Cannot be over-stressed!
In the framework of Lend/Lease, America sent more motor vehicles to the U.S.S.R. that the total number that were on the road in the U.K. at that time.
Regards,
Regarding Lease, if you’ve never read “From Major Jordan’s Diaries” about the amounts of material and food provided, you should. It is completely mind boggling.
Here’s the full book.
http://citizensnewswire.org/files/mjd.pdf
Here are the tabulations in chapter 9.
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/fdr-scandal-page/lend.html
Trucks were important, and were the tip of the iceberg.
6. American Lend Lease had an enormous impact on the Soviet war effort.
I was about to post the same. Without the U.S. industrial might at the time the Soviets would be speaking German now. The U.S. won the World Wars I and II, now we’re losing World War III
Lend Lease was only for the British, prior to our entry in to the war 1941. We outright GAVE Stalin vast quantities of trucks, guns, airplanes, raw metals, (including fissile materials according to one source), and FOOD. Stalin having destroyed the productivity of Ukraine all by himself, we had to provide virtually 100% of the food required for his armies.
The book is "Feeding the Bear", giving a lot of detail about that. Now OOP and hard to come by for less than $200. Alas my copy was borrowed and not returned decades ago. Our guys hated SPAM, but the Soviet troops loved it!
Also not widely known is how we built an entire two-track railroad across Iran, from the Gulf of Hormuz to the Soviet border, to transport all this. Much more went via this route than by the infamous convoys to Murmansk. Control of the Med and the Suez Canal were vital to this route. Had the Brits not fought Rommel to a standstill, and with the help of Operation Torch evicted him from North Africa, (thereby neutering the Luftwaffe in southern Italy), the situation would have been entirely different.
Airplanes and some less weighty/bulky cargoes were flown via Alaska, which necessitated the building of a chain of airfields, often in inaccessible places where the only logistical route was by air to begin with. The famous AlCan Highway was carved out firstly to get fuel and supplies to those airfields.