I am confused as to why the West needs to fully occupy Russia to secure victory. Once the border is at Finland, Poland and either Romania or Ukraine they have achieved all their objectives. Sure the Soviet union would lick it's wounds but it would be doing so as a far, far weaker power.
That assumes that the war starts with that objective in mind. Many of those who advocated war at this stage did not just want a bunch of border states; they wanted Communism destroyed. That said, let's say that they manage to restrict themselves, in spite of the severe losses, to their pre-war aims. The Soviet will know for a fact that it lost its security for the sake of "Western greed", and it will have a severe case of revanchism - all of its gains have been lost, all of its efforts to gain security for its home territories negated by perfidy. An Allied Finland puts enemy forces kilometres from its second-largest city; an Allied Poland, especially restored to its interwar borders, sits athwart the major corridor into Russian lands while occupying Belarussian and Ukrainian lands; an Allied Ukraine, in the nightmare situation for Soviet leadership, is literally cutting the heart of ancestral Rus out of the country, and more practically seizing its largest breadbasket as well as threatening both its warm water ports south and its access to oil in the Caucasus. Consider what will be going through the heads of the Soviet leadership after such a war: they allied with Nazi Germany for security, which spontaneously invaded them without any fair cause; they allied with the United States and the United Kingdom for security, which spontaneously invaded them (to their eyes) without any fair cause. Now, combine this with the fact that in this timeline, nuclear warfare will be considered a regular part of conventional warfare due to the regular use of those American weapons to reduce Soviet war capacity, and with the fact that the Soviet Union will almost certainly have become a nuclear power itself by this point. That is why it becomes necessary to fully occupy Russia in order to prevent a future war. Because, if it's not done, you end up with a situation in which a revanchist Soviet Union that has recovered after a decade or two (with commensurate increase in nuclear weapons power) is far, far more willing to launch a nuclear first strike in preemptive self-defense, because it's not paranoia if the world really is out to get you.
As for the use of air power to blunt pure ground offensives, it's critical to remember that blitzkrieg itself was a combined-arms doctrine. The use of CAS and similar bombers to reduce fortificative works was a critical component of early German successes against France in particular. By contrast, failure to prevent the enemy from achieving air superiority (that is, as opposed to even contesting the air) proved critical to the failure of the Battle of the Bulge, which was itself intentionally timed to prevent the Allies from utilizing their superior air power immediately. Air power will indeed prove critical in blunting the 3:1 advantage of Soviet ground forces over Allied power, but it's actually worth remembering that Operation Unthinkable itself admitted that any failure to achieve total surprise, or to leverage said surprise into actual concrete victories, will result in what was quietly termed a protracted total war. Any Allied bombing campaign will have to deal with the fact that they're striking targets deep in Soviet territory, against fighters that can actually reach and hammer their bombers (unlike in Japan or late-war Germany, where they could operate with effective impunity) - it can and will happen, but it won't happen with the effectiveness of the 1944-1945 campaigns against a prostrated Germany or Japan.
Also, here's a fun fact: while the Allied powers had a 3:1 superiority in heavy bombers, it's actually the
Soviets who have numerical air superiority in fighters and fighter-bombers, apparently by around 11k planes. Certainly, the Allied fighters may be superior in quality (though this itself is a questionable assertion, as the Yak-3 was arguably close to, if not the equal of the P-51), but in the near term, it's actually the Soviets who would be able to seize air superiority, a situation that will not change until the loss of Lend-Lease fuel shipments starts to bite into the limited strategic reserves and American production finally ramps up to total war levels. That's why surprise is so critical to Operation Unthinkable; if the Allies can't achieve decisive successes in the reduction of Soviet forces by winter, they'll be facing down the cream of the Red Army with far lighter forces available to them, and it will be a long and brutal slog East, a cost that will be borne primarily by America and not the other Allies who are largely tapped out in terms of both manpower and fiscal resources. By the same token, since surprise is critical, they cannot wait for the Pershing or Centurion; they have to go in with the tanks they have, and the newer tanks will only come into play once the war's well underway.
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Topic: Armchair General General - /AGG (Read 139911 times)