Allen (1946) p 252. Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! 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. "It should be remembered that during World War I, the transportation crisis in Russia in 1916-17 that did a lot to facilitate the February Revolution [which lead to the abdication of the tsar] was caused by a shortage in the production of railway rails, engines, and freight cars because industrial production had been diverted to munitions," Sokolov wrote. 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. Reverse lend-lease policies comprised services such as rent on bases used by the U.S., and totaled $7.8billion; of this, $6.8billion came from the British and the Commonwealth, mostly Australia and India. Negotiations dragged on intermittently for 25 years. In spring 1944, the House passed a bill to renew the Lend-Lease program by a vote of 334 to 21. Churchill called the letter "one of the most important I ever wrote.". 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. This act set up a system that would allow the United States to lend or lease war supplies to any nation deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." . 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 munitions totaled 308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled 120m in 1946 index. Just 446 locomotives were produced during the war,[39] with only 92 of those being built between 1942 and 1945. The captain, two crew members, and six passengers had left earlier in an ill-fated effort to get help. Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States (Pub. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. 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. It was said that the Matilda was inferior to the T-34, and in truth it probably was. Lend-Lease effectively ended the United States' pretense of neutrality which had been enshrined in the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion. Alerts and Messages for U.S. visitors to Russia. The Soviet Union got arms, ammunition, aircraft, and industrial equipment for its army. [33], The program was gradually terminated after V-E Day. 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. Stettinius. [40] In total, 92.7% of the wartime production of railroad equipment by the USSR was supplied by Lend-Lease,[35] including 1,911 locomotives and 11,225 railcars[41] which augmented the existing stocks of at least 20,000 locomotives and half a million railcars.[42]. They Say He Burned Down the Reichstag. Thanks to Lend-Lease, during the war years, the Soviet Union received about 14.8 thousand aircraft, 7.1 thousand tanks, 8.2 thousand anti-aircraft guns, a large number of cars, tractors and other vital supplies. . As the war continued, however, the United States and Great Britain provided many of the implements of war and strategic raw materials necessary for Soviet victory. The British shared technology included the cavity magnetron (key technology at the time for highly effective radar; the American historian James Phinney Baxter III later called "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores"),[13][14] the design for the VT fuze, details of Frank Whittle's jet engine and the FrischPeierls memorandum describing the feasibility of an atomic bomb. 106124, Albert L. Weeks The Other Side of Coexistence: An Analysis of Russian Foreign Policy, (New York, Pittman Publishing Corporation, 1974), p. 94, quoted in Albert L. Weeks, Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World, Zaloga (Armored Thunderbolt) pp. U.S. Citizens with emergencies, please call +(7) (495) 728-5577, Outside of Office Hours, contact: +7 (495) 728-5000. [27] Other recipients were led by $11.3billion ($137billion) to the Soviet Union, $3.2billion ($38.7billion) to France, $1.6billion ($19.3billion) to China, and the remaining $2.6billion to the other Allies. Roosevelt concluded that the United States needed to help the Soviets fight against the Germans. As such, Ladd Field came to represent not only a political and economic exchange, but a cultural one as well. 1776, 55 Stat. Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. Originally intended to lend arms and material to the. Roosevelt believed that if the Soviets were defeated the Allies would be far more likely to lose. In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain the British government sent the Tizard Mission to the United States. 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. After the German assault on Russia in June 1941, the defenders got aid with this system through war material, food, fuel and other important raw materials. Even aid that might seem like a drop in the bucket in the larger context of Soviet production for the war played a crucial role in filling gaps at important moments during this period. 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. 31, enacted March 11, 1941), 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. . . 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. [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). A total of 699 Lend-Lease aircraft had been delivered to Archangel by the time the Arctic convoys switched to Murmansk in December 1941. The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. How important was the Lend Lease Act to the Soviet Union? 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. [18], The vote in the Senate, which occurred on 9 March, revealed a similar partisan difference: 49 Democrats (79 percent) voted "aye" with only 13 Democrats (21 percent) voting "nay". (1942). When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, we Mongols stood with our northern neighbor as best we could. Check out A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Amazon https://amzn.to/3lS8oVMLike & Subscribe for Daily US H. In particular, it shows that British Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 played a far more significant part in the defense of Moscow and the revival of Soviet fortunes in late 1941 than has been acknowledged. By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. 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. Dec 7, 1941 . The Strange Alliance, The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Co-operation with Russia. 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. 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. For travel to the United States on a temporary basis, including tourism, temporary employment, study and exchange. Materials totalling $. In the meantime, Great Britain was running out of liquid currency and asked not to be forced to sell off British assets. 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. LEND LEASE. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a trickle of information has emerged from archives in Moscow, shedding new light on the subject. Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today's 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." 400,000 jeeps & trucks; 14,000 airplanes BM-13N Katyusha on a Lend-Lease Studebaker US6 truck, at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Moscow, In June 1941, within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR, the Anglo-Soviet Agreement was made and the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic Sea route to Murmansk, arriving in September. The Lend-Lease policy was officially titled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States", and was a program where the U.S. supplied Free France, Great Britain and the Republic of China with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and August 1945. . Learn more about quality higher-education opportunities in the U.S. that you will not find anywhere else in the world. Washington. According to research by a team of Soviet historians, the Soviet Union lost a staggering 20,500 tanks from June 22 to December 31, 1941. 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." 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. The political fog of the Cold War often marred the truth about the vehicles received. Newly discovered files tell another story. A total of 22,800 armored vehicles were delivered to the Red Army during World War II, of which 1,981 were lost in dangerous Arctic convoys. Some of these shipments were intercepted by the Germans. The aid was given for free on the basis that such help was essential for the defense of the United States. 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. In January 1941, following up on his campaign pledge and the prime minister's appeal for arms, Roosevelt proposed to Congress a new military aid bill. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55. 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? From 1941 and onwards, the RKKA used extensive numbers . How important was Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union? The total amount that Canada agreed to pay under the new arrangement came to about $76,800,000, which was some $13,870,000 less than the United States had spent on the facilities. At the end of November 1941, only 670 Soviet tanks were available to defend Moscowthat is, in the recently formed Kalinin, Western, and Southwestern Fronts. Congress did not allow the aid to be free, so the U.S. discounted it's Lend-Lease supplies by 90 percent of costs. Lend-Lease assistance to the USSR. 2009. . [36] The USSR was very dependent on rail transport and starting during the latter half of the 1920s[37] but accelerating during the 1930s (The Great Depression), hundreds of foreign industrial giants such as Ford were commissioned to construct modern dual-purpose factories in the USSR, 16 alone within a week of May 31, 1929. 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. Source: "The Soviet Union: The Defeated Victor" pp. "[10] As the President himself put it, "There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs."[11]. 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. 1776, 55Stat. Lend-lease will be considered, first, as a method of wartime supply allocation; second, as a method of accounting which may create inter- . While Soviet pilots praised the maneuverability of the homegrown I-153 Chaika and I-16 Ishak fightersstill in use in significant numbers in late 1941both types were certainly obsolete and inferior in almost all regards to the British-supplied Hurricane. Evolucin de los . 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. Deane, John R. 1947. 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). Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. This gold was salvaged in 1981 and 1986. In fact our armed forces in Britain, ground as well as air, receive as reverse lend-lease, with no payment by us, one third of all the supplies and equipment they currently require, Britain furnishes 90% of their medical supplies and in spite of her food shortage, 20% of their food.[78]. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2023 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved. At the end of 1941 there were greater numbers of the MiG-3, but the plane was considered difficult to fly. On December 7, 1940, its Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed President Roosevelt in a 15-page letter for American help. Roosevelt approved $1billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain at the end of October 1941. I don't want $15I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. The Persian Corridor was the longest route, and was not fully operational until mid-1942. A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $719billion in 2021) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.[2] In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies. Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was nominally managed by Stettinius. The museum was established inside a former school and has been open for 8 years. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. It seems to fly in the face of some stories I've heard about Stalin ordering the obliteration of all USA and British markings on Lend Lease Materiel so as to maintain the illusion of the USSR doing it all on its own and that the others fighting the common enemy were the "little allies". 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. Even after the United States forces in Europe and the Pacific began to attain full strength during 19431944, Lend-Lease continued. [32] In September 1943, he was promoted to Undersecretary of State, and Leo Crowley became director of the Foreign Economic Administration, which was given responsibility for Lend-Lease. [55], In total, the U.S. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[57] of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[58] 11,400 aircraft (of which 4,719 were Bell P-39 Airacobras, 3,414 were Douglas A-20 Havocs and 2,397 were Bell P-63 Kingcobras)[59] and 1.75million tons of food. In April 1945, Congress voted that it should not be used for post-conflict purposes, and in August 1945, after Japan surrendered, the program was ended. "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 02:14. by Robert Beckhusen Key point: If the West had not invaded Europe and provided equipment, it would have. During early February 1941, a Gallup poll revealed that 54% of Americans were in favor of giving aid to the British without qualifications of Lend-Lease. 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.". This was the first big war in which whole formations were routinely motorized; soldiers were supported with large numbers of all kinds of vehicles. Lend-Lease thus provided a massive quantity of foodstuffs and agricultural products.[44]. 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. 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]. 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. [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. During the bitter fighting of the winter of 19411942, British aid made a crucial difference. 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]. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. Lend-Lease was the most visible sign of wartime cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. [35] One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. Substantial quantities of machine tools and raw materials, such as aluminum and rubber, were supplied to help Soviet industry back on its feet: 312 metal-cutting machine tools were delivered by convoy PQ-12 alone, arriving in March 1942, along with a range of other items for Soviet factories such as machine presses and compressors. At a time when the majority of Americans opposed direct participation in the war, Lend-Lease represented a vital U.S. contribution to the fight against Nazi Germany. During Nikita Khrushchevs rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a window of greater frankness and openness about the extent of aid supplied from the West under the Lend-Lease Actbut it was still clearly forbidden for Soviet authors to suggest that such aid ever made any real difference on the battlefield. 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. The body of the captain, Maksim Tyurikov, was found by local hunters about 120 kilometers from the wreck in 1953. During World War II, the Soviet Union received almost 15,000 U.S.-built aircraft under the lend-lease program. The Hurricane was rugged and tried and tested, and as useful at that point as many potentially superior Soviet designs such as the LaGG-3 and MiG-3. Lend-Lease's precise significance to Allied victory in WW2 is debated. on the Soviet war effort during the first year of the war was in the far. It is an indication of the extent to which the British have been able to pool their resources with ours so that the needed weapon may be in the hands of that soldierwhatever may be his nationalitywho can at the proper moment use it most effectively to defeat our common enemies.[76]. ): Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. The Red Army was a force to be reckoned with and was willing to sustain unlimited casualties. [citation needed] The USSR had only a very small number of heavy bombers in comparison. Canada was not a direct recipient of Lend-Lease aid. [76] Australia and New Zealand supplied the bulk of foodstuffs to United States forces in the South Pacific. 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.
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