how important was lend lease to the soviet union

In a secret protocol of this pact, the Germans and the Soviets agreed that Poland should be divided between them, with the western third of the country going to Germany and the eastern two-thirds being taken over by the U.S.S.R. Popular Questions What was the cause of World War II? The plan proposed by FDR was to "lend-lease or otherwise dispose of arms" and other supplies needed by any country whose security was vital to the defense of the United States. Russia's War in Ukraine: Putin's Soviet Delusion Roosevelt approved $1billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain at the end of October 1941. Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off. As such, Ladd Field came to represent not only a political and economic exchange, but a cultural one as well. 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. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.". 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. Allen (1946) p 252. 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. Originally, the American policy was to help the British but not join the war. The American Lend-Lease program was signed into law in March 1941. The U.S. received $2 million in reverse Lend-Lease from the USSR. The United States used lend-lease to induce recipients to the American way of thinking, especially regarding the economy and free-market trade. Actual military production was achieved by sacrificing the civilian economy for short-term gain (and likely by burning up pre-existing stockpiles of raw materials). 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. How Lend-Lease helped the Red Army win in World War II (PHOTOS) [8] The Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940 set in motion a rapid expansion of the United States Navy. This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 02:14. 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. During the bitter fighting of the winter of 19411942, British aid made a crucial difference. Most went to Britain, but the Soviet Union received more than $11 billion. In turn, this would have allowed the German commanders to escape at least some encirclements, while forcing the Red Army to prepare and conduct many more deliberate penetration attacks in order to advance the same distance. Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs: I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. In spring 1944, the House passed a bill to renew the Lend-Lease program by a vote of 334 to 21. And how much steel! 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. 2009. pp. Yauza. Bill Introduced in the House Would Allow US to Lend Weapons to Taiwan Check out A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Amazon https://amzn.to/3lS8oVMLike & Subscribe for Daily US H. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about $11 billion. This particular C-47 was sent to the Far North and spent the war conducting reconnaissance and weather-monitoring missions over the Kara Sea. 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. (German Language). Although most of the actual construction of joint defense facilities, except the Alaska Highway and the Canol project, had been carried out by Canada, most of the original cost was borne by the United States. Canada operated a program similar to Lend-Lease called Mutual Aid that sent a loan of Can$1billion (equivalent to Can$15.4billion in 2021)[30] and Can$3.4billion (Can$52.3billion) in supplies and services to Britain and other Allies.[31][5]. World War II Allies: U.S. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 As one Roosevelt biographer has characterized it: "If there was no practical alternative, there was certainly no moral one either. Ukraine is a founding member of the United Nations and it is also a member of the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, and the OSCE. [83] However, none of this cargo has been salvaged, and no documentation of its treasure has been produced.[84]. Particularly important for the Soviets in late 1941 were British-supplied tanks and aircraft. Report from Mikoyan to Stalin and Molotov regarding Lend-Lease Romanus, Charles F. and Riley Sunderland. 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. In April, this policy was extended to China,[20] and in October to the Soviet Union. Lend-Lease aircraft deliveries were also of significance during the Battle of Moscow. Lend-Lease Act: Definition, Ukraine & World War II - HISTORY 15 Great Facts About Ukraine - Discover Walks Blog By October, German troops were poised outside both Leningrad and Moscow. A particular critical aspect of Lend-Lease was the supply of food. [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. L. 77-11, H.R. Interested in U.S. History? An estimated 25 million Soviet citizens perished in the titanic conflict with Nazi Germany between June 1941 and May 1945. Lend-Lease: Aircraft to the Soviet Union > National Museum of the Given the disruption to Soviet production and Red Army losses, the Soviet Union was understandably eager to put British armor into action as soon as possible. Britain and the Commonwealth were carrying the battle for all civilization, and the overwhelming majority of Americans, led in the late election by their president, wished to help them. Our Fortresses and Liberators take off from huge air bases built, equipped and serviced under reverse lend-lease at a cost to them of hundreds of millions of dollars. Originally intended to lend arms and material to the. Mackenzie, Hector. 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. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. By the end of the war, the United States had extended over $49 billion in Lend-Lease aid to nearly forty nations. Thus, Stalin told Harry Hopkins [FDR's emissary to Moscow in July 1941] that the U.S.S.R. could not match Germany's might as an occupier of Europe and its resources.[35]. New Ukraine Military Aid Bill Isn't Your Grandfather's Lend-Lease Act (1942). . Just 446 locomotives were produced during the war,[39] with only 92 of those being built between 1942 and 1945. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft. Roosevelt concluded that the United States needed to help the Soviets fight against the Germans. Lend-Lease Helped Win World War II, But Not On The Eastern Front The evidence is here. Some 3,964,000 tons of goods were shipped by the Arctic route; 7% was lost, while 93% arrived safely. Both were superior to all but the Soviet KV-1 and T-34 in armor, and indeed even their much maligned winter cross-country performance was comparable to most Soviet tanks excluding the KV-1 and T-34. Ukraine is in the process of joining the European Union and has submitted an application for NATO membership. Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht; the ultimate result would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers could have waded at France's Atlantic beaches. The Lend-Lease Act was designed to provide allies with aircraft and supplies for the war in Europe. In th. The first lend-lease shipments, consisting largely of food and industrial commodities, arrived in England at a time when the German submarine blockade was close to starving out the British Isles. 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. Democrats. [65], Warsaw 1945: Willys jeep used by the Polish First Army as part of U.S. Lend-Lease program. Only 22% were unequivocally against the President's proposal. Part I. The Warplanes to Siberia Project | Historical Spotlight | News | Wargaming The Soviet government at first offered to pay $170 million. US Government Printing Office. Each method was difficult. [29] The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, we Mongols stood with our northern neighbor as best we could. Under the Lend-Lease Act, the United States sent enormous quantities of war materiel to the Soviet Union, which was critical in helping the Soviets withstand the Nazi onslaught. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. 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. Stalin needed trucks and was provided with Studebaker trucks on a massive scale. Balances for the Soviet Union were solved through a payment scheme in 1972, where they pledged to make three initial payments. . The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war. 5-6. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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 dispute remained unresolved until 1972, when the U.S. accepted an offer from the USSR to repay $722 million linked to grain shipments from the U.S., representing 25% of the initial debt with inflation taken into account, with the remainder being written off. [7], During this same period, the U.S. government began to mobilize for total war, instituting the first-ever peacetime draft and a fivefold increase in the defense budget (from $2billion to $10billion). "I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. [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". Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. [36] Most belligerent powers severely decreased production of non-essentials, concentrating on producing weapons. 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. 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.

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