The Soviet posture in Europe after the war did not betray a real fear of imminent attack by the United States, or an urgent ambition to invade Western Europe; it was the posture of a state determined to consolidate its power on the territory that it now occupied, rather than expand that territory. Although the Western Allies demobilized more rapidly, the Soviet Union did not have overwhelming military superiority in Europe in the early postwar years. The Western powers had about 375,000 occupation troops in Germany and Austria in 1947–8, while other forces in Western Europe (excluding Britain)
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