Doug, your statement that the "Germans had done a good job of bleeding the Russians nearly white" is very interesting…. Actually, that statement is not true. History tells a different story….

The Russian army that captured Berlin, and inflicted great losses upon Hitler's army was far from finished in May of 1945. If anything, the Russians were getting stronger and stronger from early 1944 and on….

The defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad and at the battle of Kursk, along with Operation Bagration, had literally destroyed the German army and its will to fight. The German Luftwaffe (air force) had ceased to exist much earlier…… The British and American air forces had literally eliminated the German Luftwaffe as a fighting force. The Luftwaffe was not a factor in the D-Day invasion which contributed to our invasion success.

The German resistence at the gates of Berlin in April of 1945 consisted largely of Hitler Youth and elderly German men who were poorly trained and no match for the Russian army.

I realize that Patton had some strong opinions about what we should do with the Russians after the defeat of the Third Reich, but fortunately our political and military leadership (Truman & Eisenhower) didn't see it the way Patton did….

Keep in mind that we were still fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, and we were counting on the Russians joining us in the defeat of Japan. Stalin had told us that once the Germans were defeated, the Russians would declared war against the Japanese and join us in the Pacific. We had every reason to believe that….

There's also a lot of evidence that Americans at home were tired of the war by May of 1945 and they felt that after the defeat of Hitler, it was time to start bringing American troops home…. This is exactly what happened despite Truman's determination not to do so……

If we had been forced to invade the islands of Japan (thank god for the bomb…) in order to defeat them, many of the million plus American troops involved in the invasion would have been "green troops," largely untested in battle. That sound strange bit it's true……

Who knows how many Americans would have died, and how long it would have taken us and the Brits to defeat Hitler, and bring down the Third Reich without the Russians…. My guess is that the war in Europe would not have ended before 1947 or 1948. Of course, we would have used the bomb on both Germany and Japan…..

A valid argument can be made that it was primarily the Russians who defeated the Third Reich & we and the Brits were minor players in the conflict….I say that with out taking anything away from the American and British armies who fought the Nazi's not only in Europe but also North Africa, Italy & the Mediterranean.

No one knows how many Russians died in World War II but a large portion of those killed was in the Germany invasion of Russia. We do know the Russians lost more civilians than soldiers in the war, and the number normally given when talking about Russian soldiers killed is over 20 million….

We were lucky that Hitler decided to invade Russia when he did. Our D-Day invasion was a wonderful thing but what is often over looked is the fact that at the same time we went ashore at Normandy, the Russians had unleached a giant attack upon German forces in the east….

This prevented the Germans from moving troops from the eastern front to Normandy. The Russians called it Operation Bagration. It was much, much larger in size than the Normandy invasion and resulted in the defeat of the German army in the east.

The Bagration offensive was the largest Allied operation of World War II. Over 2 million man made up the attacking Russian army. Some historians have described the Russian attack as a type of "red army blitzkrieg."

I'm curious about these "better options". I am not an expert on this period but a better option than aligning with Stalin does not come to mind.

It's always someone else's fault that a system that trys to eliminate the idea of Self Interest from a population always collapses.

The failure of Lenin’s revolution to sweep the world led to Stalin’s “building socialism in one country” and resulted in the exaltation of Russian nationalism that paralleled the joining of of nationalism and socialism by Stalin’s one-time partner Hitler. Stalin’s desire to crush Polish nationalism played a large role in the Katyn massacre.

After Stalin, there was a line on uninspiring, dim technocrats, and America, following the containment d0ctrine, just had to wait them out.