We had to supply the Soviets during World War II.
The Soviets would have lost if we didn't supply them.
We had to supply the Soviets during World War II.
The Soviets would have lost if we didn't supply them.
The USSR also got invaded en masse by millions of Nazis, which resulted in the destruction of huge swaths of its pre-war military stock. Hardly a suitable comparison currently (as America and Russia both are not the same now as they were in the 1940s), so why bring it up?
Then they used all that to take over Western Europe.
Same for the Brits. We kept the world afloat then.
That’s an astonishing graphic. I had no idea that the amount of materiel we sent to the Soviets in WW II was that huge. They helped defeat Nazism, but we got communism and the Cold War as a result.
At a dinner toast with Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference in December 1943, Stalin added: “The United States … is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war.”
Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, agreed with Stalin’s assessment. In his memoirs, Khrushchev described how Stalin stressed the value of Lend-Lease aid: “He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.”
But it is still doubtful they would have lost. It would have just cost way more lives and taken longer. But WWII victory was simply never in the cards for the nazis unless they could negotiate a separate truce with the Brits.
And for Soviet lend lease, it isn’t as sexy, but food from America is what kept them in the fight more than anything else. Hormel canned meat by the shipload.
bkmk
And they never paid back a dime of all that aid.
Thanks for posting that.
The USA was smart to let the Russians take the brunt of the war/casualties in Europe until 1944.