How obvious was lend-lease equipment to the average Soviet soldier 'We Would Have Lost': Did U.S. Lend-Lease Aid Tip The Balance In Soviet Fight Against Nazi Germany? L. 77-11, H.R. Under these circumstances even small quantities of aid took on far greater significance. 5,218 tanks (including 1,380 Valentines from Canada), 323 machinery trucks (mobile vehicle workshops equipped with generators and all the welding and power tools required to perform heavy servicing), 1.15bn ($1.55bn) worth of aircraft engines, Allen, R. G. D. "Mutual Aid Between the U.S. and The British Empire, 1941-45". 151 Wing in Operation Benedict, to provide air defence of the port and to train Soviet pilots. billion (about $ billion in prices ) were sent to several dozen recipient countries, including the main ones: It is an indication of the extent to which the British have been able to pool their resources with ours so that the needed weapon may be in the hands of that soldierwhatever may be his nationalitywho can at the proper moment use it most effectively to defeat our common enemies.[76]. Most went to Britain, but the Soviet Union received more than $11 billion. How important was the Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort? As early as October 12, 1941, the Soviet 126th Fighter Air Regiment was operating with Tomahawks bought from the United States by Britain. The railroads would have periodically come to a halt. [55], The Pacific Route opened in August 1941, but was affected by the start of hostilities between Japan and the U.S.; after December 1941, only Soviet ships could be used, and, as Japan and the USSR observed a strict neutrality towards each other, only non-military goods could be transported. . Tomahawks also served in defense of the Doroga Zhizni or Road of Life across the ice of Lake Ladoga, which provided the only supply line to the besieged city of Leningrad during the winter of 194142. Many of our pilots fly Spitfires built in England, many more are flying American fighter planes powered by British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, turned over to us by the British. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. Posted on 2/25/23 at 2:25 pm to WPBTiger. The others were never found. World War II Allies: U.S. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 By spring and summer of 1942 the Hurricane had clearly become the principal fighter aircraft of the Northern Fleets air regiments; in all, 83 out of its 109 fighters were of foreign origin. But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.[48]. The Hurricane was rugged and tried and tested, and as useful at that point as many potentially superior Soviet designs such as the LaGG-3 and MiG-3. ), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Canada also aided the United Kingdom and other Allies with the Billion Dollar Gift and Mutual Aid totalling $3.4 billion in supplies and services (equivalent to $61 billion in 2020) .[4][5]. Joseph Stalin never revealed to his own people the full contributions of Lend-Lease to their country's survival, but he referred to the program at the 1945 Yalta Conference saying, "Lend-Lease is one of Franklin Roosevelt's most remarkable and vital achievements in the . How important was Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort? This is the official website of the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia. [24], A total of $50.1billion (equivalent to $606billion in 2021)[26] was involved, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.[2] Most, $31.4billion ($380billion) went to Britain and its empire. By October, German troops were poised outside both Leningrad and Moscow. (1942). "What do I do in such a crisis?" Lend-Lease - Wikipedia Lend-Lease WW2 - American Supply to the Allies - Real History Online The U.S. received $2 million in reverse Lend-Lease from the USSR. I believe that lend lease to the USSR was a massive mistake that led directly to the cold war and all the issues associated with it. From: 30 Military Mission. By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy. And they would have been perpetually hungry without American canned meat and fats. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30 percent of Soviet wartime fighter and bomber production (mid 194145). In all, the United States shipped $50 billion ($608 billion in 2020 money) worth of materiel under the program, including $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union. Even Joseph Stalin himself would say that the lend-lease was . U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. In May 1942, HMSEdinburgh was sunk while carrying 4.5 tonnes of Soviet gold intended for the U.S. Treasury. The museum was established inside a former school and has been open for 8 years. . On April 23, 1947, this C-37 was forced to make an emergency landing with 36 people on board near the village of Volochanka on the Taimyr Peninsula. Given the disruption to Soviet production and Red Army losses, the Soviet Union was understandably eager to put British armor into action as soon as possible. Canada would eventually produce 1,420 Valentines, almost exclusively for delivery to the Soviet Union. Exmo. Only 22% were unequivocally against the President's proposal. The tanks reached the front lines with extraordinary speed. The Short History Of The Great Patriotic War, also from 1948, acknowledged the Lend-Lease shipments, but concluded: "Overall this assistance was not significant enough to in any way exert a decisive influence over the course of the Great Patriotic War. Lend-Lease: Western Aid for the Soviet Union - YouTube The 1930s began with one of the world's greatest economic depressionswhich had started in the United Statesand the later recession of 193738 (although minor relative to the Great Depression) was otherwise also one of the worst of the 20th century. Britain also supplied extensive material assistance to American forces stationed in Europe, for example the USAAF was supplied with hundreds of Spitfire Mk V and Mk VIII fighter aircraft. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. Known today as Lend-Lease. How Lend-Lease helped the Red Army win in World War II (PHOTOS) Langer, William L. and S. Everett Gleason. It allowed the USSR to conquer and subjugate eastern Europe and Manchuria and allowed them to prop up communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, China and North Korea. Lend-Lease assistance to the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs: I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. James Phinney Baxter III (Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development), Wolfgang Schumann (et al. In contrast, 17 Republicans (63 percent) voted "nay" while 10 Senate Republicans (37 percent) sided with the Democrats to pass the bill.[19]. Learn more about quality higher-education opportunities in the U.S. that you will not find anywhere else in the world. Payment was to be stretched out over 50 annual payments, starting in 1951 and with five years of deferred payments, at 2% interest. The British Eighth Army under Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery employed U.S. planes, guns and tanks when they whipped Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Report from Mikoyan to Stalin and Molotov regarding Lend-Lease Materials totalling $. But in order to sustain the war effort all the way back to Germany, Lend-Lease was decisive. The Lend-Lease act was enacted in March 1941 and authorized the United States to provide weapons, provisions, and raw materials to strategically important countries fighting Germany and Japan -- primarily, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. Pro lend-lease ! # On September 2, 1945, with the signing of Supply volumes and the significance of lend-lease. The body of the captain, Maksim Tyurikov, was found by local hunters about 120 kilometers from the wreck in 1953. Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and Soviet Union secretly ferried thousands of warplanes from Great . [60], Roughly 17.5million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. How Much of What Goods Have We Sent to Which Allies? | AHA - Historians British and Commonwealth deliveries to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 would not only assist in the Soviet defense of Moscow and subsequent counteroffensive, but also in increasing Soviet production for the next period of the war. Washington. It was part of a scratch operational group of the Western Front consisting of the 18th Rifle Brigade, two ski battalions, the 5th and 20th Tank Brigades, and the 140th Independent Tank Battalion. It seems to fly in the face of some stories I've heard about Stalin ordering the obliteration of all USA and British markings on Lend Lease Materiel so as to maintain the illusion of the USSR doing it all on its own and that the others fighting the common enemy were the "little allies". ", "How America Helped Build the Soviet Machine | American Heritage", "Ford Motor Company signs agreement with Soviet Union", "Russian historian: Importance of Lend-Lease cannot be overestimated", "Russia and Serbia, A Century of Progress in Rail Transport", "How Much of What Goods Have We Sent to Which Allies? In terms of its relationship with the Soviet Union, lend-lease served as a powerful tool for demonstrating the benefits of the . Thereafter it saw the passage of 4,160,000 tons of goods, 27% of the total. But according to . How important was Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union? Lend-lease will be considered, first, as a method of wartime supply allocation; second, as a method of accounting which may create inter- . He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. Mystery surrounds the infamous burning of the Reichstag in 1933. . In particular, it shows that British Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 played a far more significant part in the defense of Moscow and the revival of Soviet fortunes in late 1941 than has been acknowledged. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Roosevelt bypassed these restrictions by persuading Congress to permit the government to sell military supplies to France and Britain on a cash-and-carry basisin other words, they could pay cash for American-made supplies and then transport them on their own ships. The pact was terminated when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. From the depths of the Cold War to the present day, many Soviet and Russian politicians have ignored or downplayed the impact of American assistance to the Soviets, as well as the impact of the entire U.S.-British war against the Nazis. The Allies and the Role of Lend-Lease in WWII: The Russian View American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. [79], Congress had not authorized the gift of supplies delivered after the cutoff date, so the U.S. charged for them, usually at a 90% discount. "During World War II, only the supplies brought in by Lend-Lease prevented the paralysis of rail transport in the Soviet Union." The Lend-Lease program also sent tons of factory equipment and machine tools to the Soviet Union, including more than 38,000 lathes and other metal-working tools. Bill Introduced in the House Would Allow US to Lend Weapons to Taiwan Any mention of the role that Western assistance played in the Soviet war effort was strictly off-limits. Initially, this proposal failed, but after Germany invaded Poland in September, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1939 ending the munitions embargo on a "cash and carry" basis. (German Language). The legislation is modeled off the World War II-era Lend-Lease Act that allowed the US to arm the Soviet Union, Britain, and other allies prior to its entry into the war. [81], While repayment of the interest-free loans was required after the end of the war under the act, in practice the U.S. did not expect to be repaid by the USSR after the war. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. For the Australian company, see. The first of these units to have seen action seems to have been the 138th Independent Tank Battalion (with twenty-one British tanks), which was involved in stemming the advance of German units in the region of the Volga Reservoir to the north of Moscow in late November. Together with other recently published sources, including the wartime diaries of N. I. Biriukov, a Red Army officer responsible from August 1941 on for the distribution of recently acquired tanks to the front lines, this newly available evidence paints a very different picture from the received wisdom. newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday. [11] Isolationists were strongly opposed, warning it would result in American involvement with what was considered by most Americans as an essentially European conflict. As such, Ladd Field came to represent not only a political and economic exchange, but a cultural one as well. The program started 3 months after the German invasion of USSR in June, 1941. The first American tanks and planes reached Egypt in time to be used in the second British drive into Libya which started on November 2, 1941. Lend-Lease effectively ended the United States' pretense of neutrality which had been enshrined in the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. It carried 40 Hawker Hurricanes along with 550 mechanics and pilots of No. The Lend-Lease act was enacted in March 1941 and authorized the United States to provide weapons, provisions, and raw materials to strategically important countries fighting Germany and Japan primarily, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. The political fog of the Cold War often marred the truth about the vehicles received. A map of lend-lease shipments from the United States to the U.S.S.R. from 1941-45. [76] Australia and New Zealand supplied the bulk of foodstuffs to United States forces in the South Pacific. In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of June 27, 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge. The programme began to increase in scale during 1943. Yauza. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. How important was the Lend Lease Act to the Soviet Union? And though rapid increases in tank firepower would soon render the 40mm two-pounder main gun of the Matilda and Valentine suitable for use on light tanks only, the armor protection of these British models put them firmly in the heavy and medium categories, respectively. The total of defense materials and services that Canada received through lend-lease channels amounted in value to approximately $419,500,000. US Neutrality Acts of the 1930s and the Lend-Lease Act - ThoughtCo Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off. Our Fortresses and Liberators take off from huge air bases built, equipped and serviced under reverse lend-lease at a cost to them of hundreds of millions of dollars. The Warplanes to Siberia Project | Historical Spotlight | News | Wargaming Lend Lease | Encyclopedia.com Photo: Museum of the U.S. Air Force (Courtesy Photo). Secret Cipher Telegram. A Soviet report by Politburo member Nikolai Voznesensky in 1948 asserted that the United States, described as "the head of the antidemocratic camp and the warrior of imperialist expansion around the world," contributed materiel during the war that amounted to just 4.8 percent of the Soviet Union's own wartime production. [75][77], Though diminutive in comparison, Soviet Union supplied the United States with goods that the latter badly needed, including 300,000 tons of chrome ore, 32,000 tons of manganese ore, and large supplies of platinum, gold and wood. The convoy was the first of many convoys to Murmansk and Archangelsk in what became known as the Arctic convoys, the returning ships carried the gold that the USSR was using to pay the US. Much of the logistical assistance of the Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks and by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Other largely British-equipped tank units in action with the Western Front from early December were the 131st Independent Tank Brigade, which fought to the east of Tula, south of Moscow, and 146th Tank Brigade, in the region of Kriukovo to the immediate west of the Soviet capital. Congress did not allow the aid to be free, so the U.S. discounted it's Lend-Lease supplies by 90 percent of costs. During the war, Soviet factories produced more than 29.1 million small arms of all major types, while only 152,000 small arms ( 0.5% of the total) were manufactured by American, British, and Canadian plants. Britain wished to retain some of this equipment in the immediate post-war period. Britain had been paying for its materiel with gold as part of the "cash and carry" program, as required by the U.S. Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, but by 1941 it had liquidated a large part of its overseas holdings and its gold reserves were becoming depleted in paying for materiel from the United States. Churchill called the letter "one of the most important I ever wrote.". For European Recovery (June 23, 1997) - Library of Congress - Loc.gov On December 7, 1940, its Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed President Roosevelt in a 15-page letter for American help. It is obvious from this information that during the period of October 1, 1941, to May 1, 1944, the U.S.A., under Lend-Lease, Sent the Soviet Union arms, equipment, materials, and food totaling $5,357,300,000 and weighing 8,514,000 long tons, not including the weight of 92 delivered ships or the weight of 3333 airplanes, which arrived by air. "Transatlantic Generosity: Canada's 'Billion Dollar Gift' to the United Kingdom in the Second World War.". When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so. L.7711, H.R. In particular, it shows that British Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 played a far more significant part in the defense of Moscow and the revival of Soviet fortunes in late 1941 than has been acknowledged. This was mostly in the form of landing, servicing, and refueling of transport aircraft; some industrial machinery and rare minerals were sent to the U.S. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.". 1415 FDR Library", "Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement, February 28, 1942", "The Hyde Park Declaration 1941: Origins and Significance", "Consumer Price Index, annual average, not seasonally adjusted", "Consumer Price Index by product group, monthly, percentage change, not seasonally adjusted, Canada, provinces, Whitehorse, Yellowknife and Iqaluit", "America Reports On Aid To Allies etc. Could the soviets have won without lend lease? [38] With the outbreak of war these plants switched from civilian to military production and locomotive production ended virtually overnight. re: In hindsight was it a mistake for the US to ally with the Soviet Union during WW2. And many of the supplies needed by our Air Force are procured for us without cost by reverse lend-lease. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the End of World War II In 1946, the post-war Anglo-American loan further indebted Britain to the U.S. Lend-Lease items retained were sold to Britain at 10% of nominal value, giving an initial loan value of 1.075billion for the Lend-Lease portion of the post-war loans. Soviet authorities recognized that the Great Patriotic War gave the Communist Party a claim to legitimacy that went far beyond Marxism-Leninism or the 1917 Revolution, and took pains to portray their nations victories in World War II as single-handed. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war. Roosevelt's top foreign policy advisor Harry Hopkins had effective control over Lend-Lease, making sure it was in alignment with Roosevelt's foreign policy goals.[3]. The munitions totaled 308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled 120m in 1946 index. The Lend-Lease program also sent tons of factory equipment and machine tools to the Soviet Union, including more than 38,000 lathes and other metal-working tools. Then in 1972 agreement was reached on $722 . But the Germans were doggedly held off in front of Moscow in late November and early December, and then rolled back by a reinvigorated Red Army in a staggeringly brutal winter counteroffensive. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised. World War II | Facts, Summary, History, Dates, Combatants, & Causes Much of the meaning of Lend-Lease aid can be better understood when considering the innovative nature of World War II, as well as the economic distortions caused by the war. Recd 11/12/41. Red Army Lend/Lease Vehicles - Axis History [6], After the Fall of France during June 1940, the British Commonwealth and Empire were the only forces engaged in war against Germany and Italy, until the Italian invasion of Greece.

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