how important was lend lease to the soviet union

1776, 55Stat. [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. During the bitter fighting of the winter of 19411942, British aid made a crucial difference. Lend Lease | Encyclopedia.com Roosevelt approved $1billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain at the end of October 1941. In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. In turn, this would have allowed the German commanders to escape at least some encirclements, while forcing the Red Army to prepare and conduct many more deliberate penetration attacks in order to advance the same distance. The invasion had cost the USSR a huge amount of its agricultural base; during the initial Axis offensive of 194142, the total sown area of the USSR fell by 41.9% and the number of collective and state farms by 40%. Dear h, I don't doubt the word of the old gent seeing USA on "Soviet" equipment. Just 446 locomotives were produced during the war,[39] with only 92 of those being built between 1942 and 1945. 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. The Lend-Lease Act was designed to provide allies with aircraft and supplies for the war in Europe. In Walter Yust, ed., "17 Billion Budget Drafted; Defense Takes 10 Billions. It needed all the available resources to pressure Germany on the lands far from Moscow, where Germany was getting a degree of home advantage. The Hurricane was rugged and tried and tested, and as useful at that point as many potentially superior Soviet designs such as the LaGG-3 and MiG-3. While Soviet pilots praised the maneuverability of the homegrown I-153 Chaika and I-16 Ishak fightersstill in use in significant numbers in late 1941both types were certainly obsolete and inferior in almost all regards to the British-supplied Hurricane. In practice, very little equipment was in usable shape for peacetime uses. U.S. Citizens with emergencies, please call +(7) (495) 728-5577, Outside of Office Hours, contact: +7 (495) 728-5000. What Was the Lend-Lease Act? - The Defense of the United States north, and in particular for the Northern Fleet.102Much of the material. ", In practice, very little was returned except for a few unarmed transport ships. billion (about $ billion in prices ) were sent to several dozen recipient countries, including the main ones: . Originally intended to lend arms and material to the. The story of how that microfilm came to be in the National Archives is a convoluted tale worthy of telling. re: In hindsight was it a mistake for the US to ally with the Soviet Union during WW2. Lend-Lease tanks and aircrafts > WW2 Weapons On March 12, 1943, the plane was given to the Soviet Air Force in Fairbanks, Alaska, and given the registration USSR-N238. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.". The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. How important was Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union? In December 1940, President Roosevelt proclaimed the United States would be the "Arsenal of Democracy" and proposed selling munitions to Britain and Canada. In 1941, the threat of World War II drove passage of the Lend-Lease Act repealing key provisions of the Neutrality Acts. While I was in training, my motivation was to get these wings and I wear them today proudly, the airman recalled in 2015. .. 'We would have lost': Did U.S. lend-lease aid tip the balance in Soviet He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. Originally, the American policy was to help the British but not join the war. Bill Introduced in the House Would Allow US to Lend Weapons to Taiwan US Neutrality Acts of the 1930s and the Lend-Lease Act - ThoughtCo Alerts and Messages for U.S. visitors to Russia. Even Joseph Stalin himself would say that the lend-lease was . [citation needed]. [18], The vote in the Senate, which occurred on 9 March, revealed a similar partisan difference: 49 Democrats (79 percent) voted "aye" with only 13 Democrats (21 percent) voting "nay". ): Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. . How Much Did Lend Lease Help Russia? - Czech Heritage The Red Army was a force to be reckoned with and was willing to sustain unlimited casualties. How important was the Lend Lease Act for the Soviet Union - Quora By July 1942 the Red Army had 13,500 tanks in service, with more than 16 percent of those imported, and more than half of those British. [56] Nevertheless, some 8,244,000 tons of goods went by this route, 50% of the total. Roosevelt concluded that the United States needed to help the Soviets fight against the Germans. use.' On the negative side, however, it must be recorded that actual [33], The program was gradually terminated after V-E Day. Lend-Lease: Western Aid for the Soviet Union - YouTube For travel to the United States on a temporary basis, including tourism, temporary employment, study and exchange. A particular critical aspect of Lend-Lease was the supply of food. 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. Together with other recently published sources, including the wartime diaries of N. I. Biriukov, a Red Army officer responsible from August 1941 on for the distribution of recently acquired tanks to the front lines, this newly available evidence paints a very different picture from the received wisdom. By spring and summer of 1942 the Hurricane had clearly become the principal fighter aircraft of the Northern Fleets air regiments; in all, 83 out of its 109 fighters were of foreign origin. 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. Langer, William L. and S. Everett Gleason. How important was lend lease to Soviet Union? 1. Lend-Lease kept the Soviet home front going through the winter of 1941 and throughout 1942. by Robert Beckhusen Key point: If the West had not invaded Europe and provided equipment, it would have. The first of these units to have seen action seems to have been the 138th Independent Tank Battalion (with twenty-one British tanks), which was involved in stemming the advance of German units in the region of the Volga Reservoir to the north of Moscow in late November. 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. President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill into law on March 11, 1941. Materials totalling $. 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. [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). Dec 7, 1941 . Regardless of Soviet cold-war attempts to forget (or at least diminish) the importance of Lend-lease, the total impact of the Lend-Lease shipment for the Soviet war effort and entire national economy can only be characterized as both dramatic and of decisive importance. The US Supported Soviet Union with Lend-Lease Program - YouTube 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. Although it was not entirely reasonable that Canada should pay for any construction that the Canadian Government considered unnecessary or that did not conform to Canadian requirements, nevertheless considerations of self-respect and national sovereignty led the Canadian Government to suggest a new financial agreement. [nb 2][9] Sympathetic to the British plight, but hampered by public opinion and the Neutrality Acts, which forbade arms sales on credit or the lending of money to belligerent nations, Roosevelt eventually came up with the idea of "lendlease". Surplus military equipment was of no value in peacetime. How much Soviet equipment was Lend-Lease? Initially, this proposal failed, but after Germany invaded Poland in September, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1939 ending the munitions embargo on a "cash and carry" basis. . In particular, it shows that British Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 played a far more significant part in the defense of Moscow and the revival of Soviet fortunes in late 1941 than has been acknowledged. Lend-Lease: How the US Kept the Soviets Afloat in World War II 5-6. In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Roosevelt bypassed these restrictions by persuading Congress to permit the government to sell military supplies to France and Britain on a cash-and-carry basisin other words, they could pay cash for American-made supplies and then transport them on their own ships. [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. Havlat, Denis. The U.S. asked for $1.3 billion at the cessation of hostilities to settle the debt, but was only offered $170 million by the USSR. In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of June 27, 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge. The Arctic route was the shortest and most direct route for lend-lease aid to the USSR, though it was also the most dangerous as it involved sailing past German-occupied Norway. The Soviets lost a substantial number of draft and farm animals as they were not able to relocate all the animals in an area before it was captured and of those areas in which the Axis forces would occupy, the Soviets had lost 7 million of out of 11.6 million horses, 17 million out of 31 million cows, 20 million of 23.6 million pigs and 27 million out of 43 million sheep and goats. The political fog of the Cold War often marred the truth about the vehicles received. [34], Lend-Lease contributed to the Allied victory. Large quantities of undelivered goods were in Britain or in transit when Lend-Lease terminated on September 2, 1945. 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. This was agreed upon before the signing of the first protocol on October 1, 1941, and extension of credit. Interested in U.S. History? Check out A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Amazon https://amzn.to/3lS8oVMLike & Subscribe for Daily US H. [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. Britain also supplied extensive material assistance to American forces stationed in Europe, for example the USAAF was supplied with hundreds of Spitfire Mk V and Mk VIII fighter aircraft. WWII lend-lease: was the US aid that helpful? (I) It permitted him to "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of, to any such government [whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States] any defense article." In th. [82] In June 1942, SSPort Nicholson was sunk en route from Halifax to New York, allegedly with Soviet platinum, gold, and diamonds aboard; the wreck was discovered in 2008. 2009. pp. This inevitably produced shortages of related products that are required for industrial or logistical uses, particularly unarmored vehicles. Painting of Lend-Lease tanks and equipment - Axis History Forum A steady stream of British-made tanks continued to flow into the Red Army through the spring and summer of 1942. . Russian historian: Importance of Lend-Lease cannot be overestimated The history of Lend-Lease began on May 15, 1940 when UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked Roosevelt to temporarily.

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