Allied Aid To The Sviet Union In World War II

Profile photo for Robert Hansen Robert Hansen · Following Freelance Writer, Amateur Chess EnthusiastMar 8 If lend lease only started to arrive in significant amounts to USSR in late 1943, how does this account for its victories against Germany in battles like Moscow, Stalingrad & Kursk? These occured from late 1941-mid 1943. An opinion on lend-lease that can be expressed in one sentence, whether it’s “Lend-lease saved Moscow by providing 40% of Soviet tanks” or “most lend-lease arrived after Kursk, when the war was already won,” can be dismissed out of hand as the product of an agenda. Lend-lease played a decisive role in the war, but nothing so clear-cut as winning this or that battle. Western guns were nice to have, but it was the butter that made the difference. The significance of Lend-Lease did not begin in late 1943 — deliveries scaled dramatically in the second half of 1942 and played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet economy. The Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk were won almost wholly by Soviet arms, but the Soviet Union could never have won the war without Western assistance. Lend-Lease By Year From June 1941 to June 1942, assistance to the Soviet Union was very improvisational under so-called “Pre-Lend Lease” aid and the First Lend Lease Protocol, which was manufactured and delivered by Britain via the hazardous and constricted Arctic supply route. By the time the Battle of Moscow came to an end, barely more than 350,000 tons of supplies had been delivered. That may sound impressive, but it’s a drop in the bucket of an industrial war — in the abstract, fifty divisions will consume 350,000 tons of supplies in ten days of normal operations. Bottom line — Lend-Lease in 1941 was in no world decisive, and only blatant creative accounting can argue otherwise. The most egregious example of this creative accounting is the myth that “40% of Soviet medium and heavy tanks at Moscow were British.” Making Pro-Western Myths and Memes: “40% of Medium and Heavy Tanks” The Battle of Moscow was a massive, complex affair that took place in four stages from October 1941 to January 1942, and over four million men, four thousand tanks, and around 10,000 artillery pieces served in the campaign at one stage or another. The stages of the battle were: The Vyazma-Bryansk encirclement battles at the first month of the offensive; the Germans mustered two million men to attack, encircle, and then destroy the larger part of 1.2 million Soviet defenders guarding the distant approaches to Moscow. The Penetration of the Mozhaisk Defensive Line by the German armored spearheads from October 13 to 31st, initially opposed by 90,000 Soviet soldiers gradually reinforced by reserves and troops from the Eastern districts of the Soviet Union. The direct defense of the approaches to Moscow throughout November and early December, featuring more than a hundred thousand soldiers occupying strong defensive belts and 670 tanks, including 205 T-34s and KV-1s, as well as 90 British infantry tanks in frontline units that engaged the Germans. The Soviet counteroffensive from December 5th onward — the Red Army mustered a 58-division reserve counting 1.1 million Soviet soldiers, together with an additional 1,700 tanks drawn from the Eastern districts, to mount a counteroffensive and repel Army Group Center. Now, a slight segue. Bent Larsen, the second-best Western chess player of the 1960s briefly served as the second of a young Bobby Fischer, the famously eccentric future world chess champion. Larsen wrote about this experience in his book, detailing an episode where Fischer, still a sheltered child, found himself in Yugoslavia for the first time. The young Fischer became sick, and refused to seek care because he was convinced that a communist country could not produce a decent doctor. When Larsen convinced him to go to the doctor, Fischer was shocked to find that the man was competent and asked if he had studied in the West. No, the doctor said, but he and his wife had vacationed in Vienna — this was the proof Fischer needed, and he now decided that the doctor had learned everything he knew while vacationing in Vienna. A few British military historians and amateurs seemingly took inspiration from Fischer’s innovative absurdist reasoning and applied it to history, and the results may shock you. They discovered that lend-lease supplies from Britain had, in fact, won the Battle of Moscow. The impetus for this groundbreaking revelation was to simply ignore the fact that lend-lease supplies from Britain obviously did not win the Battle of Moscow. Just complete these five simple steps: Only look at the period of November 26th to December 5th, when all Soviet forces engaged were at their nadir while the use of British tanks was at its relative peak — looking at the period before November 26th or after December 5th would be as absurd as believing a Yugoslavian doctor learned his trade at Yugoslavian medical school. Take the Soviet forces that are already at their minimum count, not counting the rapidly growing Soviet strategic reserve that will soon go into action — insist that the infantry and artillery doing the bulk of the fighting count as zero, and the Soviet light tanks with decent winter mobility and a reasonable gun also count as zero. Embrace the alternative facts that a ploddingly slow, 16-ton infantry tank with no mobility in snowy conditions and no HE round is a “medium tank,” one with combat value equal to a 30-ton tank with excellent anti-tank and anti-infantry performance as well as good winter mobility. The armored trifecta is armor protection, armor protection, and armor protection — armor protection is the only thing that counts, which is why WWII ended in a German victory with King Tigers rolling into Oak Ridge and stealing the nuclear weapon plans. Take the 205+ T-34s and KV-1s and Britain’s 90 “medium and heavy tanks,” to find that Britain supplied 90 out of 295 Soviet “medium and heavy tanks,” or 32%. Increase the 32% figure to 40%. Just because. Voila! British lend-lease tanks now comprise 40% of Soviet combat power at the Battle of Moscow. You’ve proven that lend-lease won the Battle of Moscow, scored a point for British national pride and delivered a blow to the Russophiles, and all it took was being comprehensively wrong about everything on purpose. Here’s a lifehack — when someone tries selling you a bizarrely specific statistic that invokes a mixture of percentages and poorly-defined categories, something like “40% of Soviet medium and heavy tanks engaged in the defense of Moscow” or “33% of new Soviet aircraft production between July 32nd 1942 and February 29th 1944,” they’re probably fooling you. These are examples of bad, lazy arguments that ultimately undersell and discredit the war-winning role of lend-lease. Lend-Lease in 1942 In the first half of 1942 and even more in the second half, lend-lease grew dramatically. Total deliveries were seven times greater than in 1941, for a total of nearly 2.5 million tons. The first reason for this was that the Soviet Union completed its movement of soldiers from the Transbaikal, Siberia, and the Far East to European Russia. This opened up the Trans-Siberian Railway for shipments of non-military aid from the United States that arrived through Vladivostok, which is where just under 50% of all lend-lease arrived throughout the war. Second was the implementation of the Second Lend-Lease Protocol in June 1942 — this had a much higher budget, a greater allotment of shipping for tonnage, and provisioned for the US to take over supplying most materiel to the USSR directly. This was also a relief to Britain, which didn’t have as much manufacturing to throw around as the US and made significant sacrifices in arming its forces for the sake of sending tanks and planes to the USSR. Finally, the UK and USSR managed to complete the opening of the Persian Corridor. This route for lend-lease had greater capacity and was much safer than the old Arctic route. From late 1942 onward, it became the path for a great majority of Soviet military aid. The Arctic arrow really ought to originate from the UK By the end of 1942, a Soviet soldier was still overwhelmingly more likely to ride into battle on a horse than in a Studebaker. But an important share of the calories he and the Soviet worker consumed throughout that year would have come from American food shipments. Making Pro-Soviet Myths and Memes: The Tonnage Fallacy Tonnage is a useful tool when assessing the value of Lend-Lease to put the sheer scale of the Second World War into perspective. Sending “thousands of tanks” really does sound impressive on its face, but when you realize those deliveries took place over a four-year-long war that consumed tens of thousands of tanks and millions of men, you realize that it isn’t. But sometimes, you need to interrogate your metrics. Tonnage on its own will give you a completely incorrect view of the value of food shipments. The Heer had conquered the Soviet Union’s most food-rich regions in 1941, and Fall Blau in 1942 expanded this control of arable land in the Soviet Union to 40%. The Soviet Union experienced significant levels of hunger and even starvation throughout the year, but they also began receiving large food shipments that averaged 1.5 million tons per year throughout the remainder of the war. In the conditions the Soviet Union faced, there’s no way to dismiss the value of 1.5 million tons of food per year. But Soviet leaders explicitly requested the most processed, value-added food types with the greatest macronutrient-to-weight ratio. A ton of egg powder, milk powder, SPAM, and other food concentrates had at least twice the caloric density of the ton of unprocessed agricultural products produced by the Soviet Union, and lend-lease made the difference between several million starvation deaths in 1942–1943. Whether or not this would cause the collapse of the Soviet economy is hard to say, but it would be an enduring economic wound. Lend Lease Beyond Kursk: The Double-Edged Myth of the Soviet Steamroller Pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet observers both tend to indulge in the idea of the Soviet Union as an overwhelming industrial power with infinite human resources. This is either denigrative, that the Red Army overwhelmed the Heer through mass alone and shrugged off 8:1 losses in every battle, or as a miracle of Communist ingenuity throwing overwhelming numbers of tanks, planes, artillery, etc. into each new battle. The Soviet Union’s tank manufacturing numbers are a beloved talking point, both by those who glorify the Soviet Union and by the borderline Nazi apologists who promote the idea that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike against the greatest military power on Earth (just look at how many tanks and planes the Soviet Union had!). Both of these perceptions have very little to do with reality. When it mattered most, the Soviet Union was smaller than Axis Europe. The USSR never had double the population of Grossdeutschland and its minor allies, and the German advances of 1941 and 1942 reduced it to a more or less equal population. And while Soviet weapon counts were impressive on paper, they were really just a dysfunctional feature of the Soviet Union’s immature industry. The worst culprit is the mind-boggling number of artillery pieces the Soviet Union produced throughout the war, as Red Army units often had more guns than they had shells to fire that day. The most expensive parts of industrial production for a land army are the ammunition, the spare parts, the trucks — all the boring bits that don’t get you promoted from lower middle manager to upper middle manager in the Soviet bureaucracy. Germany produced far more trucks, much greater quantities of artillery ammunition, and on balance was a slightly superior industrial power with far better-utilized capacity in comparison to the Soviet Union. When the Red Army went to war in June 1941, they lost the majority of their tens of thousands of tanks due to breakdowns and abandonment unrelated to German action. One tank corps in the Battle of Brody lost more than 90% of its light tanks and over 80% of its T-34s without ever encountering German forces. Back to 1943; the Red Army went into the Battle of Kursk with a terrific number of tanks, no doubt about that. But their mobile infantry still primarily consisted of cavalry groups and they were still being outshot badly by the German artillery. Recent studies have concluded that throughout the battle, the Germans fired 2.3 times the weight of shot in artillery ammunition as the Soviet Union did, which would have accounted for a large part of the disparity in casualties. The Soviet Union did not have any miraculously deep well of manpower to tap into — its recruitment after Stalingrad relied heavily upon retaking ground that had been occupied, restoring it economically, and drawing new soldiers from those territories. The Red Army was a pyramid scheme, where this victory would find many of the men to achieve the next one. However, this process of replenishment relied heavily on lend-lease. The Red Army and the Heer had both mounted scorched-Earth retreats across Ukraine and Belarus, and the Heer in particular had carried out a policy of brutal economic exploitation and the deliberate starvation of urban populations for two years. They had slaughtered or stolen anywhere from 60% to 90% of farm animals like cows, horses, and pigs that had represented a large share of the pre-war agricultural value of farms in the occupied areas. Carrying out the war against Nazi Germany required pulling a total of 19.5 million men out of agriculture between 1941 and 1945. Something far more important than the 7,000 tanks that the Soviet Union received through lend-lease is often forgotten — they received 8,000 tractors. The large food deliveries and shipments of agricultural equipment facilitated the Soviet Union having its cake and eating it too, to restore production in the occupied areas faster and also conscript a greater portion of the agrarian population into military service. Note that they use percentages for aviation fuel and absolute numbers for aircraft and tanks — shipments of aviation fuel were small in absolute volumes, on account of the fact Soviet aircraft did not use it. Likewise, planes and tanks were not very impressive as a proportion of Soviet production. But worst of all, where are the tractors? Conscripting so many soldiers without lend-lease would still have been possible, but it would have forced increasingly harsh sacrifices on the population and caused still more damage to the economy. Within a few years, the costs of continued offensive war would become impossible to bear and the Soviet Union would have to strike a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany. Winning Battles vs Winning a War This is doubly true because the lack of lend-lease deliveries in 1944 would have drastically reduced the ability of the Red Army to win decisive, crushing victories over the Heer. The Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk display more or less what the Red Army could do on its own means without extensive military aid in trucks, explosives, and other areas where Soviet industry was weak. Most new Soviet trucks during the war came from lend-lease? Few of them had arrived yet, and they made do with horses. The US provided a critical amount of Soviet gunpowder and explosive material? Most of it had yet to arrive, and they made do with appalling inferiority in artillery ammunition. But what they had never done was attack, surround, and destroy large German formations in a battle where the Heer had not first overextended itself. Soviet skill and overall capabilities never reached the critical point of enabling them to win an offensive annihilation battle against reasonably prepared German troops. This changed with Operation Bagration, which annihilated the German Army Group Center in the summer of 1944. Soviet tactics had improved considerably, and their planning and deception operations were masterful. The Germans had powerful mobile forces in the East, but STAVKA misled them into placing virtually all mobile reserves in the Southern sector, not in Belarus where the attack was imminent. However, the value of Western aid was also far greater than ever. While Germany had suffered most of its bomber losses in the East, the US and UK had thoroughly wrecked the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm. STAVKA had tricked the Germans into deploying two-thirds of all their mobile divisions in Romania, yes… But the missing third would have drastically reduced the success of Operation Bagration if not for the fact they were being steadily ground down by the British and Commonwealth troops in the Battle for Caen. The whole operation couldn’t have been nearly as ambitious if not for the lend-lease trucks, as well. “Soviets in Studebakers” is a cliche, but by the summer of 1944 it had finally become a reality; lend-lease trucks had steadily grown to account for roughly half of Soviet motor capacity, improving Soviet mobility and logistics besides releasing horses to agricultural duty. Lend-lease was a paltry 360,000 tons in 1941 — deliveries were more than 10 times greater in 1943, and almost 20 times greater in 1944. These deliveries and the additional fronts that opened from mid-1943 onward were the difference between the Soviet Union winning costly, plodding battles like Kursk or shattering German resistance as at Operation Bagration. What Does Lend-Lease Account For? Despite the German losses suffered on other fronts and the exhaustion of German offensive potential after the Battle of Stalingrad, German manpower reserves didn’t hit empty until the spring of 1944. Despite economic aid deepening the practical Soviet manpower pool, STAVKA’s own manpower reserves hit empty about a year later. The Red Army could and did fight and win battles more or less within its own means in the most critical years of the war. But while the Red Army soldiers and their leaders did the essential work of saving themselves from Nazi Germany, they couldn’t have finished the job on their own. Without economic or military assistance, the USSR could not have waged a mobile war capable of destroying the Wehrmacht faster than its own offensive potential would exhaust itself. In the end, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would settle a border somewhere between the Vistula and the Dnieper River — until next time. 3.9K views View 59 upvotes View 2 shares 1 of 7 answers 37 comments from Matthias and more