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Originally Posted by Phil Masters
What I’d be looking for are the higher-probability Patton timelines with the same divergence point...
* The one where the negative reactions among the western allies weren’t unexpected.
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Thank you for the input.
This is, indeed, more likely. It will be out there somewhere.
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* The one where the Americans didn’t have a magic unlimited supply of A-bombs, or maybe the Soviet Air Force just got lucky in the art of shooting down B29s and leaving radioactive craters. The Red Army worked around the one hit their logistical chain did suffer, most German soldiers surprised Patton by telling him where to put his offer of a chance to kill more Russians, and the North German Plain turned into a killing ground, Zhukov schooled Patton in the way that quantity has a quality of its own, and by the end of 1945, the T-34s were rolling into Paris. And being cheered more than a little.
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This will be out there somewhere, too, given that with infinite worlds there is no limit; but IMHO it really can't be called more likely than Patton-2.
- The nuke supply wasn't magical or unlimited. If you just move the July forecasts to March, as mentioned upthread, you see 3 nukes in March, 5 in April, 7 in May, 10 in June, and 10 per month after that. Don't look at the actual output in our timeline, which was dialed back immediately upon VJ. Granted, from June onwards, about half of the production is implosion designs but fueled by uranium. That gives less yield, but still a nuke.
- Part of the attack on the Soviet LOCs was conventional. Once German bases were repaired and the infrastructure strengthened, Bomber Command and the USAAF could reach deep into Soviet territory, and even before that, the flimsy Soviet logistics across Poland was attacked from existing bases.
- The VVS really wasn't the force for intercepting Western bombers. It was large and impressive at doing what it was designed to do - which was tactical and CAS assistance to the Red Army on the battlefield, and interdiction against the German counterpart, equally low-altitude operations. Even their best fighters worked well at low to medium altitudes, and badly (with the exception of rare, experimental, small-batch variants) at high altitudes. Where by "high" I mean the upper end of standard Western bombers' altitude; the B29s were simply out of reach.
- Bomber Command, in turn, was virtually unopposed. Remember they went in at night, and the Soviets were essentially radar-blind at this time.
- German soldiers were indeed less than enthusiastic about invading the Soviet Union all over again, yes. But they were totally determined and fought to the last day while the Soviets were on German soil, in order to defend their towns from the Red Army and their families from the Soviet soldiers. They shouldered a not insignificant part of the burden over the first weeks of the new war, when the Soviets were still advancing.
- While we're talking about unexpected allies, let's remember that 10% of the force committed to the final Soviet attack towards Berlin was made up by the LWP, with Soviet officers, Communist Polish NCOs, and Polish soldiers who saw no better alternative. On Patton-2, there were widespread mutinies that made this force unreliable. The Romanians also changed sides.
- With all of that, yes, the Soviets initially advanced. Then they ran out of fuel, ammunition, and replacements. Sure, they had hundreds of rifle divisions - each of them about a third, in size, of a US division at average strength including its normal attachments. They largely did not manage to send them up front along their wrecked rail lines, and when they did, the privates were 17-year-olds who were half-starved, and in some of the divisions nearly all the men were sick, weak and losing hair. They had spent some time waiting for the trains close to the wrong place.