how important was lend lease to the soviet union

One of the greatest differences with prior wars was the enormous increase in the mobility of armies. 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]. Ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) provided amounted to 53 percent of total domestic consumption. The agreement was that all temporary construction for the use of American forces and all permanent construction required by the United States forces beyond Canadian requirements would be paid for by the United States, and that the cost of all other construction of permanent value would be met by Canada. Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to the United Kingdom at a large discount for 1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States, which were finally repaid in 2006. ", United States Army Center of Military History, "Britain pays off final instalment of US loan after 61 years", "Salvor's report citing recovery of further 29 bars", "Treasure hunters 'find $3billion in platinum on sunken WW2 British ship', Official New Zealand war history of Lend-lease, from, Official New Zealand war history; termination of Mutual Aid from 21 December 1945, from. In a November 1943 report to Congress, President Roosevelt said of Allied participation in reverse Lend-lease: the expenditures made by the British Commonwealth of Nations for reverse lend-lease aid furnished to the United States, and of the expansion of this program so as to include exports of materials and foodstuffs for the account of United States agencies from the United Kingdom and the British colonies, emphasizes the contribution which the British Commonwealth has made to the defense of the United States while taking its place on the battle fronts. On September 20, 1945, all Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union was terminated. The Lend-Lease Act was signed into law on March 11, 1941, and ended on September 20, 1945. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. [24], A total of $50.1billion (equivalent to $606billion in 2021)[26] was involved, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.[2] Most, $31.4billion ($380billion) went to Britain and its empire. President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill into law on March 11, 1941. | AHA", "Lend-Lease and Military Aid to the Allies in the Early Years of World, The United States at war; development and administration of the war program by the federal government, Sea routes of Soviet Lend-Lease:Voice of Russia, "$220 Million in Gold Bullion was Recovered from HMS Edinburgh", "Report to Congress on Reverse Lend-Lease", "Chapter XIV: The United States and Canada: Copartners in Defense. 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. The Soviets have long insisted that Lend-Lease aid made little difference. 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. Following the Nye Committee[nb 1] hearings, as well as influential books of the time, such as Merchants of Death, both 1934, the United States Congress adopted several Neutrality Acts in the 1930s, motivated by non-interventionismfollowing the aftermath of its costly involvement in World War I (the war debts were still not paid off), and seeking to ensure that the country would not become entangled in foreign conflicts again. [49], Roosevelt, eager to ensure public consent for this controversial plan, explained to the public and the press that his plan was comparable to one neighbor's lending another a garden hose to put out a fire in his home. First protocol period from October 1, 1941, to June 30, 1942 (signed October 7, 1941), Second protocol period from July 1, 1942, to June 30, 1943 (signed October 6, 1942), Third protocol period from July 1, 1943, to June 30, 1944 (signed October 19, 1943). United States Army in World War II, Statistics: Lend-Lease World, U.S. Army in WW II, Statistics: Lend-Lease Chief of Military History, 15 Dec 1952, Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland, United States aircraft production during World War II, Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Military history of the United States during World War II, Springwood birthplace, home, and gravesite, Little White House, Warm Springs, Georgia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lend-Lease&oldid=1141045045, United States federal commerce legislation, United States foreign relations legislation, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2022, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, "Pre Lend-lease" June 22, 1941, to September 30, 1941 (paid for in. Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States (Pub. 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. I will quote at length: How important was Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort? For example, in the 4 Ottawa Protocol (July 1, 1944, to June 30, 1945) the USSR requested 240 B-17 bombers and 300 B-24 bombers, none of which were supplied. American contributions of the time were far fewer. Extrapolating from available statistics, researchers estimate that British-supplied tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and certainly made up a significant proportion of tanks available as reinforcements at this critical point in the fighting. This is the official website of the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia. "In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler," Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL's Russian Service. 4, 48. In the meantime, Great Britain was running out of liquid currency and asked not to be forced to sell off British assets. 5-6. That is the U.S. would be "repaid" when the recipient fought the common enemy and joined the world trade and diplomatic agencies, such as the United Nations.[51]. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1982, Bd. The Yak-1, arguably the best of the batch, and superior in most regards to the Hurricane, suffered from airframe and engine defects in early war production aircraft. Almost all European nations outside the Soviet bloc were members of the plan from the beginning. "The Museum of the Allies and Lend-Lease is a unique, one-of-a-kind museum," said Borodin. 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. [55] This constituted some 23% of the total aid to the USSR during the war. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. D.C. 4 Ottawa Protocol (July 1, 194430 June 1945). Under Lend-Lease, the U.S. shipped more than $50 billion in supplies equivalent to more than $700 billion today. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. Thereafter it saw the passage of 4,160,000 tons of goods, 27% of the total. Joseph Stalin never revealed to his own people the full contributions of Lend-Lease to their country's survival, but he referred to the program at the 1945 Yalta Conference saying, "Lend-Lease is one of Franklin Roosevelt's most remarkable and vital achievements in the . "Western Aid for the Soviet Union During World. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union officially ended in September 1945. The Soviet Northern Fleet was also a major and early recipient of British Hurricanes, receiving those flown by No. Dec 7, 1941 . 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. Lend Lease A transformative example that demonstrated America's willingness and ability to help its allies in times of war was the aid provision America provided to Britain and the Soviet Union during World War II. The Lend-Lease Act was the system by which the U.S. gave away $50 billion in military aid in 1941-45 (during World War II) so that the Allies could better fight Germany and Japan. Only 22% were unequivocally against the President's proposal. Heavy bombers had not been mentioned in previous protocols. 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. 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. Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, America sent arms and equipment to the Soviet Union to help it defeat the Nazi invasion. ", In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. [21], After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entering the war in December 1941, foreign policy was rarely discussed by Congress, and there was very little demand to cut Lend-Lease spending. British Matilda tanks are loaded onto a ship for transportation to the U.S.S.R. as part of the Lend-Lease program. 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. However, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov both stated that Lend-Lease enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Germany on the Eastern Front. . The Soviet Union got arms, ammunition, aircraft, and industrial equipment for its army. . L. 77-11, H.R. 1776, 55Stat. 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. In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain the British government sent the Tizard Mission to the United States. United States and Britain, not the Soviet Union, China, or other United Nations . The Strange Alliance, The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Co-operation with Russia. In 1944, Britain transferred several of the US-made destroyers to the USSR. Roosevelt approved $1billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain at the end of October 1941. 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. Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? They Say He Burned Down the Reichstag. Borodin said he wished to honor and show gratitude to the United States and its veterans who rendered aid to the Soviet Union during World War II. [16] Propaganda showing the devastation of British cities during The Blitz, as well as popular depictions of Germans as savage also rallied public opinion to the Allies, especially after Germany conquered France. The records constitute the primary policy and subject files on World War II Lend-Lease to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 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. by Robert Beckhusen Key point: If the West had not invaded Europe and provided equipment, it would have. Lend-Lease aircraft deliveries were also of significance during the Battle of Moscow. WWII program to provide U.S. allies with free armaments, This article is about the World War II program. The Persian Corridor was the longest route, and was not fully operational until mid-1942. I was recently able to examine Russian-language materials of the State Defense Committeethe Soviet equivalent of the British War Cabinetheld in the former Central Party Archive. on the Soviet war effort during the first year of the war was in the far. In 194546, the value of Reciprocal Aid from New Zealand exceeded that of Lend-Lease, though in 194243, the value of Lend-Lease to New Zealand was much more than that of Reciprocal Aid. New Orleans. 1415 FDR Library", "Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement, February 28, 1942", "The Hyde Park Declaration 1941: Origins and Significance", "Consumer Price Index, annual average, not seasonally adjusted", "Consumer Price Index by product group, monthly, percentage change, not seasonally adjusted, Canada, provinces, Whitehorse, Yellowknife and Iqaluit", "America Reports On Aid To Allies etc. From 1941 to 1945, total lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union accounted for only 5% of the Soviet GDP in total. 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. When poll participants were asked their party affiliation, the poll revealed a political divide: 69% of Democrats were unequivocally in favor of Lend-Lease, whereas only 38% of Republicans favored the bill without qualification. By October, German troops were poised outside both Leningrad and Moscow. It allowed the USSR to conquer and subjugate eastern Europe and Manchuria and allowed them to prop up communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, China and North Korea. [6], In 1939 howeveras Germany, Japan, and Italy pursued aggressive, militaristic policiesPresident Roosevelt wanted more flexibility to help contain Axis aggression. Alerts and Messages for U.S. visitors to Russia. That the Soviet victories of late 1941 were won with Soviet blood and largely with Soviet weapons is beyond dispute. "[10] As the President himself put it, "There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs."[11]. [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). 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. About $11 billion in war matriel was sent to the Soviet Union under that program. 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. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. It needed all the available resources to pressure Germany on the lands far from Moscow, where Germany was getting a degree of home advantage. Surplus military equipment was of no value in peacetime. 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. The railroads would have periodically come to a halt. 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%. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. Moscow. 2009. pp. Many of our pilots fly Spitfires built in England, many more are flying American fighter planes powered by British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, turned over to us by the British. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. The Lend-Lease agreements with 30 countries provided for repayment not in terms of money or returned goods, but in "joint action directed towards the creation of a liberalized international economic order in the postwar world." In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. Part of the bill required the British to open their empire to trade. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.". "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. 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. In fact, for a brief period during December 1941, the relative importance of British aid increased well beyond levels planned by the Allies as a result of American reaction to the outbreak of war with Japan; some American equipment destined for the Soviet Union was actually unloaded from merchant vessels and provided to American forces instead. 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. 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. Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in todays 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., By U.S. Mission Russia | 10 May, 2020 | Topics: History, News, U.S. & Russia. 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). 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. [65], Warsaw 1945: Willys jeep used by the Polish First Army as part of U.S. Lend-Lease program. After a decade of neutrality, Roosevelt knew that the change to Allied support must be gradual, given the support for isolationism in the country. "During World War II, only the supplies brought in by Lend-Lease prevented the paralysis of rail transport in the Soviet Union." 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. Under conditions of much of European Russia being occupied by the Axis, attrition was a losing prospect for the USSR; without Allied aid they might very well have collapsed as a military power some time in 1943. He suggested amending the act to allow warring nations to purchase military goods, arms and munitions if they paid cash and bore the risks of transporting the goods on non-American ships, a policy that would favor Britain and France. Before becoming secretary of commerce in the Truman administration, he had served in two crucial posts during World War II, as Lend-Lease representative in Britain and then as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. 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. But the Germans were doggedly held off in front of Moscow in late November and early December, and then rolled back by a reinvigorated Red Army in a staggeringly brutal winter counteroffensive. The Neutrality Acts, enacted between 1935 and 1939, were intended to prevent the United States from becoming involved in foreign wars. Most visibly, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks. After this final payment, Britain's Economic Secretary to the Treasury formally issued thanks to the U.S. for its wartime support. [33], The program was gradually terminated after V-E Day. Lend-Lease's precise significance to Allied victory in WW2 is debated. 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". 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. Under these circumstances even small quantities of aid took on far greater significance. When the House of Representatives finally took a roll call vote on February 9, 1941, the 260 to 165 vote was largely along party lines. Lend-Lease Helped Win World War II, But Not On The Eastern Front The evidence is here. This inevitably produced shortages of related products that are required for industrial or logistical uses, particularly unarmored vehicles. Saudi Arabia-Top 10 most important events in the History. Reverse Lend-Lease to the United States totalled $7.8 billion. [75] Reciprocal contributions included the Austin K2/Y military ambulance, British aviation spark plugs used in B-17 Flying Fortresses,[75] Canadian-made Fairmile launches used in anti-submarine warfare, Mosquito photo-reconnaissance aircraft, and Indian petroleum products. Member since Oct 2007. Particularly important for the Soviets in late 1941 were British-supplied tanks and aircraft. Although British shipments amounted to only a few percent of Soviet domestic production of machine tools, the Soviet Union could request specific items which it may not have been able to produce for itself. Britain got of their arms and ammunition from this Act. 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. US Government Printing Office. And the Soviet Union didn't pay much of that. Photo: Museum of the U.S. Air Force (Courtesy Photo). Materials totalling $. 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. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a trickle of information has emerged from archives in Moscow, shedding new light on the subject. In May 1942, HMSEdinburgh was sunk while carrying 4.5 tonnes of Soviet gold intended for the U.S. Treasury. It is obvious from this information that during the period of October 1, 1941, to May 1, 1944, the U.S.A., under Lend-Lease, Sent the Soviet Union arms, equipment, materials, and food totaling $5,357,300,000 and weighing 8,514,000 long tons, not including the weight of 92 delivered ships or the weight of 3333 airplanes, which arrived by air. L.7711, H.R. Crowley, Leo T. "Lend-Lease". A further 15% were in favor of qualifications such as: "If it doesn't get us into war," or "If the British can give us some security for what we give them." It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line. The sole modern heavy bomber the USSR had was the Petlyakov Pe-8, and it only had 27 of them at the start of the war, with fewer than 100 produced until 1945. 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. American aid also provided 4.5 million tons of food, 1.5 million blankets, and 15 million pairs of boots. 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. ): Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. The Lend-Lease law was adopted by the U.S. Congress on March 11, 1941; according to it, all the supplied vehicles, arms, equipment and materials were not to be paid for should they be destroyed. 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. [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. [70][71], Significant numbers of British Churchill, Matilda and Valentine tanks were shipped to the USSR.[72]. Lend-lease was a system of U.S. assistance to the Allies in World War II.It was based on a bill of March, 11, 1941, that gave the president of the United States the right to sell, transfer into property, lease, and rent various kinds of weapons or materials to those countries whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States itself. American deliveries to the Soviet Union can be divided into the following phases: Delivery was via the Arctic Convoys, the Persian Corridor, and the Pacific Route. Evolucin de los . Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion. [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. About 15 percent of the aircraft of the 6th Fighter Air Corps defending Moscow were Tomahawks or Hurricanes. 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. The Lend-Lease Act was designed to provide allies with aircraft and supplies for the war in Europe. [67][68] The British tanks first saw action with the 138 Independent Tank Battalion in the Volga Reservoir on November 20, 1941.

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