What if there was no Lend-Lease?

[Ifor]

Is there any information concerning the possible repercussions of lend-lease not being available to the Russians. My understanding is that the AFV situation would not have be so different, but supply would have. Could the strategic situation have been different without the supplied transport?

[steverodgers801]

A huge effect would be the Soviets would not have had as much mobility with out the trucks and jeeps sent.

[AJFFM]

Is there any information concerning the possible repercussions of lend-lease not being available to the Russians. My understanding is that the AFV situation would not have be so different, but supply would have. Could the strategic situation have been different without the supplied transport?

Very hard to quantify without actually knowing the exact proportion of the lend-lease to the overall Soviet war machine at the critical moments of the war.

In the end the only difference it would make is delay German defeat since most US lend-lease occurred after Germany declared war on the US.

[Der Alte Fritz]

Yes this question has already been answered by Mark Harrison in his ACCOUNTING FOR WAR study of the Soviet wartime economy. In short there is little difference in outcome to the war it just the Soviet people suffer a lot more deaths as the war is both longer and the cuts in civilian economy are deeper and longer.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Accounting-War- ... 331&sr=1-6

Free articles by Mark Harrison here:
https://warwick.academia.edu/markharrison

and his blog has many free articles:
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/

[LWD]

There are political dimensions in addition to the material and ecoomic ones that make it hard to give any accurate detailed answers to this question. Germany looses in any case IMO. Whether or not the USSR survives is an open question as is the leadership at the end. IMO it's likely that it does and with Stalin still at the head. It might well mean western troops in Berlin rather than Soviet ones though. The post war occupation zones are likely different as well. I suspect the Soviets would not end up fighting the Japanese either.

[Ifor]

Thank you, appreciated.

[BDV]

There also is a british component to the effort of supplying the Soviets - quite significant actually. US reducing or cancelling their efforts would surely mean increasing efforts from Britain and the Commonwealth side.

Also, decreased demand means lower prices and decreased profits. What US doesn't give out for free anymore, GB and USSR will be able to afford (albeit in smaller amounts). Some of the key things USSR desperately needed were not that bulky, especially communication equipment and medical supplies, and could have been shipped either by Arctic Convoy, or if needed, by Persia-Azerbaidjan route.

[phylo_roadking]

Very hard to quantify without actually knowing the exact proportion of the lend-lease to the overall Soviet war machine at the critical moments of the war.

And there's the rub - those "critical moments" like the Battle of Moscow. There's a couple of threads on here where the numbers are crunched about Allied tanks in the Red Army, and there were some tank units around Moscow at the time of Zhukov's offensive that were anything from 15 to 25% British....

Across the whole Red Army right at that moment the percentage was negligible - but in certain locations when the course of the war happened to turn - like Moscow - their role, numbers and importance for the survival of the USSR spiked.

There are a couple of websites where ALL the LL aid is documented....and the amount and nature of the aid is frightening. Five Million pairs of boots? SPAM in frieghtening quantities - old Russian baboushkas still remember Spam apparently Take a look at the lists and think what the Soviet war effort and economy as a whole would have looked like without it.

[Alk]

Marshal Zhukov was quoted in 1963 as saying the following about Lend Lease...

"When we entered the war, we were still a backward country in the industrial sense, as compared to Germany. Today, some say the Allies really didn’t help us. . . . But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us materiel without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war. . . .We did not have enough munitions; and how would we have been able to turn out all those tanks without the rolled steel sent to us by the Americans?"

Zhukov was always a plain speaker, but in general, from a national pride standpoint, the Russians simply denied the importance of Lend Lease for the last 65 years. The Americans didn't care enough to refute the claims.

A closer look at the numbers show that a third of all explosives used by the Russians in WW2 (200,000 tons) were supplied by the Americans. When you add the 400,000 trucks, the Shermans that were used so heavily in Romania and Hungary, and the fact that two recent Russian Historians are claiming that at times over a quarter of the active Red Air Force Aircraft were supplied by the allies, and the argument becomes very compelling that Lend Lease was a key factor to Russian dominance in 1944/45. That is not even touching the facts that late in the war a typical Russian soldier was quite possibly getting to the front on American supplied locomotives and freight bars, and might well have been wearing uniforms made of out American material, wearing American combat boots, eating American supplied food, and communicating with American supplied radios and telephones.

[Art]

A closer look at the numbers show that a third of all explosives used by the Russians in WW2 (200,000 tons) were supplied by the Americans.

Certainly less, see numbers quoted here:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 9&t=139080
On the other hand there there was an export of raw materials used in explosive and powder production.

400,000 trucks

According to the "Report on the war aid..." the number of trucks that arrived to the USSR was about 360 thousands (excluding jeeps), of them by the VE day some 300 thousands. See also:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 9&t=158313

at times over a quarter of the active Red Air Force Aircraft were supplied by the allies

The proportion was smaller all the way, the largest percentage by the year 1945 was about 1/5 IIRC.
Zhukov was not an expert in war economy, he could hardly say anything more valuable than a simple statement "LL provided a lot of material" (and without doubt it did). I would take information on effect of LL from people like Vernidub as more relevant here.

[LWD]

... There are a couple of websites where ALL the LL aid is documented. ...

The most comprehensive sites I've gone to note that not all aid was captured by the sources they used. Certainly most of the aid is though. And you are correct it is massive. The actual fighting vehicles may not have had much impact and the railroad related items probably had a greater impact post war than during the war but between things like boots, food, and chemicals (including explosives) it was truly significant. Again it also had a hube political/moral impact. It was physical proof to the Red Army soldier that he was not in this war alone.

[ljadw]

Very hard to quantify without actually knowing the exact proportion of the lend-lease to the overall Soviet war machine at the critical moments of the war.

And there's the rub - those "critical moments" like the Battle of Moscow. There's a couple of threads on here where the numbers are crunched about Allied tanks in the Red Army, and there were some tank units around Moscow at the time of Zhukov's offensive that were anything from 15 to 25% British....

Across the whole Red Army right at that moment the percentage was negligible - but in certain locations when the course of the war happened to turn - like Moscow - their role, numbers and importance for the survival of the USSR spiked.

There are a couple of websites where ALL the LL aid is documented....and the amount and nature of the aid is frightening. Five Million pairs of boots? SPAM in frieghtening quantities - old Russian baboushkas still remember Spam apparently Take a look at the lists and think what the Soviet war effort and economy as a whole would have looked like without it.

This is more than questionable

1) The Battle of Moscow being a critical moment :more than questionable

2)The role of tanks in the Battle of Moscow :is much exaggerated

3)The role of British tanks in the outcome of the Batte of Moscow is also much exaggerated:already on 25 november,the Germans had admitted that it was over;

4) The boots are a joke

5) Spam :IIRC : 144000 ton= 144 million of kilo for a population in the non occupied territories of the SU of 560 million (140 X 4),which means for every Soviet citizen yearly 250 gram Spam,or 5 gram a week .

[Der Alte Fritz]

From a historiography point of view the Lend Lease argument says more about Cold War politics than shedding any light on the Soviet economy and war effort and the arguments used are those of Cold War warriors.

The Soviets (and modern day Russians) feel that their immense losses i defeating the bulk of the German Army go unrecognised - which IMHO is still largely true today. So they make the quite valid point that Lend Lease was a drop in the ocean of the output of the Soviet economy, that the quality of much of the equipment was poor and what matters is that 10 million+ Soviet soldiers died in inflicting 80% of all German casualties of 5 million. By the time the Allies landed in SICILLY in 1943 the Soviets had already DEFEATED the German Army at STALINGRAD an KURSK and It was simply a question of how long it would take to get into the Reich. By the time the Allies land in Normandy in June 1944, the Soviets have ripped the heart out of the Ostheer in Operation Bagration within a month. To a large extent Normandy is a mopping up operation on a large scale. Remember in 1941 the first years deliveries of Allied supplies HAD TO BE PAID FOR, they were not supplied under Lend Lease.

The British and Americans feel that their efforts and sacrifice in the Northern convoys and in supplying millions of tons of economic aid and simply the vast task of transporting it half way around the world go unrecognised by an ungrateful Soviet peoples. So they point out the high quality of the goods supplied RADIOS, AIRCRAFT, 4X4 LORRIES, CANNED FOOD. RAILWAY SIGNALLING EQUIPMENT because this negates the small number/weight of the items and they forget the Matilda tanks, the Great War locomotives and the pairs of boots. They waged a war of MACHINES against Germany so the AIR WAR and NAVAL BLOCKADE are significant efforts against the German war economy that stopped it bringing its full weight to bear against the Soviets. The first firestorm raid was in November 1942 and the vast number of guns used in German air defences were not deployed on the Eastern Front. Allied losses may have been tiny (400,000 each killed for the Empire and USA including fighiting the Japanese.) and they killed a fraction of the German Army but they inflicted VAST damage to the German war effort.

The Zhukov quote is probably correct but lets think about Truman's post war quote (and I do not have it to hand, so will have to paraphrase) - 'we sent cans of SPAM so that we would not have to send American boys.' So US economic aid to help the Soviets defeat the German Army was preferable to sending American mothers sons to die in a foreign land. Had the USSR fallen in 1941, the British and Americans would have suffered huge casualties in recovering Europe. If they expected a million casualties in invading Japan in 1945 and dropped the A bomb as a result - how many in recovering France, Italy and Germany from a victorious Nazi regime?

Many of these arguments we use today are straight from the late 1950s and 1960s Cold War rhetoric. Lets forget them and concentrate on the reality, the Russian, White Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Lithuania, Latvian, Estonian, Cossack, Khazak, etc, etc, peoples defeated Nazi Germany and it was a honour and a privilege to help them.

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it." What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don't have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, "I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can't use it any more, it's all smashed up." He says, "How many feet of it were there?" I tell him, "There were 150 feet of it." He says, "All right, I will replace it." Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.

FDR Dec 1940

[wm]

4) The boots are a joke

5) Spam :IIRC : 144000 ton= 144 million of kilo for a population in the non occupied territories of the SU of 560 million (140 X 4),which means for every Soviet citizen yearly 250 gram Spam,or 5 gram a week .

Those (military) boots weren't a joke. They meant a large part of the Soviet Army was fighting in high quality boots, not bare foot (the rest was fighting in painted black tarpaulin boots).
As far as I know spam (or rather spam like Russian food called tushonka) was for the front only. According to many war memoirs spam was available in quantity.
Without spam (or at least LL food), on poor quality bread alone it's propable those soldiers would have been a joke too.

According to the Russian Wikipedia some of the ratios between the USSR/lend-lease were:

sugar 66%
canned meat 480% (LL=664.6 thousand tons)
animal fats 107%

Anastas Mikoyan - the people’s commissar responsible for the procurement of supplies to the Red Army estimated unofficially that LL shortened the war by a year to a year and half.

[ljadw]

From a historiography point of view the Lend Lease argument says more about Cold War politics than shedding any light on the Soviet economy and war effort and the arguments used are those of Cold War warriors.

The Soviets (and modern day Russians) feel that their immense losses i defeating the bulk of the German Army go unrecognised - which IMHO is still largely true today. So they make the quite valid point that Lend Lease was a drop in the ocean of the output of the Soviet economy, that the quality of much of the equipment was poor and what matters is that 10 million+ Soviet soldiers died in inflicting 80% of all German casualties of 5 million. By the time the Allies landed in SICILLY in 1943 the Soviets had already DEFEATED the German Army at STALINGRAD an KURSK and It was simply a question of how long it would take to get into the Reich. By the time the Allies land in Normandy in June 1944, the Soviets have ripped the heart out of the Ostheer in Operation Bagration within a month. To a large extent Normandy is a mopping up operation on a large scale. Remember in 1941 the first years deliveries of Allied supplies HAD TO BE PAID FOR, they were not supplied under Lend Lease.

The British and Americans feel that their efforts and sacrifice in the Northern convoys and in supplying millions of tons of economic aid and simply the vast task of transporting it half way around the world go unrecognised by an ungrateful Soviet peoples. So they point out the high quality of the goods supplied RADIOS, AIRCRAFT, 4X4 LORRIES, CANNED FOOD. RAILWAY SIGNALLING EQUIPMENT because this negates the small number/weight of the items and they forget the Matilda tanks, the Great War locomotives and the pairs of boots. They waged a war of MACHINES against Germany so the AIR WAR and NAVAL BLOCKADE are significant efforts against the German war economy that stopped it bringing its full weight to bear against the Soviets. The first firestorm raid was in November 1942 and the vast number of guns used in German air defences were not deployed on the Eastern Front. Allied losses may have been tiny (400,000 each killed for the Empire and USA including fighiting the Japanese.) and they killed a fraction of the German Army but they inflicted VAST damage to the German war effort.

The Zhukov quote is probably correct but lets think about Truman's post war quote (and I do not have it to hand, so will have to paraphrase) - 'we sent cans of SPAM so that we would not have to send American boys.' So US economic aid to help the Soviets defeat the German Army was preferable to sending American mothers sons to die in a foreign land. Had the USSR fallen in 1941, the British and Americans would have suffered huge casualties in recovering Europe. If they expected a million casualties in invading Japan in 1945 and dropped the A bomb as a result - how many in recovering France, Italy and Germany from a victorious Nazi regime?

Many of these arguments we use today are straight from the late 1950s and 1960s Cold War rhetoric. Lets forget them and concentrate on the reality, the Russian, White Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Lithuania, Latvian, Estonian, Cossack, Khazak, etc, etc, peoples defeated Nazi Germany and it was a honour and a privilege to help them.

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it." What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don't have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, "I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can't use it any more, it's all smashed up." He says, "How many feet of it were there?" I tell him, "There were 150 feet of it." He says, "All right, I will replace it." Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.

FDR Dec 1940

as usual:excellent