The 2nd AEF

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

The 2^nd AEF

© Final Sword Productions LLC 2004

The roundups had started the week before. Hoover’s men were snatching up senior people in the CPUSA, their front groups, the various levels of illegals / underground and the other Leninists. The left press in the major cities shrieked indignation but law suits were met with bland government stalling tactics. The arrests were for suspicion, for material witnesses, to compel appearance before unnamed grad juries…the usual stalling tactics. In the early hours of Sunday, June 22^nd, buses brought manacled reds of various stripes to a nondescript USG warehouse at an unknown location. Each busload was herded by dark suited FBI types into folding chairs in a giant auditorium. The reds mostly recognized each other. They also recognized that everyone was still in the clothing they had been seized in. It seemed obvious to them that a fascist coup was in progress in the US. Many expected to be shot before the day was out. They could not have been more wrong.

When the last detainees had been seated, an immaculately groomed Army officer walked to the podium and turned to address the hall. Behind him aides set up a large map of the Western USSR. On it were giant arrows with Nazi symbols superimposed. In a high, squeaky voice, the officer identified himself as brevet lieutenant general George S. Patton. The Nazis had invaded the USSR. A goan came from the assembled reds. Many wept or screamed. Patton waiting till the moment passed, then went on. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had warned Stalin. The loon in the Kremlin had ignored all the warnings. At this the Trotskyites jeered and laughed. Patton let that moment pass also. He then went on to say that while the US was not at war with Hitler, FDR wanted to send help. Taking a leaf from the air group being sent to Chiang [what we now call the Flying Tigers], FDR had ordered colonel Patton to take a leave of absence from the US Army with a temporary [brevet] rank of lieutenant general. Patton was to recruit a cadre of regular and National Guard officers and NCO’s for a volunteer force to aid the Soviets once war had begun. Over the past sixty days Patton had done so, asking the cadre to volunteer for an undisclosed mission. What the red leaders were needed for were to provide the men. The various Communist and allied youth movements, unions, etc. had had several million mostly young people pass through them over the last decade of depression and approach to war. The proposal was to send a force of two mobile corps to aid Moscow but for this some one hundred thousand plus ‘volunteers’ would have to be found. ‘Volunteers’ need not be US citizens or even currently resident in the US. Prior military experience was a plus but in the desperate circumstances that were likely to follow. ‘Volunteers’ would not be subject to the draft.

The call for volunteers was quickly oversubscribed. Moscow Center got behind it. Refugee organizations supplied volunteers at every neutral port in Europe and Africa. The Latin American Communist parties also sent everyone they could find. The first division got the best of the untrained horde of manpower. It got the bulk of the US and Latin American International Brigades from the Spanish CW veterans as well as a fair number veterans of other wars. The US made available what tanks and mobile equipment it had, stripping forming US divisions where necessary. Training was sketchy to nonexistent but morale was sky high. The first division, the George Washington under brevet Major General Teddy Roosevelt [the one from Utah Beach in OTL] left Seattle the first week of August for Vladivostok. The tanks were mostly various marks of Stuarts with a leavening of Grants and Lees. AAA and AT was mostly lacking and what there was completely obsolete. The artillery was a mish mash of guns with the core being WW1 French 75 mm’s. However there were more than enough trucks, pickup trucks, tractor trailers and autos to make it fully motorized. It took till the 3^rd week of October to get the division across Siberia and deployed in the 2^nd Moscow line of defense, just in time for the bounce back after the post Bryansk-Vyazma panic. The 2^nd division, Walker’s Lincoln Division, was strung out from the Volga to Lake Baikal, while the 3^rd , Allen’s Jefferson Division, and the Corps troops were unloading at Vladivostok. Patton himself was forward with the lead division. He would take corps command when the 2^nd division came up and switch to army level when the 4^th [Van Fleet’s PanAmerican] came up with the 2^nd set of Corps troops [both of these were still in training camps in Seattle/Ft. Lewis awaiting transport – there was both a shortage of ships and a massive bottleneck with the port of Vladivostok that needed to unload both new units and the supply stream to keep the already deployed units viable].

The reds of the Washington division initially found Patton’s discipline and training ideas to be almost fascist but their Soviet political advisers quickly disabused them of such bourgeois notions. It was a giant shock to the sensitive Western reds to see Stalinist discipline in practice. Deserters were shot out of hand. Spy mania raged around them and as International Volunteers they were not immune to the Cheka’s tender ministrations. Patton could rage but this only slightly limited the usual Soviet heavy handed methods. Slipping off to meet girls and cadge drinks could result in the silly volunteers being shot out of hand. Talking back to the police units proved equally fatal. It took a few hundred dead to get the point across but the rest learned to keep to their units and keep their heads down.

Patton had three weeks to make military units out of his armed mobs. By rational standards this was impossible. This was not a rational time. He trained the men to the point where they could deploy, fire weapons and regroup to retreat when hard pressed. Within three weeks his lead division was put to the test as the Germans jumped off on their final Moscow offensive. The Washington Division tried. Mostly they died. However they bled the Germans facing them badly. Their Stuart , Grant and Lee tanks were not grossly inferior to the German Mk III and IV’s that were the best the Germans had, and were actually better than the Mk I’s and II’s they often faced. US radios were not as good as the German FM sets but were far more plentiful as were Americans able to use radios. The inferior artillery at least had amble ammunition which the German artillery did not. On the defense the French 75’s could somewhat substitute for the lack of AT as could the plentiful BAR’s for AAA. The big American advantage was the plentiful motor transport. The Germans had gone into Russia both short of motor transport and short of maintenance resources to keep their heterogeneous fleet moving. By mid-November jump off even Panzer division had mostly horse drawn transport. The combination of abundant radios and abundant trucks/autos enabled the US forces to keep retreating out of harm’s way The Germans would bleed them but couldn’t finish them off.

Stalin and Zhukov raged at the American cowardice, their unwillingness to stand and die. However over the two weeks they began to notice that the American mobile delaying slowed down the Germans in front of them more than the suicidal stands of Soviet militia units. The three weeks wore the Washington Division down to the size of a small brigade but over that time the Jefferson arrived with the corps troops, keeping the Americans in the fight. Patton’s corps was now in operation, directly to the north of Moscow [Stalin didn’t trust them on the direct route].

So there was Patton with a weak mobile corps when the main Soviet counteroffensive began December 5^th-6^th. He did not have T-34’s, KV-1’s or the trusty Russian 76mm guns. He did not have air support beyond Piper Cubs for liason/recon. His lead division was bloodied and his second untrained. However he was fully motorized, over equipped with radios AND he had winter weight oil and drivers who knew how to drive on ice and snow. Within a day he also was able to cast off the mask of being an International Volunteer force and serve under the US flag [he jumped the gun with news of Pearl Harbor although in fact the US was not formally at war with Germany for another three days]. This new situation gave him what amounted to operational freedom. The Soviets could request but not order him in theory as well as practice.

Patton was a natural armored cavalryman and a pursuit situation such as this was his forte. The German front had essentially dissolved on the repulse. There were gaps between what amounted to mixed road columns of combat unit remnants and the supply tail that was behind them in the advance. Patton ignored Stalin’s fixation with towns and cut behind Kluge’s lead corps on the Moscow-Smolensk Highway. He essentially used his full motorization to go cross country over the frozen terrain to get behind the main combat elements [this was just a precursor to the Soviet Mech Corps tactics of 43-45 in OTL].

The ensuing ten day battle was small change in the context of the battles of Army Groups raging on the Ost Front that month. Three nominal German division [all essentially below regimental effective strength] plus a mass of support troops, Russian auxiliaries and civilians tainted by collaboration [Stalin’s definition of collaboration being that they were alive behind German lines and not in arms against Hitler] Essentially all Patton does is cut ahead of them on the road in good defensive terrain, lagger up and try not to get overrun. He has the equivalent of under a division pushing down the road from the east and a scratch German brigade pushing from the West. He gets savaged before the Germans just flow around his block position minus their vehicles, heavy weapons and accumulated supplies.

However at a time of disasters FDR has a victory to show the American public. In OTL December of 1941 was nothing but bad news – Pearl, Wake, Philippines, Malaya, U-Boat sinkings…- here he has a bona fide victory by American arms. He also has vindication after five months and change of eating shit from his rightwing critics about aiding godless Bolshevism.

Stalin would be less than grateful but willing to be a bit accommodating. Patton was insubordinate but gave him a victory. OK. Patton could be insubordinate until he failed. A major party official would get dispatched to Vladivostok to clean up the port problems by the usual means of shooting people until the rest worked harder. Party organizations throughout the world would be instructed to forward men to fight under this reactionary warlord Patton.

The US State Department would use the victory to leverage a major asset out of Stalin – the Polish POW’s. The dead of Katyn could not be brought back to life but the hundred thousand plus that became the Anders Army in OTL could be forwarded to Patton as replacement for his battered units. Enough ethnics in Patton’s legions spoke some Polish and enough of the Polish officers spoke some English. For the rest life was cheap in Russia that winter.

Over the course of the winter Patton wins a series of small successful engagements. By the time of the Spring thaw he will have a small army of six makeshift US-Polish-International divisions. The language problems will make them a tower of Babel. They will have learned by doing and while not up to the level of real panzer divisions be far better than Soviet tank and motor divisions at this stage. Stalin would not have parted with any of his precious T-34’s but could probably have been talked out of a hundred or so 76mm’s to solve the AT problem. Also the American level of mechanical knowledge would have led to much successful salvage of captured German equipment. So have April find Patton’s 2^nd AEF opposite Second Panzer Army on the south side of the central Ost Front.

Nothing in life comes for free. The equipment for Patton would have come out of what would have been sent via Lend Lease to the Soviets through Vladivostok plus equipment for the British Empire for North Africa and for forming US units. It would not have taken more shipping as the limiting factor throughout the war was Vladivostok. With less Lend Lease armor Stalin has a bit less to waste over-expanding his initial Moscow and Rostov counterattacks into a win the war general offensive. I see Patton’s army as canceling this out and treat it as coming out in the wash.

The British feel the effect far more immediately. I highly doubt that either Battleaxe or Crusader can come off absent the tanks and trucks sent to Patton. However this is not all bad. Even a successful German-Italian attack by Rommel on Tobruk in the winter of 1941 is not a true disaster for British arms and I am not at all sure Rommel could have pulled it off. The more likely result is that Rommel is bloodily repulsed at Tobruk and also lacks the strength to knock Auchinlek back from the frontier. However at worst the British are just forced back to the El Alamein line somewhat sooner.

The bigger difference is on US mobilization. Patton’s force would have drained off enough equipment that for Torch the two US armored divisions would have been essentially motorized infantry divisions short on armor by then current US doctrine. However the initial US armored divisional structure had too many tanks and not enough supporting arms so paradoxically the resultant divisions would actually be more useful. The more important difference would be that Patton could from January onwards start returning to the US experienced cadre. Even one hundred officers a month who had ‘seen the elephant’ – wounded or frostbitten ones sent home to the US for recovery and then assigned to new units – would have made orders of magnitude of difference on the performance of the US units in Torch. Many tend to forget just how green the US units were in North Africa. They would still not have been on the level of the Germans but neither would they have been the hapless US troops of Kasserine Pass.

The next major change is that service in Russia would have exposed the problems of the Sherman tank in a way that North Africa, Sicily and Italy simply did not. This does not get the US Pershings in time for Normandy. It does get upgunned diesel Shermans . Those two fixes simply needed Patton to have the status in army politics to buck McNair which in OTL Patton never did under Ike.

Patton’s army would probably have come out of Russia in the early spring of 1943. Stalin would probably not have trusted them with a major role in major offensives so it would have been involved in secondary battles on the central front from April 1942 to March of 1943. This lack of trust would in turn have spared them from the extreme losses of Zhukov’s Mars offensive or Stalingrad. My presumption would be that two divisions of the most fanatic reds would have stayed behind with all the equipment while the men came out through Iran and Iraq [I am essentially projecting what happened to Anders Poles and just adding the Americans]. So by early 1944 Patton would be available for redeployment in the Mediteranean Theater. My guess is that this would have given him what became Devers command – Sixth Army Group for the southern French campaign. In turn this gives Devers Bradley’s command and leaves Bradley at the army level where he can do less harm. While one could construct various intricate theories of how these command changes would impact the ETO we are really past where reasonable extrapolation can take us. The US army will be somewhat better from cadre rotated from the Russian front and from better Sherman tanks. Whether this in turn would matter much I leave to the reader.

The last big difference comes with the Cold War. The myth that the West left Russia to die on its own would be harder to sustain. Yes it would still be one small Western army on a giant front. However the concept that the West refused to fight until Stalin won the war becomes an order of magnitude harder sell. Communism would also have been more unpopular with the US public post WW2. In OTL the left made a paradise out of Stalin’s SU. The mixture of lack of real contact and wartime propaganda led to a view of Stalinism that was left out the bitter realities. Now a few hundred thousand Americans including the core of the young leftists of the 30’s would have seen the police state reality instead of the glorious propaganda. I will concede that some true believers would have stood by the dream. For many the reality would have shattered the illusions. The Readers Digest and similar accounts postwar would have made the Cold War MUCH easier to sustain.

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