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Lend-Lease
Blake Morris
Asher Thomas
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Caleb Gutierrez
How it should be IMO
Leo Martinez
Connor Ward
This shit again
Lend lease sent to the USSR:
Aircraft - 7.411 (CW) + 14.795 (US) = 22.206
Automotive:
— 1.5 ton trucks 151.053 (US)
— 2.5 ton trucks 200.662 (US)
— Willys Jeeps 77.972 (US)
Bren Gun Carriers - 2.560 (CW)
Boots - 15 million pairs (US)
Communications equipment:
— Field phones - 380.135 (US)
— Radios - 40.000 (US)
— Telephone cable - 1.25 million miles (US)
Cotton cloth - 107 million square yards (US)
Foodstuffs - 4.5 million tons (US)
Leather - 49.000 tons (US)
Motorcycles - 35.170 (US)
Locomotives - 1.981 units (US)
Rolling stock - 11.155 units (US)
Tanks - 5.218 (CW) + 7.537 (US) = 12.755
Tractors - 8.701 (US)
Trucks - 4.020 (CW) + 357.883 (US) = 361.903
That's the entirety of Allied Lend Lease to the Soviet Union. We did a good job, that's a lot of stuff to produce and bring to a country on the other side of the world during a maritime war effort; but that's barely 10% of Soviet production*, and it most certainly did not win the war.
*(The war was decided in the winter of 1941, before the first American trade arrived.)
For more precise numbers:
Aircraft Production
Soviet Union:
1942: 18,251 plus 4,042 lend-lease
1943: 34,637 plus 9,206 lend-lease
1943: 33,210 plus 6,459 lend-lease
Germany:
1942: 17,400
1943: 25,200
1944: 34,300
Tank Production
Soviet Union:
1942: 20,727 plus 4,582 lend-lease
1943: 28,608 plus 3,798 lend-lease
1943: 28,963 plus 3,223 lend-lease
Germany:
1942: 4,800
1943: 11,800
1944: 17,800
(Source: M Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938-45, Cambridge 1985)
At its peak in 1944, Allied aid to the USSR accounted for about 10% of the Soviet GNP.
Even the famed trucks are over-exaggerated
01/01/42
Domestic russian trucks in service: 317,100
Lend lease trucks: 0
—
01/01/43
Domestic Russian trucks in service: 378,800
Lend lease trucks: 22,000
—
01/01/44
Domestic Russian trucks in service: 387,000
Lend lease trucks: 94,100
—
01/01/45
Domestic Russian trucks in service: 395,200
Lend lease trucks: 191,300
—
05/01/45
Domestic russian trucks in service: 385,700
Lend lease trucks: 218,100
—
A) Note: "trucks" cover any kind of military transport vehicles.
B) Note: By 1944 was 4-6% of the trucks in Russian service were captured from the Germans.
IF you take the time to decipher the numbers posted above, you will see that although there is no doubt the LL trucks helped a lot, they were in no way decisive in the outcome of the war (by decisive I mean their absence would have meant a German victory). The Soviets also purposely tailored their production to complement LL materiel deliveries, thus the reduced Soviet truck output from '42 onwards was not a result of their plant being maxed out, it was a conscious decision once it was clear LL trucks would become available in quantity so as to allow domestic production to focus on other areas of industry. On a side note, another little known fact about LL trucks is that about a third of them (119,000 mv) were actually assembled in Soviet factories.
All info on trucks from "Journal of Slavic Military Studies" Vol. 10, June 1997, "Motor Vehicle Transport Deliveries through Lend-Lease" by V.F. Vorsin.
Nicholas Wilson
Arn't these important?
Ian Ortiz
Yes but the number must be put in perspective:
1,900 locomotives could be nice if they came earlier but it was sort of pissing in the ocean anyway
Sauce: izmerov.narod.ru
Jonathan Sanders
Eli Bennett
The tank the soviets (and the Brits) REALLY hated was the M3 Lee, which was complete garbage.
Mason Brown
The Sherman was a good tank in the same way that the T-34 was a good tank: not objectively an amazing tank, but the simplicity of production meant that even if they had loss ratios of 2-1 (neither tank was -that- bad) they would still be producing ten of them for every le ebin dank Tiger or Panther. In real life, the technical superiority of a vehicle always has to be weighed against its production costs.