how important was lend lease to the soviet union

The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about $11 billion. The story of how that microfilm came to be in the National Archives is a convoluted tale worthy of telling. On April 23, 1947, this C-37 was forced to make an emergency landing with 36 people on board near the village of Volochanka on the Taimyr Peninsula. At a time when Soviet industry was in disarraymany of their industrial plants were destroyed or captured by the advancing Nazi troops or in the process of evacuation eastbattlefield losses of specific equipment approached or even exceeded the rate at which Soviet domestic production could replace them during this crucial period. Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs: I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. The program started 3 months after the German invasion of USSR in June, 1941. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2023 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Lend-Lease Act was signed into law on March 11, 1941, and ended on September 20, 1945. [29] WWII program to provide U.S. allies with free armaments, This article is about the World War II program. 19329 posts. [56] Nevertheless, some 8,244,000 tons of goods went by this route, 50% of the total. On February 24, 1943, a Douglas C-47 Skytrain transport aircraft with serial number 42-32892 rolled out of a factory in Long Beach, California, and was handed over to the U.S. Air Force. Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches. In addition, much of the $31 billion worth of aid sent to the United Kingdom was also passed on to the Soviet Union via convoys through the Barents Sea to Murmansk. ", "Address Is Spur To British Hopes; Confirmation of American Aid in Conflict is Viewed as Heartening, A joining of interests, Discarding of Peace Talks is Regarded as a Major Point in the Speech.". Marshall Plan Countries. Other largely British-equipped tank units in action with the Western Front from early December were the 131st Independent Tank Brigade, which fought to the east of Tula, south of Moscow, and 146th Tank Brigade, in the region of Kriukovo to the immediate west of the Soviet capital. 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). The Lend-Lease program also sent tons of factory equipment and machine tools to the Soviet Union, including more than 38,000 lathes and other metal-working tools. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. On December 7, 1940, its Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed President Roosevelt in a 15-page letter for American help. The United States used lend-lease to induce recipients to the American way of thinking, especially regarding the economy and free-market trade. 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. This was mostly in the form of landing, servicing, and refueling of transport aircraft; some industrial machinery and rare minerals were sent to the U.S. It is commonly agreed that the implementation of the Lend-Lease Act greatly increased the strength of the Soviet Union and Great Britain against Germany, the two biggest gainers in this Act. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. Supply volumes and the significance of lend-lease. ), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Reverse lend-lease policies comprised services such as rent on bases used by the U.S., and totaled $7.8billion; of this, $6.8billion came from the British and the Commonwealth, mostly Australia and India. On May 11, 1947, 27 people were rescued, having spent nearly three weeks in the icebound wreck. Member since Oct 2007. BM-13N Katyusha on a Lend-Lease Studebaker US6 truck, at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Moscow, In June 1941, within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR, the Anglo-Soviet Agreement was made and the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic Sea route to Murmansk, arriving in September. 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. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1982, Bd. "Transatlantic Generosity: Canada's 'Billion Dollar Gift' to the United Kingdom in the Second World War.". Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. According to research by a team of Soviet historians, the Soviet Union lost a staggering 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. 5-6. Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today's currency, the Lend-Lease Act of the United States supplied needed goods to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the "enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy bloodthirsty Hitlerism." 400,000 jeeps & trucks; 14,000 airplanes "It was not just some piece of scrap metal. Between June 1941 and May 1945, Britain delivered to the USSR: In total 4million tonnes of war material including food and medical supplies were delivered. Much of the logistical assistance of the Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks and by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. The records constitute the primary policy and subject files on World War II Lend-Lease to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 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. Ukraine is in the process of joining the European Union and has submitted an application for NATO membership. In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $719billion in 2021) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.[2] In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies. For the Australian company, see. The British Military Mission to Moscow noted that by December 9, about ninety British tanks had already been in action with Soviet forces. Roosevelt approved $1billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain at the end of October 1941. So the Soviets were charged 10 cents on the dollar of actual cost. . Interested in U.S. History? Mackenzie, Hector. Exmo. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Some 3,964,000 tons of goods were shipped by the Arctic route; 7% was lost, while 93% arrived safely. The Soviet debt for Lend-Lease supplies was finally paid and closed as part of the settlements with the Paris Club on August 21, 2006. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. Crowley, Leo T. "Lend Lease" in Walter Yust, ed. Churchill also granted the US base rights in Bermuda and Newfoundland for free; this act allowed their British garrison to be redeployed to more crucial theatres. US Government Printing Office. But for decades the official Soviet line went much further. 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. James Phinney Baxter III (Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development), Wolfgang Schumann (et al. Lend-Lease assistance to the USSR. The passage of the 1939 amendment to the previous Neutrality Acts marked the beginning of a congressional shift away from isolationism, making a first step toward interventionism. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. 3, S. 468. [7], During this same period, the U.S. government began to mobilize for total war, instituting the first-ever peacetime draft and a fivefold increase in the defense budget (from $2billion to $10billion). [79], Congress had not authorized the gift of supplies delivered after the cutoff date, so the U.S. charged for them, usually at a 90% discount. [80], The final payment of $83.3million (42.5million), due on December 31, 2006 (repayment having been deferred in the allowed five years and during a sixth year not allowed), was made by Britain on December 29, 2006 (the last working day of the year). After a decade of neutrality, Roosevelt knew that the change to Allied support must be gradual, given the support for isolationism in the country. The Soviet government at first offered to pay $170 million. In the case of the Soviet Union, this residual civilian-type lend-lease was valued by the United States at $2.6 billion (out of total lend-lease to the Soviet Union of $10.8 billion). "Western Aid for the Soviet Union During World. Franklin D. Roosevelt had committed the United States in June 1940 to materially aiding the opponents of fascism, but, under existing U.S. law, the United Kingdom had to pay for its growing arms purchases from the United States with cash, popularly known as cash-and-carry. "In order to really assess the significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet victory, you only have to imagine how the Soviet Union would have had to fight if there had been no Lend-Lease aid," Sokolov wrote. Even Joseph Stalin himself would say that the lend-lease was . But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised. Photo: Museum of the U.S. Air Force (Courtesy Photo).

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