'We Would Have Lost': Did U.S. Lend-Lease Aid Tip The Balance In Soviet Fight Against Nazi Germany?

Radio Free Europe ^ | 05/07/2020 | Coalson

[Phoenix8]

An estimated 25 million Soviet citizens perished in the titanic conflict with Nazi Germany between June 1941 and May 1945. Overcoming massive defeats and colossal losses over the first 18 months of the war, the Red Army was able to reorganize and rebuild to form a juggernaut that marched all the way to Berlin. But the Soviet Union was never alone: Months before the United States formally entered the war, it had already begun providing massive military and economic assistance to its Soviet ally through the Lend-Lease program.

[dfwgator]

I think a “Divide and Conquer” strategy would have won it for the Nazis, but their brutality gave the Russians no choice but to fight. And if they cut off the head, their command structure would have gone into chaos. Curiously, I think Hitler didn’t go after Stalin personally, because Hitler actually greatly admired Stalin.

Originally many welcomed the Germans as liberators, but they soon learned that the Germans weren’t very interested in making friends in Russia.

[Leaning Right]

> Entertaining as hell, but not historically accurate. <

Yes indeed, on both counts. The movie played fast-and-loose with the facts on purpose (for satirical value). As an example, they had the actor who played Zhukov speak with a Yorkshire accent!

[alexander_busek]

2/3 of all the vehicles except armor in the Red Army on VE day were made in America or built in US factories shipped to the Soviet Union.

If I recall correctly, the U.S. gave the Soviets more motor vehicles (incl. jeeps, trucks, etc.) than existed in all of Great Britain at the time.

Regards,

[Phoenix8]

Thank you, I’ve read a few pages and it’s amazing stuff. The outright communists in FDRs government still amaze me.

McCarthy was spot on and a great American hero. Just mercilessly smeared by the left.

[FreedomPoster]

Spot on.

[dfwgator]

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

-Arthur Jensen (Network)

[ZULU]

I always wondered what would have happened if we let nutjobs Hitler and Stalin annihilate each other and then wiped out the winner?

[FLT-bird]

My experience is that even today most Russians try to deny/minimize the massive amounts of material aid they received. There’s no question it was vital. Not even mentioned here was the stuff they got from Canada and Britain.

Without the 2,000 locomotives and over 400,000 trucks they never could have sustained their supply lines to push into Central Europe.

In addition to all those radios the US provided, Britain provided a huge amount of telephones and cable. At the start of the war it was not uncommon for even relatively large Red Army formations to have no direct means of communication.

Aviation fuel. In the early part of the war the US provided well over 90% of their aviation fuel.

Metals...their strategic metal reserve was captured early on. They simply had not had time to relocate it further east. The resulting catastrophic shortfall never happened because the Allies made good their losses.

Similarly when their breadbasket Ukraine fell to the Nazis, they avoided mass starvation due to the huge amounts of food the Allies - especially America - sent.

Explosives was also mentioned. They were desperately short. Florida’s plentiful phosphate (very rich in nitrogen) supplied both fertilizer and explosives for both the US and the Soviet Union.

Industrial equipment and machine parts. This doesn’t get mentioned much in comparison to the roughly 24,000 armored fighting vehicles the Allies sent to the Soviet Union but it was if anything far more important. How do people think the Soviet Union suddenly became such an industrial powerhouse that it could hugely outproduce the Germans in tanks?

Also not mentioned was the large number of Soviet pilots trained in America and Canada.

Allied intervention was decisive on the Eastern Front.

[FLT-bird]

We helped the Commies too damn much - particularly with trucks. Without those trucks we could have “shaken hands” with them hundreds and hundreds of miles further east. They could never have supplied their forces very far from their railheads without the trucks.

[crusher2013]

We shipped them a massive amount of Food which kept them from starving and allowed them to put millions of men in the fight.

The weird fact is we shipped most of the food across the Pacific in Soviet flagged ships to Vladivostok.

The Japanese could have easily stopped this but were afraid of the Soviets.

Lack of coordination was one of the main reasons the Axis lost WW2. (Thank God).

[Clutch Martin]

“The great War was great for our industry.”

My pathological older sister once made a remark somewhat similar to this at the dinner table about Vietnam and all the money that was being made on the war and how it wasn’t such a bad thing if it’s going to drive industry.

I was sitting there with a draft card in my wallet, 18 yoa, and my number was called up I had two years before draft... I f****** blew up right there and I have rarely talked to that psycho b**** since.

The draft ended, my status changed from Boomer to BoomerII, I enlisted, finished a degree, got out and started my career leveraging my veterans preference.

[the_individual2014]

They did copy our B-29 too, but that was after the war they built their copies of it down to the smallest detail, damn Soviets. They did know how to properly copy, I will give them that.

[rdcbn1]

Yeah, Hitler made some huge mistakes in Russia and not focusing on Moscow and assuming Japan would declare war on Russia when he declared war on the US were two of the biggest

[dfwgator]

Been watching a Russian drama about the master spy Richard Sorge, he’s the one that found out that the Japs were not going to attack the Soviet Union. That allowed Stalin to move his troops stationed in Siberia up to the front.

[SunkenCiv]

...the Soviet Union was never alone: Months before the United States formally entered the war, it had already begun providing massive military and economic assistance to its Soviet ally through the Lend-Lease program.

Yes, no doubt about it. The US really was the Arsenal of Democracy, and Japan's attacks in December 1941 were the biggest blunder in military history. It even eclipses Hitler's moronic bus-schedule style of conducting Germany's wars of conquest, and by a large measure.

As noted by J. Parschall, in December 1941 the US had an economy five times larger than Japan's; by August 1945 the US economy was eight times larger. It was US industrial production that made the hard fighting possible, for both the US and all its allies.

The USSR had built loads of tanks, mostly to keep the lid on its people -- the USSR was an occupying power, even in Russian-majority areas -- and built loads more during the war, but lost most of them, as the Germans were great at knocking out tanks and tank on tank warfare.

After Barbarossa started, Molotov had secret diplomatic contact with the Japanese, and only after he'd become assured that they wouldn't start shooting at Soviet forces did Stalin order the east emptied to meet the German invasion.

I have wondered if that verbal agreement also helped the Japanese talk themselves into the stupid idea of bringing the US into the war.

BTW, whomever put revisionism in the keywords is a troll who should be banned.

---

Hitler talking in his everyday voice to Finnish military commander Mannerheim in 1942. The only existing recording of Hitlers normal voice. For my history project.

Hitler Speaking Normally (Subtitles) | March 25, 2011 | AlbusPercyDumbledore

[SunkenCiv]

Hitler remembered Napoleon’s mistake.

No, he didn't. Nappy's and Hitler's mistake was invading Russia in the first place, a mistake repeated by the Central Powers in WWI, and a mistake pioneered over 2000 years earlier (and long before there was a Russia) by the Persian army when it tried to corner the Scythians.

Each time he took charge of a major fork in the road, Hitler chose the wrong fork. Putting everything into bagging the British army at Dunkirk would likely have led to victory in North Africa.

Regardless, finishing off the British in North Africa should have been done prior to launching Barbarossa (you'll see Hitler's illogic about that in the transcript of the video above).

Taking Stalingrad and trying to hold it was exactly the error that led to the non-decisive chaos on Germany's eastern front in 1942.

Hitler got convinced that the Kursk salient was a problem, and when his generals couldn't talk him out of it, found they also couldn't talk him into going ASAP. Instead, he wanted them to wait. During the delay, the Red Army developed defense in depth.

Then, prior to the battle, he shifted three divisions out of the preparations and sent them to the fighting in Italy, where the terrain was ideal for defensive operations anyway.

Without that a-hole, there wouldn't have been a second World War, but when it came, in a perverse way, we're lucky he was running the other side.

[dfwgator]

There’s some fascinaing audio of Hitler talking with Finnish Field Marshal Mannerheim, where Hitler frankly discussed with him what was happening in Russia.

It’s the only recording with Hitler’s normal speaking voice.

[dfwgator]

The other problem was the supply lines. They didn’t count on the Russian roads being of such low quality that they turned to mud when it rained. And they didn’t account for the different gauge of the Russian railroads, so using trains for supplies wasn’t an option.

[dfwgator]

Also, I would have tried to make a deal with Ukraine, sort of like the one with Slovakia. Offer to make Ukraine a puppet state with some autonomy. I think most Ukrainians would have gone for that, and they have triggered a Civil War in the Soviet Union, then it’s a simple matter of “Divide and Conquer”.