Originally, the American policy was to help the British but not join the war. I don't want $15I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. (German Language). On April 23, 1947, it was forced to make an emergency landing with 36 people on board near the village of Volochanka on the Taimyr Peninsula. Check out A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Amazon https://amzn.to/3lS8oVMLike & Subscribe for Daily US H. L. 77-11, H.R. Almost all European nations outside the Soviet bloc were members of the plan from the beginning. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. The Soviets have long insisted that Lend-Lease aid made little difference. 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. 28, 30, 31, harvnb error: no target: CITEREFHardesty1991 (, Soviet Supply Protocols. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. Recd 11/12/41. The political fog of the Cold War often marred the truth about the vehicles received. So the Soviets were charged 10 cents on the dollar of actual cost. 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. To: The War Office. Posted on 2/25/23 at 2:25 pm to WPBTiger. Mongolian lamb and meat donations to the front lines outperformed those sent by the Lend-Lease Act. And Soviet forces would have been much more poorly coordinated with a constant lack of radio equipment. . . "[10] As the President himself put it, "There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs."[11]. 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. And the Soviet Union didn't pay much of that. [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. 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. 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. 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. Lend Lease came as a response to the Axis Powers' violence and showed that America was committed to defending their nation and its . 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. Officially the "Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry". The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. 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. But in order to sustain the war effort all the way back to Germany, Lend-Lease was decisive. The 19th and Early 20th Century History. 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 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. Democrats. The Persian Corridor was the longest route, and was not fully operational until mid-1942. About 15 percent of the aircraft of the 6th Fighter Air Corps defending Moscow were Tomahawks or Hurricanes. initially requested by the Soviet Union from Britain was naval, in the. I will quote at length: "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. Democrats voted 238 to 25 in favor and Republicans 24 in favor and 135 against. ", In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. In the case of the Soviet Union, this residual civilian-type lend-lease was valued by the United States at $2.6 billion (out of total lend-lease to the Soviet Union of $10.8 billion). re: In hindsight was it a mistake for the US to ally with the Soviet Union during WW2. 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". Any mention of the role that Western assistance played in the Soviet war effort was strictly off-limits. In 1941, the threat of World War II drove passage of the Lend-Lease Act repealing key provisions of the Neutrality Acts. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. How much Soviet equipment was Lend-Lease? Known today as 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. The 1930s began with one of the world's greatest economic depressionswhich had started in the United Statesand the later recession of 193738 (although minor relative to the Great Depression) was otherwise also one of the worst of the 20th century. That the Soviet victories of late 1941 were won with Soviet blood and largely with Soviet weapons is beyond dispute. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about $11 billion. British Matilda tanks are loaded onto a ship for transportation to the U.S.S.R. as part of the Lend-Lease program. Reverse Lend-Lease to the United States totalled $7.8 billion. 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. [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. But the Soviet Union was never alone: Months before the United States formally entered the war, it had already begun providing massive military and economic assistance to its Soviet ally through the Lend-Lease program. At the end of 1941 there were greater numbers of the MiG-3, but the plane was considered difficult to fly. 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]. [citation needed] The USSR had only a very small number of heavy bombers in comparison. But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.[48]. Deane, John R. 1947. 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. A total of 699 Lend-Lease aircraft had been delivered to Archangel by the time the Arctic convoys switched to Murmansk in December 1941. Yes, in 1942 Lend-Lease was of course important for Soviet Russia. The program started 3 months after the German invasion of USSR in June, 1941. Particularly important for the Soviets in late 1941 were British-supplied tanks and aircraft. Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The pact was terminated when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Originally intended to lend arms and material to the. 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. 4, 48. The American lend and lease system was introduced in the beginning of the war to support Great Britain in their struggle with Germany. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. [33], The program was gradually terminated after V-E Day. the president asked at a press conference. [45], Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conference during 1943, acknowledged publicly the importance of American efforts during a dinner at the conference: "Without American machines the United Nations could never have won the war."[46][47]. In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. How important was the US lend-lease? newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday. 1. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so. It provided Britain and the Soviet Union with limited war materiel beginning in October that year. 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. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1982, Bd. It needed all the available resources to pressure Germany on the lands far from Moscow, where Germany was getting a degree of home advantage.