how important was lend lease to the soviet union

Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion. Pro lend-lease !<br><br>#<br><br>On September 2, 1945, with the signing of the act of surrender of militaristic Japan, the Second World War was completed, and on September 20, 1945, all Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR were stopped. Most went to Britain, but the Soviet Union received more than $11 billion. Perhaps most directly, without Lend-Lease trucks, rail engines, and railroad cars, every Soviet offensive would have stalled at an earlier stage, outrunning its logistical tail in a matter of days. The programme began to increase in scale during 1943. The Soviet authorities were well aware of this dependency on Lend-Lease. External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein. During World War II, the Soviet Union received almost 15,000 U.S.-built aircraft under the lend-lease program. [56] Nevertheless, some 8,244,000 tons of goods went by this route, 50% of the total. The Lend-Lease law was adopted by the U.S. Congress on March 11, 1941; according to it, all the supplied vehicles, arms, equipment and materials were not to be paid for should they be destroyed. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union officially ended in September 1945. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Secret Cipher Telegram. Lend-Lease assistance to the USSR. "Transatlantic Generosity: Canada's 'Billion Dollar Gift' to the United Kingdom in the Second World War.". And though rapid increases in tank firepower would soon render the 40mm two-pounder main gun of the Matilda and Valentine suitable for use on light tanks only, the armor protection of these British models put them firmly in the heavy and medium categories, respectively. Most visibly, 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. The U.S. government never published detailed reports on what and how much was sent under the Lend-Lease program to the USSR. The story of how that microfilm came to be in the National Archives is a convoluted tale worthy of telling. Under conditions of much of European Russia being occupied by the Axis, attrition was a losing prospect for the USSR; without Allied aid they might very well have collapsed as a military power some time in 1943. Dec 7, 1941 . Allen (1946) p 252. While much of the documentary evidence remains classified secret in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense and the Russian State Archive of the Economy, Western and Russian researchers have been able to gain access to important, previously unavailable firsthand documents. Under the Lend-Lease Act, the United States sent enormous quantities of war materiel to the Soviet Union, which was critical in helping the Soviets withstand the Nazi onslaught. After the German assault on Russia in June 1941, the defenders got aid with this system through war material, food, fuel and other important raw materials. On March 11, 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. An estimated 25 million Soviet citizens perished in the titanic conflict with Nazi Germany between June 1941 and May 1945. Yauza. The Lend-Lease Act was designed to provide allies with aircraft and supplies for the war in Europe. For the Australian company, see. Each method was difficult. 31, enacted March 11, 1941),[1] was a policy under which the United States supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, China, and other Allied nations with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and 1945. Few Americans objected to Soviet aid until 1943. Roosevelt's top foreign policy advisor Harry Hopkins had effective control over Lend-Lease, making sure it was in alignment with Roosevelt's foreign policy goals.[3]. newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. The dispute remained unresolved until 1972, when the U.S. accepted an offer from the USSR to repay $722 million linked to grain shipments from the U.S., representing 25% of the initial debt with inflation taken into account, with the remainder being written off. [8] The Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940 set in motion a rapid expansion of the United States Navy. [73][74], Reverse Lend-Lease was the supply of equipment and services to the United States. As such, Ladd Field came to represent not only a political and economic exchange, but a cultural one as well. Rather, Lend-Lease was designed to serve America's interest in defeating Nazi Germany without entering the war until the American military and public was prepared to fight. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. Some idea of the scope of economic collaboration can be had from the fact that from the beginning of 1942 through 1945 Canada, on her part, furnished the United States with $1,000,000,000 to $1,250,000,000 in defense materials and services. [1] There was no repayment required. Roosevelt's Soviet Protocol Committee was dominated by Harry Hopkins and General John York, who were totally sympathetic to the provision of "unconditional aid". Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 19411942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates. Washington. 28, 30, 31, harvnb error: no target: CITEREFHardesty1991 (, Soviet Supply Protocols. 4, 48/Maslov MA Bomber PE-8. Roosevelt approved $1billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain at the end of October 1941. Nikolay Ryzhkov & Georgy Kumanev Food and other strategic deliveries to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act, 19411945, pp. Churchill called the letter "one of the most important I ever wrote.". Some 3,964,000 tons of goods were shipped by the Arctic route; 7% was lost, while 93% arrived safely. Roosevelt made sure that Lend-Lease policies were supportive of his foreign policy goals by putting his top aide Harry Hopkins in effective control of the program. About half of these were delivered by sea via the North Atlantic or were flown across the South Atlantic Ocean to the USSR via North Africa. Source: "The Soviet Union: The Defeated Victor" pp. And they would have been perpetually hungry without American canned meat and fats. A particular critical aspect of Lend-Lease was the supply of food. Trucks such as the Dodge '"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000003F-QINU`"'34-ton and Studebaker 2+12-ton were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. After a series of dramatic Nazi successes during the opening stages of Hitlers invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, foreign observers predicted that Soviet resistance would soon collapse. Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States (Pub. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2023 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The terms of the agreement provided that the materiel was to be used until returned or destroyed. Ukraine is in the process of joining the European Union and has submitted an application for NATO membership. Extrapolating from available statistics, researchers estimate that British-supplied tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and certainly made up a significant proportion of tanks available as reinforcements at this critical point in the fighting. American contributions of the time were far fewer. [64], From October 1, 1941, to May 31, 1945, the United States delivered to the Soviet Union 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the aviation fuel including nearly 90 percent of high-octane fuel used,[35] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc. While the Matilda Mk II and Valentine tanks supplied by the British were certainly inferior to the Soviets homegrown T-34 and KV-1, it is important to note that Soviet production of the T-34 (and to a lesser extent the KV series), was only just getting seriously underway in 1942, and Soviet production was well below plan targets. "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. "[10] As the President himself put it, "There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs."[11]. Lend-Lease - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org In a few paragraphs the Wiki page shows the importance of the deliveries. [32] In September 1943, he was promoted to Undersecretary of State, and Leo Crowley became director of the Foreign Economic Administration, which was given responsibility for Lend-Lease. . A steady stream of British-made tanks continued to flow into the Red Army through the spring and summer of 1942. Stalin needed trucks and was provided with Studebaker trucks on a massive scale. Most famously, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin raised a toast to the Lend-Lease program at the November 1943 Tehran conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Such assessments, however, are contradicted by the opinions of Soviet war participants. Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, America sent arms and equipment to the Soviet Union to help it defeat the Nazi invasion. Lacking any detailed information to the contrary, Western authors generally agreed that even if Lend-Lease was important from 1943 on, as quantities of aid dramatically increased, the aid was far too little and late to make a difference in the decisive battles of 19411942. The British shared technology included the cavity magnetron (key technology at the time for highly effective radar; the American historian James Phinney Baxter III later called "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores"),[13][14] the design for the VT fuze, details of Frank Whittle's jet engine and the FrischPeierls memorandum describing the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Tens of thousands of agricultural machines, such as tractors and threshers, were destroyed or captured. ): Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Democrats voted 238 to 25 in favor and Republicans 24 in favor and 135 against. Britain wished to retain some of this equipment in the immediate post-war period. I don't want $15I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. Lend-lease will be considered, first, as a method of wartime supply allocation; second, as a method of accounting which may create inter- . The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. [83] However, none of this cargo has been salvaged, and no documentation of its treasure has been produced.[84]. [55], In total, the U.S. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[57] of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[58] 11,400 aircraft (of which 4,719 were Bell P-39 Airacobras, 3,414 were Douglas A-20 Havocs and 2,397 were Bell P-63 Kingcobras)[59] and 1.75million tons of food. [38] With the outbreak of war these plants switched from civilian to military production and locomotive production ended virtually overnight. The United States did not provide them to the USSR when requested. D.C. 4 Ottawa Protocol (July 1, 194430 June 1945). by Robert Beckhusen Key point: If the West had not invaded Europe and provided equipment, it would have. British and Commonwealth deliveries to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 would not only assist in the Soviet defense of Moscow and subsequent counteroffensive, but also in increasing Soviet production for the next period of the war. The Lend-Lease agreements with 30 countries provided for repayment not in terms of money or returned goods, but in "joint action directed towards the creation of a liberalized international economic order in the postwar world." 3, S. 468. Of this, $6.8 billion came from the British and the Commonwealth. Only 205 of these tanks were heavy or medium types, and most of their strength was concentrated in the Western Front, with the Kalinin Front having only two tank battalions (67 tanks) and the Southwestern Front two tank brigades (30 tanks). 5-6. re: In hindsight was it a mistake for the US to ally with the Soviet Union during WW2. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941. During early February 1941, a Gallup poll revealed that 54% of Americans were in favor of giving aid to the British without qualifications of Lend-Lease. David Glantz, the American military historian known for his books on the Eastern front, concludes: Although Soviet accounts have routinely belittled the significance of Lend-Lease in the sustainment of the Soviet war effort, the overall importance of the assistance cannot be understated. L.7711, H.R. Thanks to Lend-Lease, during the war years, the Soviet Union received about 14.8 thousand aircraft, 7.1 thousand tanks, 8.2 thousand anti-aircraft guns, a large number of cars, tractors and other vital supplies.

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how important was lend lease to the soviet union