Te estoy diciendo que la Urss sin la ayuda americana no hubiera ganado

Lend-lease is my special interest in world war 2, and this is formulated correctly. The question is exactly not, whether lend-lease was delivered, or if it mattered. It is exactly, how much did it matter, and when did it matter. The short answer is that lend-lease made up around 4–5% of Soviet GDP by value, but that GDP measurements in a communist society is not that helpful. So let’s try some other indicators.

Let’s start by talking the really big picture here, the United States shipments totaled 16 million metric ton almost precisely. It should be noted, some of these shipments were lost at sea, spoiled or got diverted. Either way, the total amount of shipped did not equal what was delivered, but it was close enough for our purposes.

The chronology of when shipments arrived is fairly important. The Soviets were most desperate for supplies in 1941 and 1942, however, most American supplies arrived after that. In fact 71% of all lend-lease supplies arrived after the Soviets had won the Battle of Kursk. For a brief overview of delivery periods you can behold the graph below.

I am trying to cover everything here, so I will be incredibly brief, but understand many things are far more complicated than the brief overview, I will give some judgements on various categories of equipment that is almost always brought up.

How significant were trucks? Quite important later in the war. By the end of 1943, so half a year after Kursk, lend-lease trucks made up around 16.8% of trucks, before Kursk the amount of lend-lease trucks were fair insignificant.

How significant were locomotives? Not at all, locomotives arrived very late, and in small numbers they had basically no impact on WW2.

How significant were aircraft? Aircraft were significant right away, not only did aircraft arrive in significant numbers, but unlike most materials, arrived early when they were most needed.

How significant were tanks? Tanks were not very significant, they arrived in smaller numbers than aircraft, and many tanks delivered were lower quality light tanks such as the M3 Stuart. While lend-lease medium tanks like the Sherman were good quality, they made up not even 1 out of 10 Soviet medium tanks.

That’s a lot of charts, but I hope this illustrates a pretty obvious trend. Generally speaking lend-lease arrived after the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. There is a wide consensus that after the battle of Kursk, Germany could no longer hope to win no matter what, and since most lend-lease arrived then.

In short, should be clear, that lend-lease probably did not alter the cause of the war, a conclusion also reached by economic historian Mark Harrison, and military historians David Glantz and Jonathan House. Though it may have helped to shorten the war, reduce casualties and help the Soviet economy to recover.

Preempting some common comments here:

Lend-lease aluminium and copper were delivered in significant quantities, but not making up even half of Soviet domestic production. Both metals were important, but it should be noted most soviet aircraft had wooden frames, and aluminium was not required to make them except for the engines. Statistics are available for metal production in Mark Harrison’s “Accounting for War”

Lend-lease food, did not save the USSR and could not have fed the Soviet army even remotely. The Soviet Union produced over 100 million tons of food per year during WW2, they received around 3 million tons of food through lend-lease, in total lend-lease barely made up 1% of food available to the Soviets.

Explosives were also good, but explosives came almost exclusively in the form of Toluene of which 116,619 tons was shipped, the Soviets produced 208,100 during the war. Toluene is an a component of TNT. However, TNT is not the only explosive, and the Soviets made other explosives themselves such as the RDX based A-IX-2 which is still used today. Lend-lease explosives made up perhaps 10% or less of what the Soviets had, and again were more significant after 1943. Powder for bullets were not as significant, and I don’t know why people want it to be, bullets are not difficult to make.

Lend-lease delivered around 600,000 tons of high octane avgas and if I recall correctly around 400,000 tons of petroleum products including lubricants. I have misplaced my statistics for Soviet domestic production, but consider again that most products were in the millions of tons.

In the real WWII history did the Soviet Union defeat Nazi Germany practically alone.
While this WWII fact is less known and less acknowledged in the Western world.

No US Lend-Lease was delivered to the Soviet Union during the utmost critical year 1941 for Soviet.
Soviet lost some 3 million soldiers during 6 months in 1941, almost its entire Red Air Force, the majority of their tanks, huge figures of cannons/equipment/ supplies, and vast territories.

The total US Lend-Lease goods delivered to Soviet into 1942 were nevertheless less/negligible compared the now ongoing massively recovered and up-scaled Soviet war production during 1942.
It further adds to the less/negligible picture that particular the ‘M3 Lee tanks w. 37mm gun’ delivered in 1942, as the only tank type delivered in 1942 by USA, were already obsolete versus the Wehrmacht ‘Panzer III’ and ‘Panzer IV’ tank types. The M3 was nicknamed “A coffin for six” by the Soviets.
Soviet was particular short of tanks and aircrafts in 1942 after the massive 1941 losses.

The often alleged ”millions of boots” is also a strong exaggeration.
In fact were 0.99 million boots named “Shoes, services, enlisted men” in the US Lend-Lease listings delivered to Soviet ( while Britain received 1.5 million pairs of the same type ).
The alleged “millions” of boots figure probably origins from the delivered 13.5 million “Shoes, Russian, war aid” intended for the Soviet civilian work force and other civilians.

The often focused 2000 US Lend-Lease locomotives, is however true. But they were delivered as late as in 1944–1945, the majority during the 2nd part of 1944.
Thus long after Soviet had strategic defeated, and also extensively tactically defeated, Nazi Germany. And had pushed the Germans several hundred kilometres back on the the whole east front, especially the south and central parts of it.

The same is to an extent also applicable regarding the much focused “Trucks”.
The Soviet Union had sufficient quantities of trucks during 1939-1941. But lost an awful lot of them in 1941.
The Soviet Union produced some 250000 trucks throughout the war. This figure is almost 60% of all the US Lend-Lease delivered trucks.
The trucks were actually used for local transports. While other transports were unchanged done by means of trains that were offloaded as close as possible to the front lines where the needs were.
Domestic distributions of raw materials, goods, personell, etc. were similarly performed by trains.
The US Lend-Lease trucks supplied in 1942 assisted by principal to replace the lost in 1941. Then in 1943–1944 to the relatively same purpose for the increased Red Army from 7–8 million soldiers to 10–11 million soldiers. And also from early 1943 on to reduce the relative use of horse drawn local transports from the train supplied local depots to the front lines.
Truck transports during WWII were generally only some 2–4 times faster than horse drawn on a normal day. While in the extensive Soviet offroad conditions, wintertime with icy slippery bad roads built for horse transports, and in deep snow, and also during the several weeks long spring & autumn Rasputitsa endless ‘sea of mud’ seasons, were horse drawn often/mostly more and much more efficient than trucks.

Soviet Union had ultimately strategic defeated Nazi Germany following the Stalingrad Jan. 1943, and Kursk July 1943, strategic victories. From then were the German forces forced on a continuous retreat back to Berlin and an inevitable ultimate defeat.
This was the strategic situation by mid of 1943 - before - the US Lend-Lease had reached any relative significantly deliveries.

This is actually applicable to the whole US Lend-Lease delivery to Soviet.
The often used phrase regarding Nazi Germany - “Too little, too late” - is the applicable also for the US Lend-Lease to Soviet. It did not influence Soviet Union’s capability to defeat Nazi Germany all alone.
Soviet Union did some 85–90% of that total job.

The total US Lend-Lease delivery to Soviet amounted only some 5-6% of the total Soviet war production. The majority was delivered 1943–1945.
It did however provide a positive psychological effect from early 1942.

It was Britain that got both the absolute and relative real huge share of the US Lend-Lease. Not the Soviet Union.
Britain received some 60% of the total. But contributed only some 2–5% on the 1941–45 WWII battlefields in Europe.
Soviet Union received some 22% of the total. And contributed varying extensively some 80–98% on the 1941–1945 battlefields in Europe.

The below tables’ figures show this pretty well.

The significance in favor of the USSR for lend-lease is highly exaggerated outside historical research. The short answer is that the USSR would almost certainly still have won, and in fact pretty much already had won by the time that lend-lease arrived in significant quantities. Longer answer to follow.

Mark Harrison the economist historian who specialized in Soviet economic history in the 1990s, gave a bid for the GDP of the USSR in his book “Accounting for War”. We also know the value of all lend-lease (including services which made up a little over 10% of lend-lease). Hence we can see that lend-lease made up just 5% of the GDP of the USSR for the war years.

But looking merely at the value of the whole war is obviously kinda simplistic. People absolutely love to talk about trucks. So we shall do that.

At the beginning of 1941, the USSR had 961,000 trucks, after the catastrophic losses of 1941, the USSR still had 553,838 trucks remaining as per 1st of January 1942.
Below you see a graph shows cumulative percentage of the total amount of trucks used by the USSR after the beginning of 1942. That is to say which portions of available trucks lend-lease made up. Excuse the Danish.

As you can see, lend-lease trucks made up a good portions of available trucks, however at the end of 1942, after Stalingrad had already been surrounded, the lend-lease trucks, made up less than 5% of the inventory, and at the battle of Kursk it made up less than 15% of the inventory. And at Moscow in 1941, there were no lend-lease trucks at all. Also, in case someone has a number of lend-lease trucks which is over 400,000 and just fuming with anger, then you are counting jeeps as trucks, which they aren’t.

In terms of war material, the two most significant categories of material were planes and tanks. Making up over 50% of all military-lend lease. If we start with tanks, like in the previous graph, the one below shows cumulative percentage of tanks which were Soviet produced vs lend-lease, with the added information that they are also divided in categories of Heavy, Medium and Light tanks.

As you can see, unlike trucks while lend-lease supplemented the Soviet production, it stayed around 10% for most of the war, and was for the most part qualitatively inferior to Soviet tanks, firstly because they never received anything as good as the KV-1 or IS-2, of which they produced around 13,000 themselves. Secondly, various design issues (exception being Sherman which was excellent).

Which of the lend-lease tanks did the Russians prefer, and what did they think of the others?

We go on to aircraft, which in my opinion is the most significant category of military lend-lease much more important than tanks and very overlooked. The below graph like previous graphs shows the cumulative percentage of lend-lease vs soviet production aircraft.

As you can see, in terms of numbers, it is slightly more significant than tanks. But most importantly the quality of lend-lease aircraft was excellent. The only issue the Soviets usually had with western aircraft, was that they thought the armament was weak. This didn’t apply to the P-39 aircobra armed with a 37mm cannon. A concept the Soviets applied to their own Yak-9T. Some of the top Soviet aces flew lend-lease aircraft, and Soviet opinion of the aircraft seems to be been generally high, even the Hurricane from which the Soviets drew inspiration for future avionics.

The next most talked about item is probably food. This one in particular is sorta annoying to me, because I have never met a single person who thinks that the USSR could not have won without lend-lease food, who actually have any idea what food was delivered. I do not know the chronology of food deliveries, so you’ll get the totals in million tons.

The USSR produced 590 million tons of food during WW2, lend-lease amounted to a total of 3.86 million tons. That is 0.7% of the food. No matter how you try to angle that, it is not a significant amount. Consider that the USSR produced 22 million tons of meat. I also have the chronological data for Soviet food production if anyone is interested.

While we stay at the civilian lend-lease, please consider that the USSR produced hundreds of millions of pairs of boots, in that context the 1 million pair of boots and 9 million other pairs of shoes is not exactly mind blowing. Same for blankets and a lot of other small items.

I could show you data for train production, but we can dismiss this quite quickly, by pointing out that lend-lease locomotives didn’t arrive until 1944.

Radio deliveries to the USSR also came up to be about 20% of the inventory from the end of 1943.

Conclusion

Lend-lease was no doubt useful, good and all that stuff. However, all these categories shown above represents the parts of lend-lease which made up the majority of lend-lease; the most numerically significant portions. Most other categories than the ones shown, made up a smaller percentage than these.

There is no area in which the USSR were not able to produce equipment, and in absolutely gigantic quantities. Jonathan House, David Glantz, T. Davies, Alexander Hill and many other military historians who have looked at various battles and the war as a whole, agree with me that the USSR would almost certainly have won without lend-lease. The question is of some difference in time and casualties. Though if the USSR had not received more help from the west, they may just have made a separate peace with Germany, and allowed the US and UK to absorb any additional casualties in defeating Germany, which is exactly what they didn’t want to do.

The most compelling point I want you to consider, is that the vast majority of lend-lease arrived after the Soviets had won the battle of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. By the time the first Sherman was put into action on the eastern front, the German army had already been thoroughly defeated and the days of the Reich was numbered.

Some additional notes

All the statistics I have created here, are from my project at Roskilde university where I studied lend-lease statistics for half a year together with my Russian speaking colleague and fellow historian and journalist.

All the statistics are made at the most optimistic estimates for lend-lease and the most pessimistic estimate or data for the USSR. The numbers do not nessesarily represent reality, but represents the absolute logical maximum significance of lend-lease we could demonstrate.

The most common type of ad-hoc argument against my position is from people who do not understand statistics, and so they must resort to random quotes. So I will make a note of it here pre-hand: Zhukov never said they could not have won without lead-lease, that is from an American journalist claiming that some 30 years later, and it’s not verifiable. Khrushchev was not an economist, or a general or worked in material or logistics, even if the often paraphrased quote of him praising lend-lease as war winning was not taken totally out of context, please bear in mind that he had no clue how much lend-lease was delivered, he was a political officer in WW2 and have zero insight into the economic aspect of it.

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