[Cookie Monster]

I was under the impression the western allies just let the Soviets bleed as much as the Germans could untill a Soviet victory was imminent.

[Tailz]

I was under the impression the western allies just let the Soviets bleed as much as the Germans could untill a Soviet victory was imminent.

I think this myth started as Stalin started to see the Western Powers as a challenge to his own power. I think anyone would be hard pressed to prove such an accusation and have it stick - unlike the Soviets stopping to let the Poles get wiped by the Germans, before continuing their advance, purely on political grounds because Stalin wanted any political opposition in the territories he was about to become lord and master of, crushed. It just looked better if he let the Germans do the dirty work first, then he can roll in as liberator once the political opposition is crushed - as is what he did.

[cowofzot]

Fair point Tailz. One option would in 43 to take Sardinia & Corsica then into southern France instead of grinding endlessly in Italy.

[William_H_Dougherty]

I was under the impression that a large contingent of the Germans encircled in the Falaise gap actually did escape.

I also do not think, had the Germans been able to prevent the gap from forming, there would have been any significant strategic change to the Normandy situation.

The entire reason the gap existed at all was because Hitler ordered Field Marshal Kluge to launch a hopeless counter-attack against the Allies at Normandy, which essentially was a miserable failure that saw most of the panzer divisions in the western theatre bleed dry, while the Allies essentially broke out left and right.

Germany was incapable, Falaise or not, of closing the allied beach head.

As for the Soviet Union dominating all of Europe had Normandy failed, I wouldn't be so sure. Many historians believe, had Germany remained in the defensive (e.g. no battle of the bulge), that the war would have dragged on for much longer in the East.

In other words, the allies would have probably attempted a second landing, or prioritized the Italian campaign to the point that, no, the Soviet Union would not have occupied all of Western Europe.\

Besides, who had the bomb?

- WHD

[Tailz]

I was under the impression that a large contingent of the Germans encircled in the Falaise gap actually did escape.

If my memory serves me correctly: The Allies left the pocket "un-closed" on purpose because they didn't really have anything to fully hold against all the troops and material inside the pocket as they tried to escape the pocket. Patton boasted he could close the pocket and push into the British lines and give them another Dunkirk. Which went over like a lead balloon with the British, and Bradley ordered him not to close the pocket as Bradley didn't think Patton could hold and would get over run by the escaping German units.

So instead the Allies left the pocket open and bombed, strafed, and shot up anything and everything that tried to escape - and that destroyed a LOT of German equipment and manpower.

Besides, who had the bomb?

The Bomb is over rated, even the Japanese high command guessed correctly that the atomic bomb was so expensive and such a giant technical undertaking to produce, that the Allies only had two - and that it would be months/year before they could even make another. It was not until after the war that America put atomic bomb production into high gear.