Soviet-Anglo/American Air War in the ruins of Europe

While far from an expert on the matter, I am unaware of the USAF using any Jet fighters in 45'??

As for high altitude fighters, while a bit inferior to the P51 Mustangs, the Red Air Force did have fighters capable of reaching B-29's altitudes.

 

Flying? This list is for about September - October 1945 or about a month after the war ends.

The P-80 was available by late 1945 in squadron strength.
The P-59 was flying in several squadrons as a training aircraft (equipping the 412th FG out of Muroc Lake)
Bell's P-82 long range fighter was under flight test with two prototypes flying.
The Navy had the FH-1 Phantom prototypes flying and about to start carrier trials.
Ryan's FR-1 Fireball (mixed prop jet) was flying and in carrier trials
North American had the F-86 (plank wing or "jet Mustang") version of this fighter under development.
Republic had the F-84 Thunderjet under design and development.
Vought had the F6U Pirate in the design stage.
Curtiss was developing the F-87 Blackhawk jet nightfighter.
McDonnell Douglas had the F-88 Voodo in the early stages of design.
Lockheed had the F-90 (competing with the F-88) also in early design stages.

Just starting development were:

Douglas F3D Skyknight.
Grumman F9F Panther
among others.

The US had four jet engines in production at that point:

The Westinghouse I19 (1900 lbs thrust) being used on the FH 1 and F6U
General Electric had the I-14 (1400 lbs thrust) and I-16 (1600 lbs thrust) in production and the I-40 (4000 lbs of thrust) in testing.
Allis-Chambers was producing the Whittle W-2 as a license copy called the H-1.

There were also several turboprop prototypes and mixed turboprop / jet designs like the Consolidated XP-81 (flying) in design or development.

The only two fighters I know of that the Red Air Force had in 1945 that could have possibly intercepted a B-29 were the Bell P-63 and the MiG 7. I suspect from what little is published on the latter that it was pretty much a failure and saw little service.

 

Thank you T.A. you have once again shown your knowledge on the matter. I guess its due to a library which only a few possess and most aspire to obtain.

As for Jet fighters on the Soviet side, couldn't the MiG-9 be or even the mig 15 be counted in jet propulsion?

As for intercepting the B-29. Are you sure you are not confusing the mig 5 with the mig-3?

Also the Yak-1, La-5 and the p-39 had the capabilities as well?

 

The one thing that Russia no longer a had in 1945 was the security of distance. Unlike any other "Army" in the world, prior to 1945, the Allies had the ability to attack Russia from several sides.

The World got a lot smaller after WW2.

 

An aerial campaign is one thing, an outright invasion is a whole other story. Even today, Russia's uses its forests as a deterrent.

 

The P-39 was lacking the turbocharger it was originally designed to have. Thats the reason it was good only at low and medium altitudes

 

My point is that the Allies had pretty well perfected the construction of "Expeditionary" airfields using Perforated Steel Planks and Marsden Matting during the Pacific campaign. The Navy/ Marines were accustomed to flying from unimproved airstrips in forward areas, not to mention the development of "Close Air Support" combat techniques. This ability would make an attack through Vladivostock feasible and would also take advantage of the logistics system that was in place due to Lend Lease.

Russias forests would serve as an excellent source for Russian caskets and Allied Rifle stocks.

 

I'm still trying to understand the ground rules in the "what if" game, so pardon my attempt at comment. However, I have to side with Sloniksp on this point. Regardless of the West's ability to dominate the Soviet's defenses at the time, invasion and occupation are an entirely different matter. Land mass, terrain and population would work against the invading force. Reminds me of the "Invasion of the US" thread. Beating the Soviets back to their borders is one thing; invasion/occupation is an entirely different matter, though that may go beyond the intended scope of this thread.

The other aspect of this, already touched on earlier, is the willingness of the Western allies to continue on with war. I can't quote any scholarly sources, but my understanding of the times certainly suggests the US was "done". Truly the country could not have been more mobilized for war and apparently thriving economically because of it. However, there were very clear objectives which were realized once Germany and Japan were defeated and the populace was war weary. No doubt they would have gone on as long as necessary to realize the original objectives, but a new reason to continue war would have been nearly unsellable, absent a Soviet attack of magnitude, etc.

 

I meant the Mig 7. The MiG 9 and Yak 15 both flew on what were essentially cleaned up versions of the Jumo 004 and BMW 003 engines. None of these flew until mid 46 mainly due to having to move the Junkers Dessau plant to Russia and restart production. The MiG 15 and La 150 series rely on the RR Nene engine for their effectiveness. Without that British product the Russians are stuck with German wartime technology and dependent on German engineers for jet design. The somewhat heavy and bulky Henkel 011 engine might have come available giving the Russians something with a bit more "poke" but it would have been less than the engines the West was using.

Of the three listed Yak 1, La 5 and P 39 or later Yak 3, 9, La 7 none had very good performance over about 16,000 feet. All suffered severe drops in performance above that altitude. It was simply none of these aircraft was optimized for high altitude combat. The P-39 struggled to reach 20,000 feet. The Soviet fighters likewise might have managed 25,000 feet after a prolonged climb but even after reaching those heights they would have had trouble intercepting a B-17 or 24 let alone the faster and higher flying B-29.

So, in a 1946 scenario the Russians would have been able to get a jet or two into the air pretty quickly but only on the Jumo 004 engine. That would have made their jets considerably less capable than the ones the West was using in terms of efficency and reliability.
These early jets weren't exactly stellar performers either.

The Yak 15 only made 466 mph on a single Jumo 004. The Yak 17 was little better being essentially a tricycle landing gear 15. The MiG 9 had similar performance (a bit over 500 mph).
It isn't until the Russians have copies of the RR Dewent and Nene that they get engines that can match the West. Without these they are hit.

 

Well I think the US would have forged ahead if need be. There were already troops in the pipeline and the US had the technological advantage and the logistics chain. It is very conceivable that Hammerin' Hank would have given the green light for an Atomic solution. I think that is the only thing that kept the Russians in check.

 

The population thing might well work against the Soviets. One the allies start taking ground back from the Soviets, especially if they are providing even minimal food to the populations, I would expect much of the civilian population to favor the allies. This would include not only areas of Germany, Poland, and other formerly independent countries but the Ukraine and perhaps parts of Russia as well

I think that's true of not just the US but most if not all the western allies. It would take the war being portrayed as a Soviet stab in the back and the wide spread acceptance of that portrayal.

 

I agree fully about the countries not of the USSR. Many such as Poland traditionally hated the Russians. I guess I'm not sure how far this would have gone. At some point, Russia for certain, we would be hitting the national pride "raw nerve" and a guerilla war that absent nukes, could go on a long time. I really didn't put nuclear weapons into my initial thought process, but I guess if the US was willing at that early stage to continue dropping them, obviously without any threat of similar retaliation, that probably would have done it at some point. Wow, what a mess that would have been!

Maybe I spoke prematurely about the will of the guy on the street in the US to press on. I think I need to understand better the climate of the time and re-read what was agreed on by the Allies prior to the war's end. I know that having relatives in Eastern Europe, Poland specifically, my parents and other relatives here in the US always felt that Roosevelt and Truman "sold them out". My sense about this was that there wasn't much concern about Eastern Europe on the part of mainstream America or that it somehow wasn't worth it at that point. That could be a misperception on my part, based on their passion and the subsequent Cold War and not the objective reasoning of the Western allies at the time.


Yalta

 

Consider also that the propaganda campaign in praise of the Soviets had been running pretty much full bore since 42. I'm not sure if it started slacking off in 45 or not. In any case no politician would want to touch this unless he could make a very good and clear case for it being in the national interest of his country. Absent a Soviet attack or significant agressive moves I don't see this happening.

 

The war would have been needless sacrefice. The Allied citizens were told that they were fighting facists, not communists. They would not likely fight the Russians--Allied soldiers were absolutely sick with occupation duties and wanted to go home. The Russians were as war weary as can be and after getting Eastern Europe, there was nothing left to fight for.

You got two superpowers which are basically satisfied with the status quo. They did manage to coexist for fifty years, you know...

 

One of the reasons for that I believe is that both sides thought that time and history were on their side. By the time it was clear that this wasn't the case there weren't any good options for the Communists.

 

While I don't want to belabor another Red Star - White Star ground campaign, the depth, terrain and, weather of Russia would have posed far less of a challenge to the US than it did to Germany. Russian forests would have simply been building materials for the US. They would have brought in industrial saw mills and turned them wholesale into lumber.

Roads? The US shipped asphalt plants around the world to build airfields and roads. A mere three engineer regiments totalling just over 3000 men (1/3 were black) built the Alaska highway in less than 12 months. They crossed two major mountian ranges, numerous swamps, bogs, rivers, and aborial forest to do it.
They also built the Ledo / Burma Road in under 2 years. That too was an engineering tour de force.
How much trouble could building a road net across the steppe of Western Russia be? I would expect most of the roads to be a combination of graded, drained gravel and codurory (log) construction rather than actually hard paved. But, for military purposes these would be light years ahead of the unimproved dirt roads the Germans were forced to use.
Rivers? Unlike the Germans the US could bridge a major river in less than a day in the dead of winter. As with the Rhine, the US would also have brought in LVT, and landing craft along with riverine vessels to control the river itself. In fact, if the river was navigable I'd expect it to quickly become a supply line itself.
POL supplies? I would expect them to bury a pipeline several feet in the ground as they advanced just as they did in France. This would make it largely immune to partisans (but I hardly expect the population to be hostile to GI's toting silks, Hersey bars, cigarettes, and cash in huge quantities).

The US also had good experiance with very cold nasty weather. Alaska anyone? Iceland? Greenland?

In winter I would fully expect rear area units to have built Quonset huts for shelter and have heating and such available.
Fresh water? The US engineering units had purification equipment issued standard.
A single US engineering battalion was more mechanized than a whole Army's worth of German engineers. They had masses of dump trucks, bulldozers, graders, cranes, cement mixers, trenchers, road rollers, and a whole range of other equipment.
US airfield engineer units had such luxuries as large rider lawn mowers to tend grass airfields.
For building railways the US had trains equipped to lay track sections as they went. Basically, the engineer train laid its own railway with the help of dump trucks to build the gravel bed.

When you think that the US military worldwide had something like 2 million men in the military building stuff and more civilians behind them it pretty much puts an end to Russia having any protection from sheer size against such a force.

 

TA, what would you say are the principal reasons why it took the US/Western Allies so long to squash the German Army in the Western Front? Lack of totalitarian discipline and the political will to undertake military operations that would lead to heavy casualties in the short-term?

I was under the impression that the Western Allies had the same numerical advantages against the Germans, as least in terms of military personnel are involved, compared to the Red Army.

 

One thing to keep in mind here "Wolfy", in the American armed forces there were between ten and twelve men in the rear for every man on the front. These kept them supplied with every thing from bullets to toothbrush powder.

But they counted as "total military" troops opposing the Nazis anyway. So really there were fewer combat troops than one thinks. And as T.A. pointed out the Combat engineers also counted, but they did more building new things, repairing destroyed things, and hindering German advances by blowing stuff up than shooting at the enemy.

 

Likewise, do you know what was the proportion of support personnel that the German enjoyed? All I know is that US front line military formations of the infantry, armored, parachute, etc. type had slightly more tail than "teeth" than the German but they enjoyed a lot more support from rear area non-combative support detachments.

The Soviet formations, on the other hand, were very "teeth" heavy, even more than the German.

 

I agree with the Soviet position on supply, probably just the opposite of the American (don't quote me). But since they had no oceans or even short sea routes to transport their suppy across, probably less needed actually. As per the German, I would assume it was well supplied with both men and material in the beginning, and down to the "fuzzy wuzzies" by the end.