Lend-Lease contributed to the Allied victory. Even after the United States forces in Europe and the Pacific began to attain full strength during 1943–1944, Lend-Lease continued. Most remaining Allies were largely self-sufficient in frontline equipment (such as tanks and fighter aircraft) by this time but Lend-Lease provided a useful supplement in this category and Lend-Lease logistical supplies (including motor vehicles and railroad equipment) were of enormous assistance.
Much of the logistical assistance of the Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks and by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. Trucks such as the Dodge ton and Studebaker ton were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical.Lend-Lease also supplied significant amounts of weapons and ammunition. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30 percent of Soviet wartime fighter and bomber production (mid 1941–45).Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production.
A particular critical aspect of Lend-Lease was the supply of food. The invasion had cost the USSR a huge amount of its agricultural base; during the initial Axis offensive of 1941-42, the total sown area of the USSR fell by 41.9% and the number of collective and state farms by 40%. The Soviets lost a substantial number of draft and farm animals as they were not able to relocate all the animals in an area before it was captured and of those areas in which the Axis forces would occupy, the Soviets had lost 7 million of out of 11.6 million horses, 17 million out of 31 million cows, 20 million of 23.6 million pigs and 27 million out of 43 million sheep and goats. Tens of thousands of agricultural machines, such as tractors and threshers, were destroyed or captured. Agriculture also suffered a loss of labour; between 1941 and 1945, 19.5 million working-age men had to leave their farms to work in the military and industry. Agricultural issues were also compounded when the Soviets were on the offensive, as areas liberated from the Axis had been devastated and contained millions of people who needed to be fed. Lend-Lease thus provided a massive number of foodstuffs and agricultural products.
According to the Russian historian Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Lend-Lease had a crucial role in winning the war: “On the whole the following conclusion can be drawn: 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, since it could not itself produce sufficient quantities of arms and military equipment or adequate supplies of fuel and ammunition. The Soviet authorities were well aware of this dependency on Lend-Lease. 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”.
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. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. 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. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don't think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so”.
Conclusion
Summing up all the facts we discovered about cooperation of three countries and their participation in the World War II, we can state that although relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had been strained in the years before World War II, the U.S.-Soviet alliance of 1941–1945 was marked by a great degree of cooperation and was essential to securing the defeat of Nazi Germany. Without the remarkable efforts of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, the United States and Great Britain would have been hard pressed to score a decisive military victory over Nazi Germany. Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conference during 1943, acknowledged publicly the importance of American efforts: "Without American machines the United Nations could never have won the war."
In a confidential interview with the wartime correspondent Konstantin Simonov, the Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov is quoted as saying:
“Today [1963] some say the Allies didn't really help us... 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.”
David Glantz, the American military historian known for his books on the Eastern front, concludes:
Although Soviet accounts have routinely belittled the significance of Lend-Lease in the sustainment of the Soviet war effort, the overall importance of the assistance cannot be understated. Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates. 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. Without Lend-Lease food, clothing, and raw materials (especially metals), the Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened by the war effort. Perhaps most directly, without Lend-Lease trucks, rail engines, and railroad cars, every Soviet offensive would have stalled at an earlier stage, outrunning its logistical tail in a matter of days. Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken twelve to eighteen months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht.”
According to the facts we discovered, we created an informational board devoted to the topic of alliance of three countries during the WW II. It depicts our vision and understanding of the issue as well as our contribution to the creation of everlasting memorable signs of the terrible event of fascism so that the next generations always remember about people’s sufferings and prevent anything like this in future. Our project can be a source of curricular and extra-curricular educational activities to raise the awareness about the war and the assistance of the countries for the purpose of winning the war and confronting the Nazi Germany.
Sources
1. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/us-soviet
2. From 'Ally' to enemy: Britan's relations with the Soviet Union 1941// Geoffrey Warner, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-25106-3_19
3.Soviet-American Cooperation in World War II https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1943040100
4. https://www.rushmyessay.com/samples/the-big-three-ww2/
Appendix 1
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