One of these days I’d like to take a look on the net and figure out exactly how much US military equipment, money etc. the Soviets were given.
I’ve always thought that without the massive Lend-Lease program Russia would not have survived the German invasion.
Just a thought and I’ve nothing to back it up. But hearing people state that the Russian’s won the war and the Western front was a sideshow is incorrect.
We gave the USSR a mountain of supplies, about to the same degree as we did England. But its actually true that WWII was the war between Germany and Russia, and the western front was a death blow. But the overwhelming, not even close, destruction of the German military occurred in the east.
Not efficiently in terms of Soviet losses, but that is indeed where the German military was destroyed. And the Luftwaffe was destroyed by daylight bombing. The greatest utility in the bombing was forcing the Luftwaffe to fight and to get destroyed.
But the numbers are that between 70 an 80% of the German army was destroyed in the east. That’s why an old German will still blanche at the mention of the eastern front. And they inflicted enormous losses too. BOth sides in the east lost about as many in individual battles there than we did in the entire war.
We gave the soviets over 400,000 trucks and jeeps. The trucks were absolutely vital - without them there's no fuel, food or ammo for their T-34s. The soviets also liked to tow artillery with the trucks and turn them into mobile artillery batteries.