Imagine the Red Army fighting a modern war against the Wermacht without: 1/3 of all its explosives 80% of all its copper 1/2 its processed Aluminum 15 million boots (pairs) 400,000 Trucks/Jeeps Perhaps most importantly and forgotten 2000 modern, powerful and DIESEL locomotives (as opposed to the old wheezy steam ones they had) Etc the list goes on
Sadly Communist USSR lied for decades minimizing what we did to enable their victory.
Of course it tipped the balance.
My mom and dad worked in a USA factory that made Red Army overcoats. The great War was great for our industry. Maybe we can have another? s/ s/ s/
Also correct if I am wrong but we also gave the Soviets, A-20 Havocs, and P-40 fighters.
If you’ve never read From Major Jordan’s Diaries, you should.
http://citizensnewswire.org/files/mjd.pdf
The fact that he was able to find a handful of highly competent senior leaders among what he hadn't purged such as Konstantin Rokossovsky, Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev also made a huge difference.
Hitler vs Stalin...a war which all decent people wish that *both* sides had lost.
Correct. WWII the Americans had the money and the industry, but the Soviets did most of the dying.
The Russians have found themselves in a similar place in their current alliance with China. Russia has the boots on the ground around the world, while China funds the operation.
Being able to supply the Red Army with food, fuel and ammunition was a necessity for it to gain the mobility that enabled it to overcome the Wehrmacht.
I have watched several recent WW II Russian video depicting the efforts of various Russian units fighting the Germans. They are post USSR and seem factual
The message is that the efforts were made under various handicaps from lack of or old everything. They were primitive. It was hard. horses....... they used lots of horses.
However, American stuff unquestionably made a difference. Number and generalship won for Russia. Russian Generals on the assault ought thought German Generals on defense
Americans can’t conceive of the Russian loses.
The Russians had 1,254,000 killed at Stalingrad/Kursk. America had 407,000 killed in all theaters.
Don’t forget tons of SPAM that the Russian considered a delicacy. The Koreans still do.
Speaking of key materials, what food do you think the Red Army was sustained by? America’s favorite—Spam. Stalin singled Spam out for specific praise.
A good book to read that shows just how near the edge they were is The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food
"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."
Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.
"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."
America could not fight WW2 on its terms, today due to lack of manufacturing (vs. China) and character (but there are the WOKE weapons).
Don’t forget explosives. Most Soviet artillery shells were filled with explosives made in America.
Seems Stalin never got over the Soviet losing the 1920 war with Poland ...
I always wondered what would have happened if we let nutjobs Hitler and Stalin annihilate each other and then wiped out the winner?
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.
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).