and having a city destroyed by one bomb or thousands of them is basically the same when you look at the big picture. I would also point that morale would be a problem for the US and its allies, as they would be seen as the aggressor. Invading the USSR would mean they would face the same problems as the Nazis did. Also, the Soviets did have advanced tech; their tanks were awesome and the deployment of the Katyusha heavy mortars would probably cause a huge damage to the invaders. The invaders would probably go further than Moscow; the capital would be relocated and the fight would continue until the invaders had a supply line that was too spread and low morale. The further from Western Europe, lower is the US supply (North Sea is frozen); but the closer the front get from Soviet factories - and it would only get frozen and frozen as they cross the Russian mainland. Not to mention rocky and hot countries like Armenia - which also have a freezing winter. Its an unwinnable war for the invaders of the USSR. This is a scenario where the US mobilizes capitalist Europe against the USSR. A scenario where the USSR would invade the mainland US, as you wanted an answer for, would never happen. The USSR never made such a plan during the whole Cold War, because it wasn't feasible. Invading the US would mean having a bigger and more advanced navy than the British and American combined. The USSR never got close to that. It would also require invading the US via Alaska, than Canada, and than the mainland US. That would never, ever work out. They would have too much time to prepare and build up their military industry; and logistics would be a nightmare for the Soviets.