aid from Britain can be argued to have had the most significant impact. ): Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. A particular critical aspect of Lend-Lease was the supply of food. As one Roosevelt biographer has characterized it: "If there was no practical alternative, there was certainly no moral one either. Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States (Pub. Source: "The Soviet Union: The Defeated Victor" pp. Substantial quantities of machine tools and raw materials, such as aluminum and rubber, were supplied to help Soviet industry back on its feet: 312 metal-cutting machine tools were delivered by convoy PQ-12 alone, arriving in March 1942, along with a range of other items for Soviet factories such as machine presses and compressors. Robert Coalson is a senior correspondent for RFE/RLwho covers Russia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30 percent of Soviet wartime fighter and bomber production (mid 194145). In addition, there would have been constant shortages of transportation and fuel. In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. Britain had been paying for its materiel with gold as part of the "cash and carry" program, as required by the U.S. Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, but by 1941 it had liquidated a large part of its overseas holdings and its gold reserves were becoming depleted in paying for materiel from the United States. 3, S. 468. The American Lend-Lease program was signed into law in March 1941. Only 22% were unequivocally against the President's proposal. [63] The production of heavy bombers in the United States until 1945 amounted to more than 30,000. In fact the British intercepted German communications indicating that German forces had first come in contact with British tanks on the Eastern front on November 26, 1941. 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. American contributions of the time were far fewer. . Lend-Lease thus provided a massive quantity of foodstuffs and agricultural products.[44]. 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%. I believe that lend lease to the USSR was a massive mistake that led directly to the cold war and all the issues associated with it. Of this, $6.8 billion came from the British and the Commonwealth. 106124, Albert L. Weeks The Other Side of Coexistence: An Analysis of Russian Foreign Policy, (New York, Pittman Publishing Corporation, 1974), p. 94, quoted in Albert L. Weeks, Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World, Zaloga (Armored Thunderbolt) pp. 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 Overcoming massive defeats and colossal losses over the first 18 months of the war, the Red Army was able to reorganize and rebuild to form a juggernaut that marched all the way to Berlin. ), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. From: 30 Military Mission. The Neutrality Acts, enacted between 1935 and 1939, were intended to prevent the United States from becoming involved in foreign wars. And it is a salient point that over 80% of the aid was received after June 1942, when the tide of the war had already turned against the Germans on the Eastern Front. [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). [1] There was no repayment required. 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. Most remaining Allies were largely self-sufficient in frontline equipment (such as tanks and fighter aircraft) by this time but Lend-Lease provided a useful supplement in this category and Lend-Lease logistical supplies (including motor vehicles and railroad equipment) were of enormous assistance. [81], While repayment of the interest-free loans was required after the end of the war under the act, in practice the U.S. did not expect to be repaid by the USSR after the war. "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. This was agreed upon before the signing of the first protocol on October 1, 1941, and extension of credit. As the war continued, however, the United States and Great Britain provided many of the implements of war and strategic raw materials necessary for Soviet victory. This act set up a system that would allow the United States to lend or lease war supplies to any nation deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." . ", In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. [15] Though these may be considered the most significant, many other items were also transported, including designs for rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives. 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]. 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 United States and Soviet Union secretly ferried thousands of warplanes from Great . [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". But for decades the official Soviet line went much further. The Persian Corridor was the longest route, and was not fully operational until mid-1942. Roosevelt believed that if the Soviets were defeated the Allies would be far more likely to lose. Agricultural issues were also compounded when the Soviets were on the offensive, as areas liberated from the Axis had been devastated and contained millions of people who needed to be fed. Lend-Lease Helped Win World War II, But Not On The Eastern Front The evidence is here. During World War II, the Soviet Union received almost 15,000 U.S.-built aircraft under the lend-lease program. [69] Lend-Lease tanks constituted 30 to 40 percent of heavy and medium tank strength before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941. At the end of 1941 there were greater numbers of the MiG-3, but the plane was considered difficult to fly. It was said that the Matilda was inferior to the T-34, and in truth it probably was. Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion. Romanus, Charles F. and Riley Sunderland. The Viking Press. Particularly important for the Soviets in late 1941 were British-supplied tanks and aircraft. [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. 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. [83] However, none of this cargo has been salvaged, and no documentation of its treasure has been produced.[84]. 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. [citation needed]. U.S. Citizens with emergencies, please call +(7) (495) 728-5577, Outside of Office Hours, contact: +7 (495) 728-5000. Lend-Lease aircraft deliveries were also of significance during the Battle of Moscow. The Soviets have long insisted that Lend-Lease aid made little difference. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. [3] In terms of administration, the president established the Office of Lend-Lease Administration during 1941, headed by steel executive Edward R. 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 United States used lend-lease to induce recipients to the American way of thinking, especially regarding the economy and free-market trade. Under these circumstances even small quantities of aid took on far greater significance. 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. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease. Collection. The Government of Mongolia donated its gold and hard currency reserves to the Soviet Union for four years in a row. 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. Even Joseph Stalin himself would say that the lend-lease was . ", "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.". Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to Britain at a large discount for 1.075billion, using long-term loans from the United States. LEND LEASE. . The lend/lease military aid program, and the Matilda's role in it, was hardly decisive to the Soviet Union's subsequent victories on the Eastern or Western front. 151 Wing of the RAF, which operated briefly from Soviet airfields near Murmansk. 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. It was part of a scratch operational group of the Western Front consisting of the 18th Rifle Brigade, two ski battalions, the 5th and 20th Tank Brigades, and the 140th Independent Tank Battalion. [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). Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft. The munitions totaled 308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled 120m in 1946 index. [29] In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. Washington. This is the official website of the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia. The aid was given for free on the basis that such help was essential for the defense of the United States. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union officially ended in September 1945. ", Nikolai Ryzhkov, the last head of the government of the Soviet Union, wrote in 2015 that "it can be confidently stated that [Lend-Lease assistance] did not play a decisive role in the Great Victory.". 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. Nikolay Ryzhkov & Georgy Kumanev Food and other strategic deliveries to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act, 19411945, pp. Allen (1946) p 252. How important was the US lend-lease? Ukraine is a founding member of the United Nations and it is also a member of the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, and the OSCE. Britain got of their arms and ammunition from this Act. 5,218 tanks (including 1,380 Valentines from Canada), 323 machinery trucks (mobile vehicle workshops equipped with generators and all the welding and power tools required to perform heavy servicing), 1.15bn ($1.55bn) worth of aircraft engines, Allen, R. G. D. "Mutual Aid Between the U.S. and The British Empire, 1941-45". 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. By October, German troops were poised outside both Leningrad and Moscow. 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. Alerts and Messages for U.S. visitors to Russia. From 1941 to 1945, total lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union accounted for only 5% of the Soviet GDP in total. Crowley, Leo T. "Lend Lease" in Walter Yust, ed. During Nikita Khrushchevs rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a window of greater frankness and openness about the extent of aid supplied from the West under the Lend-Lease Actbut it was still clearly forbidden for Soviet authors to suggest that such aid ever made any real difference on the battlefield. 1. 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. It needed all the available resources to pressure Germany on the lands far from Moscow, where Germany was getting a degree of home advantage. [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. .. The Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937 intended to keep the United States out of war, by making it illegal for Americans to sell or transport arms, or other war materials to warring nationsneither to aggressors, nor to defenders. To address balance of payment issues between the US and Canada, and to prevent the US monopolizing British orders, the Hyde Park Declaration of 20 April 1941[28] made weapons and components manufactured in Canada for Britain eligible for Lend-Lease financing as if they had been manufactured in the US. This inevitably produced shortages of related products that are required for industrial or logistical uses, particularly unarmored vehicles. 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. The 19th and Early 20th Century History. In 1946, the post-war Anglo-American loan further indebted Britain to the U.S. Lend-Lease items retained were sold to Britain at 10% of nominal value, giving an initial loan value of 1.075billion for the Lend-Lease portion of the post-war loans. "[10] As the President himself put it, "There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs."[11]. The British Eighth Army under Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery employed U.S. planes, guns and tanks when they whipped Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The Lend-Lease policy was officially titled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States", and was a program where the U.S. supplied Free France, Great Britain and the Republic of China with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and August 1945. . How much Soviet equipment was Lend-Lease? Canada was not a direct recipient of Lend-Lease aid. After the war, it was transferred to civilian aviation, carrying passengers over the frozen tundra above the Arctic Circle. Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off. Mentions of Lend-Lease in memoirs were always accompanied by disparagement of the quality of the weapons supplied, with American and British tanks and planes invariably portrayed as vastly inferior to comparable Soviet models. on the Soviet war effort during the first year of the war was in the far. [11] Isolationists were strongly opposed, warning it would result in American involvement with what was considered by most Americans as an essentially European conflict. The plan proposed by FDR was to "lend-lease or otherwise dispose of arms" and other supplies needed by any country whose security was vital to the defense of the United States. The Short History Of The Great Patriotic War, also from 1948, acknowledged the Lend-Lease shipments, but concluded: "Overall this assistance was not significant enough to in any way exert a decisive influence over the course of the Great Patriotic War. In all, the United States shipped $50 billion ($608 billion in 2020 money) worth of materiel under the program, including $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union. 2009. pp. But the speed at which Britain in particular was willing and able to provide aid to the Soviet Union, and at which the Soviet Union was able to put foreign equipment into frontline use, is still an underappreciated part of this story. It provided Britain and the Soviet Union with limited war materiel beginning in October that year. 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 most important aspect of Lend Lease was the first few months of the war when British Aircraft and Tanks represented such a huge influx of material while the Soviets had factories still in transit etc. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. [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. TNA WO 193/580, Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, Allied technological cooperation during World War II, "Letter, Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt, December 7, 1940, pp. In April 1945, Congress voted that it should not be used for post-conflict purposes, and in August 1945, after Japan surrendered, the program was ended. 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. A steady stream of British-made tanks continued to flow into the Red Army through the spring and summer of 1942. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised. To: The War Office. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. This was the first big war in which whole formations were routinely motorized; soldiers were supported with large numbers of all kinds of vehicles. Thereafter it saw the passage of 4,160,000 tons of goods, 27% of the total. In December 1940, President Roosevelt proclaimed the United States would be the "Arsenal of Democracy" and proposed selling munitions to Britain and Canada. Dec 7, 1941 . [34], Lend-Lease contributed to the Allied victory. . The exploits of the British-equipped 136th Independent Tank Battalion are perhaps the most widely noted in the archives. The Soviet Union got arms, ammunition, aircraft, and industrial equipment for its army. The British Commonwealth and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union reciprocated with a smaller Reverse Lend-Lease program. newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, we Mongols stood with our northern neighbor as best we could. (German Language). The country's agriculture was in a difficult situation. [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. 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. [35] Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain the British government sent the Tizard Mission to the United States. Lend-Lease aid did not save the Soviet Union from defeat during the Battle of Moscow. Even aid that might seem like a drop in the bucket in the larger context of Soviet production for the war played a crucial role in filling gaps at important moments during this period.
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