He’s not wrong. Russia would have equally been defeated by Germany without US and British supplies and Allied attacks on Germany, including air raids that razed big chunks of German cities. For instance, the US sent 14,000 airplanes and 13,000 tanks to Russia, including ~5,000 of the Airacobra, a fighter first made in 1941.
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.”
The United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks.
However, the real significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort was that it covered the “sensitive points” of Soviet production — gasoline, explosives, aluminum, nonferrous metals, radio communications, and so on, says historian Boris Sokolov.
“In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler,” Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL’s Russian Service.]
You underestimate the courage and tenacity of the Russian people. Read Harrison Salisbury’s book, The 900 Days, about the seige of Leningrad. Or read about the Battle of Kursk.
The Soviets inflicted 76% of all the German military deaths during WWII. Yes, we provided significant amounts of war materiel and logistical assistance, but the Soviets deserve the lion’s share of the credit for defeating the Nazis. Revisionist history doesn’t change the facts.
Zhang, if you hurry, there’s still time for you to join the fray.