how important was lend lease to the soviet union

Canada would eventually produce 1,420 Valentines, almost exclusively for delivery to the Soviet Union. Did Soviet Union Repay Lend-lease? - Caniry 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. 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. LEND LEASE. The total of defense materials and services that Canada received through lend-lease channels amounted in value to approximately $419,500,000. In spring 1944, the House passed a bill to renew the Lend-Lease program by a vote of 334 to 21. 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. American and Soviet pilots pose in front of a Bell P-39 Airacobra, supplied to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program. Allen (1946) p 252. 3, S. 468. Lend-Lease aid did not save the Soviet Union from defeat during the Battle of Moscow. Such machines were of higher quality than analogues produced in the Soviet Union, which made a significant contribution to boosting Soviet industrial production. In fact our armed forces in Britain, ground as well as air, receive as reverse lend-lease, with no payment by us, one third of all the supplies and equipment they currently require, Britain furnishes 90% of their medical supplies and in spite of her food shortage, 20% of their food.[78]. External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein. During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the US Treasury as a form of cashless repayment of Lend-Lease. [12] The aim of the British Technical and Scientific Mission was to obtain the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of the research and development work completed by the UK up to the beginning of World War II, but that Britain itself could not exploit due to the immediate requirements of war-related production. 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. Under these circumstances even small quantities of aid took on far greater significance. President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill into law on March 11, 1941. . 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. Interested in U.S. History? 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. Even Joseph Stalin himself would say that the lend-lease was . 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. north, and in particular for the Northern Fleet.102Much of the material. Materiel delivered under the act was supplied at no cost, to be used until returned or destroyed. Reverse Lend-Lease to the United States totalled $7.8 billion. Britain wished to retain some of this equipment in the immediate post-war period. The handing over of forty imported machine tools to Aviation Factory No. While I was in training, my motivation was to get these wings and I wear them today proudly, the airman recalled in 2015. 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. 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. Learn more about quality higher-education opportunities in the U.S. that you will not find anywhere else in the world. From 1941 to 1945, total lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union accounted for only 5% of the Soviet GDP in total. 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. New Orleans. 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. The Red Army was a force to be reckoned with and was willing to sustain unlimited casualties. How important was the Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort? He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. 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." . 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. A total of 22,800 armored vehicles were delivered to the Red Army during World War II, of which 1,981 were lost in dangerous Arctic convoys. L.7711, H.R. 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. In addition, there would have been constant shortages of transportation and fuel. On December 7, 1940, its Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed President Roosevelt in a 15-page letter for American help. CMV: Lend Lease to the Soviet Union during WWII was a massive mistake Recd 11/12/41. 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. Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was nominally managed by Stettinius. In January 1941, following up on his campaign pledge and the prime minister's appeal for arms, Roosevelt proposed to Congress a new military aid bill. [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 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about $11 billion. 1776, 55Stat. adopted, it is in some important respects anachronistic today. . Lend Lease Acts - Lend Lease Lend Lease: A Transformation of - Studocu And they would have been perpetually hungry without American canned meat and fats. 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. Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States (Pub. [73][74], Reverse Lend-Lease was the supply of equipment and services to the United States. [citation needed]. .. The terms of the agreement provided that the materiel was to be used until returned or destroyed. [22], In February 1942, the U.S. and Britain signed the Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement[23] as part of a greater multilateral system, developed by the Allies during the war, to provide each other with goods, services, and mutual aid in the widest sense, without charging commercial payments. "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. Canada also aided the United Kingdom and other Allies with the Billion Dollar Gift and Mutual Aid totalling $3.4 billion in supplies and services (equivalent to $61 billion in 2020) .[4][5]. 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. 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". This inevitably produced shortages of related products that are required for industrial or logistical uses, particularly unarmored vehicles. Lend-Lease aircraft supplied to the Red Air Force 1942-1944: References and literature American M3 tanks on the railway near Murmansk after arriving in Northern Russia. 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 should be remembered that during World War I, the transportation crisis in Russia in 1916-17 that did a lot to facilitate the February Revolution [which lead to the abdication of the tsar] was caused by a shortage in the production of railway rails, engines, and freight cars because industrial production had been diverted to munitions," Sokolov wrote. How important was lend lease to Soviet Union? On March 12, 1943, the plane was given to the Soviet Air Force in Fairbanks, Alaska, and given the registration USSR-N238. the president asked at a press conference. [55], The Pacific Route opened in August 1941, but was affected by the start of hostilities between Japan and the U.S.; after December 1941, only Soviet ships could be used, and, as Japan and the USSR observed a strict neutrality towards each other, only non-military goods could be transported. Lend-Lease started in March 1941, providing for military aid to any country whose defense was considered vital to the security of the U.S. Lend-Lease: How the US Kept the Soviets Afloat in World War II 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. . 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. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the End of World War II Lend-Lease: Western Aid for the Soviet Union - YouTube From there, it flew 5,650 kilometers to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, one of some 14,000 aircraft sent by the United States to the Soviet Union during World War II under the massive Lend-Lease program. This Douglas is the only Lend-Lease aircraft that remains in Russia.". The pact was terminated when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. 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. $31 billion went to Britain, $11 billion to the Soviet Union, $3 billion to France, and $1.6 billion to China. Arctic convoys of World War II - Wikipedia ", In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. The Government of Mongolia donated its gold and hard currency reserves to the Soviet Union for four years in a row. It is an indication of the extent to which the British have been able to pool their resources with ours so that the needed weapon may be in the hands of that soldierwhatever may be his nationalitywho can at the proper moment use it most effectively to defeat our common enemies.[76]. Lend-Lease tanks and aircrafts > WW2 Weapons On March 11, 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. 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. But Was He Drugged Into Confessing. I recently heard someone claim that the Soviet Union would have been unable to survive Operation Barbarossa and subsequent German offensives without the vast amount of supplies they received from the Allies under the Lend-Lease program. . First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. Lend Lease came as a response to the Axis Powers' violence and showed that America was committed to defending their nation and its . 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. In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain the British government sent the Tizard Mission to the United States. Milestones: 1937-1945 - Office of the Historian From 1941 and onwards, the RKKA used extensive numbers . 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. [1] There was no repayment required. And the Soviet Union didn't pay much of that. On the Allied side, there was almost total reliance upon American industrial production, weaponry and especially unarmored vehicles purpose-built for military use, vital for the modern army's logistics and support. Mystery surrounds the infamous burning of the Reichstag in 1933. The US Supported Soviet Union with Lend-Lease Program - YouTube Stettinius. A map of lend-lease shipments from the United States to the U.S.S.R. from 1941-45. 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. The country's agriculture was in a difficult situation. During World War II, the Soviet Union received almost 15,000 U.S.-built aircraft under the lend-lease program. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. 2009. . The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. The legislation is modeled off the World War II-era Lend-Lease Act that allowed the US to arm the Soviet Union, Britain, and other allies prior to its entry into the war. On September 20, 1945, all Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union was terminated. 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. A particular critical aspect of Lend-Lease was the supply of food. billion (about $ billion in prices ) were sent to several dozen recipient countries, including the main ones: The distribution of loans was 90% to the UK, 5% to Australia, 1% to New Zealand, 3% to India, and zero to Canada. The Lend-Lease act was enacted in March 1941 and authorized the United States to provide weapons, provisions, and raw materials to strategically important countries fighting Germany and Japan primarily, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. British Matilda tanks are loaded onto a ship for transportation to the U.S.S.R. as part of the Lend-Lease program. 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. Check out A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Amazon https://amzn.to/3lS8oVMLike & Subscribe for Daily US H. Report from Mikoyan to Stalin and Molotov regarding Lend-Lease Collection. [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". At the end of November 1941, only 670 Soviet tanks were available to defend Moscowthat is, in the recently formed Kalinin, Western, and Southwestern Fronts. At a time when the majority of Americans opposed direct participation in the war, Lend-Lease represented a vital U.S. contribution to the fight against Nazi Germany. 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. Democrats voted 238 to 25 in favor and Republicans 24 in favor and 135 against. [27] Other recipients were led by $11.3billion ($137billion) to the Soviet Union, $3.2billion ($38.7billion) to France, $1.6billion ($19.3billion) to China, and the remaining $2.6billion to the other Allies. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. US Neutrality Acts of the 1930s and the Lend-Lease Act - ThoughtCo