Ive seen several references about lend lease, is there a Lend lease thread lurking somewhere?
If not, whats the view on lend lease, decisive in winning the war, particularly in the East, or not?
I don’t know about a Lend Lease thread, but there’s been some vigorous discussion about Lend Lease and its contribution to the Soviet effort in a few threads.
Start here http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4643&highlight=lend+lease&page=3 , and try searching lend lease linked with Chevan or Egorka for other posts.
are you looking for some specific info?
No, just wondering if there was any debate on it, and Rising Sun put me on to it.
Better to say,… lend lease is definetely important,. but not a desicive factor contributor to Red Army.
Your probably right.
Think most in the West, and nearly all Russians would go along with historians like David Glantz, who say that lend lease was very helpful in shortening the war, but did not decide it.
Glantz says "Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make a difference between defeat and victory in 1941-1942’’
According to Glantz, had Stalin and his commanders been left to their own devices, it “might have taken 12 to 18 months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht,” but "the ultimate result would probably have been the same’’
Think Glantz may have nailed it.
[Although the war would have been over by August one way or the other with Allied strategic bombing, and the dubious honour of the Western Allies taking Berlin.]
Although some Russians historians like Boris Sokolov suggests that the Soviet Union would have been defeated by Nazi Germany if it had not received billions of dollars worth of aircraft, aviation fuel, aluminum, trucks, food, and other critical supplies from the United States, and has revised upwards both the amount of Lend-Lease aid received by the U.S.S.R. (from $11 to $12.5 billion) and the percentage of Soviet production that that aid constituted (from 4 percent to 15 percent or more). Sokolov’s conclusion, is that “without these Western shipments under Lend-Lease the Soviet Union not only would not have been able to win the Great Patriotic War, it would not have been able even to oppose the German invaders”
Although I suspect Sokolov would be compared to Suvorov by some Russians.
Interesting…
I think the basic conclusion arrived here is that Lend Lease was critical to enhancing the mobility of the Red Army and to alleviating some of the endemic logistical difficulties experienced. My personal belief (and I am admittedly well versed on all this) is that the USSR would not have been defeated without Lend Lease, but they wouldn’t defeated the Germans either. The additional 12 to 18 months may have led to a negotiated settlement, if only a temporary one…
Hi nick,
Yep, that’s a third possibility, a draw, but as I posted it would have been all over by August one way or the other anyway.
Well, if you think of all the merchant marine sailors that went on the Murmansk convoys, and particulary those who didn’t make it back, it was pretty critical in those times. It’s easy to say now after 67 years that it was’nt critical, but then ? Think of Moskow…
Think I would have rather served anywhere other then on those convoys.
If every man didn’t get a medal he thoroughly deserved one.
Few stats by Sokolov on Lend lease to Soviets…
80% of all canned meat.
92% of all railroad locomotives, rolling stock and rails.
57% of all aviation fuel.
53% of all explosives.
74% of all truck transport.
88% of all radio equipment.
53% of all copper.
56% of all aluminum.
60+% of all automotive fuel.
74% of all vehicle tires.
12% of all armored vehicles.
14% of all combat aircraft.
Which translated into…
Aircraft - 14,795
Tanks - 7,056
Jeeps - 51,503
Trucks - 375,883
Motorcycles - 35,170
Tractors - 8,071
Guns - 8,218
Machine guns - 131,633
Explosives - 345,735 tons
Building equipment valued - $10,910,000
Railroad freight cars - 11,155
Locomotives - 1,981
Cargo ships - 90
Submarine hunters - 105
Torpedo boats - 197
Ship engines - 7,784
Food supplies - 4,478,000 tons
Machines and equipment - $1,078,965,000
Non-ferrous metals - 802,000 tons
Petroleum products - 2,670,000 tons
Chemicals - 842,000 tons
Field radios - 40.000
radar systems - 400
Cotton - 893,000 tons
Leather - 49,860 tons
Tires - 3,786,000
Army boots - 15,417,001 pairs
Items like the 345,735 tons of explosive materials including 22 million shells that was equal to just over half of the total Soviet production of approximately 600,000 tons, and the 103,000 tons of toluene, the primary ingredient of TNT, the high Octane aviation fuel, plus the over $1 billion dollars worth of machines and equipment might have been amongst the most important material supplied.
By all accounts Nikita Khrushchev wrote, “Without SPAM we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.”
How many marine sailors went on the Murmansk convoys, and how many didn’t make it back?
I don’t know, but probably rather more than Russian merchant marine or even navy sailors went from Russia to Britain or America on ships carrying goods for their war efforts.
Ashes has no idea what he’s started. Again. 
Absolutely agreed - you don’t know!
but probably rather more than Russian merchant marine or even navy sailors went from Russia to Britain or America on ships carrying goods for their war efforts.
Ahhhhh… not so quick, my friend (you are not with your wife - 5 minutes will not do here! ).
I suspect that the answer on your statement may be surprising for you (and for me if I am correct).
You see LL came to USSR via 3 routes: North Atlantic route, Pacific route and via Iran. From the top of my head North Atlantic convouys accounted for somethink like 20% of the total delivery. But this was undoubtedly the most dramatic one. Iran was the bigget of them. And the Pacific route was the biggest until Iran rioute was set up.
So the sing is the the ships traversing the Pacific route were going under the Soviet flag and, important for us here, as I rememeber were settled by the Soviet crews. This was done to avoid conflict with Japan.
I will have to double check on it.
As for the North Atlantic convoys, there were sunk 103 ships 11 of which were Soviet.
Ashes has no idea what he’s started. Again.
You see, you “don’t know” but yet you managed to give an answer.
I was referring more specifically to the PQ-17, and how it was critical in that particular time of war. Good one about the spam! I didn’t know that one !
Taken from U-Boat.net:
http://www.uboat.net/ops/convoys/convoys.php?convoy=PQ-17
The Losses
All in all 24 ships were sunk out of the 33 which made up the convoy. 153 merchant men lost their lives, of those only 7 had perished before the convoy was scattered. The loss of material was extremely heavy; 22 merchant ships had been lost for a total of 142,518 tons of shipping and with them 3,350 motor vehicles, 430 tanks, 210 bombers and 99,316 tons of general cargo including radar sets and ammunition to name a few.
Additionally the Soviet tanker Azerbaijan had lost her cargo of linseed oil and much of Winston-Salem’s cargo had also been jettisoned in Novaya Zemlya.
Paulus Potter drifting abandoned on July 13.
The Paulus Potter was found afloat and deserted 8 days after being bombed by the Luftwaffe. 3 men from the U-boat boarded her and examined her to see if she could be sailed to Norway but found that impossible and Kptlt. Reche put a torpedo into it.
3 more losses took place when 3 of the 11 surviving ships from PQ-17; Silver Sword (sunk by U-255 on 20 July, 1942 for her 5th victim from the PQ-17), Bellingham and Gray Ranger were sunk on the return voyage from Russia in the next home bound convoy.
Luftwaffe flew 202 sorties against the convoy and lost 5 planes for the 8 ships (Navarino, Fairfield City, Peter Kerr, Washington, Bolton Castle, Zaafaran, Pan Atlantic and Pancraft) they sank.
Guess it does’nt matter what route the lend lease came from just as long as the vital supplies got to the Soviets.
“It is now said that the Allies never helped us . . . However, one cannot deny that the Americans gave us so much material, without which we could not have formed our reserves and “could not have continued the war”. . . we had no explosives and powder. There was none to equip rifle bullets. The Americans actually came to our assistance with powder and explosives. And how much sheet steel did they give us? We really could not have quickly put right our production of tanks if the Americans had not helped with steel. And today it seems as though we had all this ourselves in abundance.”
Guess you guys know who made that statement don’t you?
And how much weight would it carry?
Ashes, you are actually being serious about it…
Lend-Lease was a burden for USSR. One more obstacle on the path to the Victory. Not only RKKA had to fight the bloody battles they also had to cope with all sorts of logistical problems that LL brough with. The only reason Stalin accepted LL was that he wanted to help US economy and keep american workers employed.
You see now?
A rather silly statement. So the almost 300,000 trucks that the Red Army was provided was nothing but a logistical problem? Mate, lead lease went a good ways to overcoming the logistical problems that the Red Army endemically faced.
I don’t believe the numbers of actual fighting weapons were that great, but the ones provided were fairly reliable such as the Sherman tank and the P-39 Airacobra, which also freed up Soviet industry to develop indigenous designs and to provide breathing space in order to move their industry…
Mr.Nick,
I did not know your were sooooo gullible! 
It’s an impressive skill, isn’t it?
I taught Donald Rumsfeld all he knows, which led to his famous statement:
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Ashes has offered some detail that’s been lacking in earlier discussions.
Do you have detail to contradict it?
I’m actually trying to get you to be serious, which is unusual because usually you love to get stuck into figures.