Lend-Lease. This topic needs to be brought to the attention of a wide range of people so that people know the truth, and not the lies that have taken root en masse in their heads. The facts of the past have been distorted too much by propaganda, and the perverted product of propaganda is self-confidently operated, as a generally recognized fact, by impostor patriots of all stripes. And therefore "Lend-Lease" turned out to be a white spot in the history of Russia for its population. If official propaganda mentions Lend-Lease, then briefly, as a fact of little significance, which allegedly did not have a significant impact on the course of the war. In fact, the influence and role of Lend-Lease on the course of the Second World War turned out to be enormous. History did not know this.
What is it -"Lend-Lease"?
On May 15, 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who offered to temporarily transfer 40-50 old destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for British naval and air bases in the Atlantic Ocean, first asked US President Franklin Roosevelt to provide American weapons for temporary use.
The deal took place in August 1940, but the idea of a wider program arose from it. By order of Roosevelt, in the autumn of 1940, a working group was formed in the US Treasury Department to prepare an appropriate bill. The legal advisers of the ministry, E. Foley and O. Cox, proposed relying on the law of 1892, which allowed the Minister of War, "when at his discretion it would be in the interests of the state", to lease "for a period of not more than five years the property of the army, if it is not needed a country".
Employees of the military and naval ministries were also involved in the work on the project. On January 10, 1941, the relevant hearings began in the US Senate and House of Representatives, on March 11, the Lend-Lease Law (act) was signed, and on March 27, the US Congress voted to allocate the first appropriation for military assistance in the amount of $ 7 billion.
Roosevelt likened the approved scheme for lending military materials and equipment to a fire hose passed to a neighbor so that the flames would not spread to their own house. I don't need him to pay for the cost of the hose, the US president said, "I need him to give me my hose back after the fire is over."
The deliveries included armaments, industrial equipment, merchant ships, vehicles, food, fuel and medicines. According to established principles, US-supplied vehicles, military equipment, weapons, and other materials destroyed, lost, or used during the war were not subject to payment. Only property left after the war and suitable for civilian use had to be paid in full or in part, and the United States provided long-term loans for such payment.
The surviving military materials remained with the recipient country, but the American administration retained the right to demand them back. Customer countries could, after the end of the war, buy equipment that had not yet been completed or was stored in warehouses using American long-term loans. The delivery period was initially set to June 30, 1943, but then extended annually. Finally, the law provided for the possibility of refusing to supply certain equipment if it was recognized as secret or was necessary by the United States itself.
In total, during the war, the United States provided lend-lease assistance to the governments of 42 countries, including Great Britain, the USSR, China, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and others, in the amount of approximately $ 48 billion.
lend-lease- (from the English lend - "to lend" and lease - "to rent, for hire") - a state program under which the United States of America, mainly on a gratuitous basis, transferred ammunition, equipment, food to its allies in World War II and strategic raw materials, including oil products.
The concept of this program gave the President of the United States the power to help any country whose defense was deemed vital to his country. Lend Lease Act, full name An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, passed by the US Congress on March 11, 1941, provided that:
delivered materials (machines, various military equipment, weapons, raw materials, other items), destroyed, lost and used during the war, are not subject to payment (Article 5)
property transferred under lend-lease, remaining after the end of the war and suitable for civilian purposes, will be paid in whole or in part on the basis of long-term loans provided by the United States (mostly interest-free loans).
Lend-lease provisions stipulated that after the war, if the American side was interested, undestroyed and not lost machinery and equipment should be returned to the United States.
In total, lend-lease deliveries amounted to about $50.1 billion (equivalent to about $610 billion in 2008 prices), of which $31.4 billion was delivered to the UK, $11.3 billion to the USSR, $3.2 billion to France and $1.6 billion to China. Reverse lend-lease (supplies of allies to the US) amounted to $7.8 billion, of which $6.8 billion went to the UK and the Commonwealth countries.
In the post-war period, various assessments of the role of Lend-Lease were expressed. In the USSR, the importance of supplies was often downplayed, while abroad it was argued that the victory over Germany was determined by Western weapons and that without Lend-Lease the Soviet Union would not have survived.
In Soviet historiography, it was usually argued that the amount of lend-lease assistance to the USSR was rather small - only about 4% of the funds spent by the country on the war, and tanks and aircraft were supplied mostly outdated models. Today, the attitude in the countries of the former USSR towards the help of the allies has somewhat changed, and attention has also begun to be paid to the fact that, for a number of items, deliveries were of no small importance, both in terms of the significance of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the supplied equipment, and in terms of access to new types of weapons and industrial equipment.
Canada had a lend-lease program similar to America's, with deliveries totaling $4.7 billion, mostly to Britain and the USSR.
The volume of deliveries and the significance of lend-lease
Materials totaling $50.1 billion (about $610 billion in 2008 prices) were sent to recipients, including:
Reverse lend-lease (for example, the lease of air bases) was received by the United States in the amount of $7.8 billion, of which $6.8 billion came from the UK and the British Commonwealth. Reverse lend-lease from the USSR amounted to $2.2 million.
The significance of lend-lease in the victory of the United Nations over the Axis is illustrated in the table below, which shows the GDP of the main countries participating in World War II, from 1938 to 1945, in billions of dollars in 1990 prices.
| A country | 1938 | 1939 | 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | 24 | 27 | 27 | 29 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 12 |
| France | 186 | 199 | 164 | 130 | 116 | 110 | 93 | 101 |
| Germany | 351 | 384 | 387 | 412 | 417 | 426 | 437 | 310 |
| Italy | 141 | 151 | 147 | 144 | 145 | 137 | 117 | 92 |
| Japan | 169 | 184 | 192 | 196 | 197 | 194 | 189 | 144 |
| USSR | 359 | 366 | 417 | 359 | 274 | 305 | 362 | 343 |
| Great Britain | 284 | 287 | 316 | 344 | 353 | 361 | 346 | 331 |
| USA | 800 | 869 | 943 | 1 094 | 1 235 | 1 399 | 1 499 | 1 474 |
| Anti-Hitler coalition total: | 1 629 | 1 600 | 1 331 | 1 596 | 1 862 | 2 065 | 2 363 | 2 341 |
| Axis countries total: | 685 | 746 | 845 | 911 | 902 | 895 | 826 | 466 |
| GDP ratio, Allies/Axis: |
2,38 | 2,15 | 1,58 | 1,75 | 2,06 | 2,31 | 2,86 | 5,02 |
As the table above shows (from American sources), by December 1941, the GDP of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition (USSR + Great Britain) correlated with the GDP of Germany and its European allies as 1:1. It is worth considering, however, that by this time Great Britain was exhausted by the naval blockade and could not help the USSR in any significant way in the short term. Moreover, according to the results of 1941, Great Britain was still losing the battle for the Atlantic, which was fraught with a complete collapse for the country's economy, which was almost entirely tied to foreign trade.
The GDP of the USSR in 1942, in turn, due to the occupation of large territories by Germany, decreased by about a third compared to the pre-war level, while out of 200 million people, about 78 million people remained in the occupied territories.
Thus, in 1942, the USSR and Great Britain were inferior to Germany and its satellites both in terms of GDP (0.9: 1) and in terms of population (taking into account the losses of the USSR due to the occupation). In this situation, the US leadership saw the need to provide urgent military-technical assistance to both countries. Moreover, the United States was the only country in the world with sufficient production capacity to provide such support in a short enough time to have time to influence the course of hostilities in 1942. Throughout 1941, the United States continued to increase military assistance to Great Britain, and on October 1, 1941, Roosevelt approved the USSR joining Lend-Lease.
Lend-Lease, coupled with increasing British aid in its Battle of the Atlantic, proved to be a critical factor in bringing the US into the war, especially on the European front. Hitler, when declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941, mentioned both of these factors as key in deciding to go to war with the United States.
It should be noted that the sending of American and British military equipment to the USSR led to the need to supply it with hundreds of thousands of tons of aviation fuel, millions of shells for guns and cartridges for PP and machine guns, spare caterpillars for tanks, spare car tires, spare parts for tanks, aircraft and cars. As early as 1943, when the leadership of the Allies ceased to doubt the USSR's ability to wage a long-term war, the USSR began to import mainly strategic materials (aluminum, etc.) and machine tools for Soviet industry.
Already after the first Lend-Lease deliveries, Stalin began to complain about the unsatisfactory technical characteristics of the supplied aircraft and tanks. Indeed, among the equipment supplied to the USSR, there were samples that were inferior to both the Soviet and, most importantly, German. As an example, we can cite the frankly unsuccessful model of the Curtiss 0-52 aviation reconnaissance spotter, which the Americans simply sought to attach somewhere and imposed on us almost for nothing, in excess of the approved order.
However, in general, Stalin's claims, subsequently thoroughly inflated by Soviet propaganda, at the stage of secret correspondence with the leaders of the allied countries were simply a form of pressure on them. The leasing relationship implied, in particular, the right of the receiving party to independently choose and stipulate the type and characteristics of the required products. And if the Red Army considered American equipment unsatisfactory, then what was the point of ordering it?
As for the official Soviet propaganda, it preferred to downplay the importance of American aid in every possible way, if not to completely hush it up. In March 1943, the American ambassador in Moscow, without hiding his offense, allowed himself an undiplomatic statement: “The Russian authorities, apparently, want to hide the fact that they receive help from outside. Obviously, they want to assure their people that the Red Army is fighting in this war alone." And during the Yalta Conference in 1945, Stalin was forced to admit that Lend-Lease was Roosevelt's wonderful and most fruitful contribution to the creation of the anti-Hitler coalition.
Mk II "Matilda II";, Mk III "Valentine" and Mk IV "Valentine"
Tank "Churchill"
M4 "General Sherman"
 |
| Intantry Tank Mk.III Valentine II, Kubinka, May 2005 |
Routes and volumes of deliveries
The American P-39 Aircobra is the best fighter of World War II. Of the 9.5 thousand Cobras launched into the sky, 5 thousand were in the hands of Soviet pilots. This is one of the most striking examples of the combat commonwealth of the USA and the USSR.
Soviet pilots adored the American Cobra, which more than once took them out of deadly fights. The legendary ace A. Pokryshkin, flying the Air Cobra since the spring of 1943, destroyed 48 enemy aircraft in air battles, bringing the total score to 59 victories.
Deliveries from the USA to the USSR can be divided into the following stages:
-- "pre-lend-lease" - from June 22, 1941 to September 30, 1941 (paid in gold)
-- the first protocol - from October 1, 1941 to June 30, 1942 (signed on October 1, 1941)
-- the second protocol - from July 1, 1942 to June 30, 1943 (signed on October 6, 1942)
-- the third protocol - from July 1, 1943 to June 30, 1944 (signed on October 19, 1943)
-- the fourth protocol - from July 1, 1944, (signed on April 17, 1944), formally ended on May 12, 1945, but deliveries were extended until the end of the war with Japan, which the USSR undertook to enter 90 days after the end of the war in Europe (that is, 8 August 1945). Japan capitulated on September 2, 1945, and on September 20, 1945, all Lend-Lease deliveries to the USSR were stopped.
Allied supplies were very unevenly distributed over the years of the war. In 1941-1942. conditional obligations were constantly not fulfilled, the situation returned to normal only from the second half of 1943.
The main routes and the volume of transported goods are shown in the table below.
| Delivery routes | tonnage, thousand tons | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Pacific | 8244 | 47,1 |
| Trans-Iranian | 4160 | 23,8 |
| Arctic convoys | 3964 | 22,7 |
| Black Sea | 681 | 3,9 |
| Soviet Arctic | 452 | 2,6 |
| Total | 17 501 | 100,0 |
Three routes - the Pacific, trans-Iranian and Arctic convoys - provided a total of 93.5% of total deliveries. None of these routes were completely safe.
The fastest (and most dangerous) route was the Arctic convoys. In July-December 1941, 40% of all deliveries went along this route, and about 15% of the shipped cargo ended up on the ocean floor. The sea part of the journey from the US East Coast to Murmansk took about 2 weeks.
Cargo with northern convoys also went through Arkhangelsk and Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk), from where, along a hastily completed railway line, cargo went to the front. The bridge across the Northern Dvina did not yet exist, and for the transfer of equipment in winter, a meter layer of ice was frozen from river water, since the natural thickness of the ice (65 cm in the winter of 1941) did not allow rails with wagons to withstand. Further, the cargo was sent by rail to the south, to the central, rear part of the USSR.
The Pacific route, which provided about half of Lend-Lease supplies, was relatively (though far from completely) safe. With the outbreak of the Pacific War on December 7, 1941, transportation here could only be provided by Soviet sailors, and merchant ships sailed only under the Soviet flag. All non-freezing straits were controlled by Japan, and Soviet ships were subjected to compulsory inspection, and sometimes drowned. The sea part of the journey from the western coast of the USA to the Far Eastern ports of the USSR took 18-20 days.
| Studebakers in Iran on their way to the USSR |
The first deliveries to the USSR along the Trans-Iranian route began in November 1941, when 2,972 tons of cargo were sent. To increase the volume of deliveries, it was necessary to carry out a large-scale modernization of the Iranian transport system, in particular, ports in the Persian Gulf and the trans-Iranian railway. To this end, the Allies (USSR and Great Britain) occupied Iran in August 1941. From May 1942, deliveries averaged 80-90 thousand tons per month, and in the second half of 1943 - up to 200,000 tons per month. Further, the delivery of goods was carried out by the ships of the Caspian military flotilla, which until the end of 1942 were subjected to active attacks by German aircraft. The sea part of the journey from the east coast of the United States to the coast of Iran took about 75 days. Especially for the needs of lend-lease in Iran, several automobile plants were built, which were under the control of General Motors Overseas Corporation. The largest were called TAP I (Truck Assembly Plant I) at Andimeshk and TAP II at Khorramshara. In total, during the war years, 184,112 cars were sent from Iranian enterprises to the USSR. Cars were distilled along the following routes: Tehran - Ashgabat, Tehran - Astara - Baku, Julfa - Ordzhonikidze.
It should be noted that during the war there were two more Lend-Lease air routes. According to one of them, planes "under their own power" flew to the USSR from the USA through the South Atlantic, Africa and the Persian Gulf, according to another - through Alaska, Chukotka and Siberia. On the second route, known as Alsib (Alaska-Siberia), 7925 aircraft were deployed.
The nomenclature of Lend-Lease supplies was determined by the Soviet government and was designed to plug the "bottlenecks" in the supply of our industry and army.
| Aircraft | 14 795 |
| tanks | 7 056 |
| Passenger all-terrain vehicles | 51 503 |
| trucks | 375 883 |
| Motorcycles | 35 170 |
| Tractors | 8 071 |
| Rifles | 8 218 |
| Automatic weapons | 131 633 |
| Pistols | 12 997 |
| Explosives | 345,735 tons |
| dynamite | 70,400,000 pounds |
| Gunpowder | 127,000 tons |
| TNT | 271,500,000 pounds |
| Toluene | 237,400,000 pounds |
| Detonators | 903 000 |
| Building equipment | $10 910 000 |
| Freight wagons | 11 155 |
| locomotives | 1 981 |
| cargo ships | 90 |
| anti-submarine ships | 105 |
| torpedoes | 197 |
| Radars | 445 |
| Ship engines | 7 784 |
| Food stocks | 4,478,000 tons |
| Machinery and equipment | $1 078 965 000 |
| non-ferrous metals | 802,000 tons |
| Oil products | 2,670,000 tons |
| chemicals | 842,000 tons |
| Cotton | 106,893,000 tons |
| Skin | 49,860 tons |
| Shin | 3 786 000 |
| Army boots | 15,417,000 pairs |
| Blankets | 1 541 590 |
| alcohol | 331 066 l |
| Buttons | 257 723 498 pcs. |
Importance of supplies
Already in November 1941, in his letter to US President Roosevelt, I. V. Stalin wrote:
Marshal Zhukov said in post-war conversations:
| Now they say that the allies never helped us... But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us so many materials, without which we could not form our reserves and could not continue the war... We did not have explosives, gunpowder. There was nothing to equip rifle cartridges. The Americans really helped us out with gunpowder and explosives. And how much they drove us sheet steel! How could we quickly start producing tanks if it weren't for American help with steel? And now they present the matter in such a way that we had all this in abundance. - From the report of the chairman of the KGB V. Semichastny - N. S. Khrushchev; stamp "top secret" // Zenkovich N. Ya. Marshals and general secretaries. M., 1997. S. 161 |
A. I. Mikoyan also highly appreciated the role of lend-lease, during the war he was responsible for the work of seven allied people's commissariats (trade, procurement, food, fish and meat and dairy industries, maritime transport and the river fleet) and, as the country's people's commissar for foreign trade, with 1942, who led the reception of allied Lend-Lease supplies:
Quote:
Here is another Mikoyan:
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The main chassis for the Katyushas was the Lend-Lease Studebakers (specifically, the Studebaker US6). While the States gave about 20,000 vehicles for our “war girl”, only 600 trucks were produced in the USSR (mainly the ZIS-6 chassis). Almost all Katyushas, assembled on the basis of Soviet cars, were destroyed by the war. To date, only four Katyusha rocket launchers have survived throughout the CIS, which were created on the basis of domestic ZiS-6 trucks. One is in the St. Petersburg Artillery Museum, and the second is in Zaporozhye. The third mortar based on the "lorry" stands like a monument in Kirovograd. The fourth stands in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin.
| The famous Katyusha rocket launchers on the chassis of the American Studebaker truck: |
The USSR received a significant number of cars from the USA and other allies: in the automobile fleet of the Red Army there were 5.4% of imported cars in 1943, in 1944 in the SA - 19%, on May 1, 1945 - 32.8% ( 58.1% were domestically produced cars and 9.1% were captured cars). During the war years, the fleet of the Red Army was replenished with a large number of new vehicles, largely due to imports. The army received 444,700 new vehicles, of which 63.4% were imported and 36.6% were domestic. The main replenishment of the army with domestically produced cars was carried out at the expense of old cars withdrawn from the national economy. 62% of all received vehicles were tractors, of which 60% were Studebaker, as the best of all tractor brands received, which largely replaced horse traction and tractors for towing 75-mm and 122-mm artillery systems. Good performance was also shown by a 3/4 ton Dodge car towing anti-tank artillery guns (up to 88 mm). A large role was played by the Willys passenger car with 2 driving axles, which has good cross-country ability and was a reliable means of reconnaissance, communications and command and control. In addition, Willis was used as a tractor for anti-tank artillery (up to 45 mm). Of the special purpose vehicles, it should be noted the Ford amphibians (based on the Willis vehicle), which were attached to tank armies as part of special battalions to conduct reconnaissance operations when crossing water barriers, and Jimsi (GMC, based on a truck of the same brand), used mainly by engineering parts at the device of crossings. The US and the British Empire supplied 18.36% of the aviation gasoline used by Soviet aviation during the war years; True, American and British aircraft delivered under Lend-Lease were mainly refueled with this gasoline, while domestic aircraft could be refueled with domestic gasoline with a lower octane rating.
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| American steam locomotive of the Ea series |
According to other sources, the USSR received under Lend-Lease 622.1 thousand tons of railway rails (56.5% of its own production), 1900 locomotives (2.4 times more than produced during the war years in the USSR) and 11075 wagons ( more by 10.2 times), 3 million 606 thousand tires (43.1%), 610 thousand tons of sugar (41.8%), 664.6 thousand tons of canned meat (108%). The USSR received 427 thousand cars and 32 thousand army motorcycles, while in the USSR from the beginning of the war until the end of 1945 only 265.6 thousand cars and 27816 motorcycles were produced (here it is necessary to take into account the pre-war amount of equipment). The United States supplied 2,13,000 tons of aviation gasoline (together with its allies, 2,586,000 tons)—almost two-thirds of the fuel used by Soviet aviation during the war years. At the same time, in the article where the figures of this paragraph are taken from, the article by B. V. Sokolov "The role of Lend-Lease in the Soviet military efforts, 1941-1945" appears as a source. However, the article itself says that the United States and Britain supplied together only 1216.1 thousand tons of aviation gasoline, and in the USSR in 1941-1945. 5539 thousand tons of aviation gasoline were produced, that is, Western supplies accounted for only 18% of the total Soviet consumption during the war. Considering that this was the percentage of aircraft supplied by the USSR under Lend-Lease in the Soviet fleet, it is obvious that gasoline was imported specifically for imported aircraft. Along with aircraft, the USSR received hundreds of tons of aviation spare parts, aviation ammunition, fuel, special airfield equipment and apparatus, including 9351 American radio stations for installation on Soviet-made fighters, and navigation equipment (radio compasses, autopilots, radars, sextants, artificial horizons).
Comparative data on the role of Lend-Lease in providing the Soviet economy with certain types of materials and food during the war are given below:
And here is the first lie, which many people repeat to this day, not knowing its origin and source:
The first official historical assessment of the role of Lend-Lease was given by Gosplan Chairman Nikolai Voznesensky in his book "The Military Economy of the USSR during the Patriotic War", published in 1948:
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The 4% figure was published without further comment and raised many questions. In particular, it was not clear how Voznesensky and his staff calculated these percentages. Estimating Soviet GDP in monetary terms was difficult due to the lack of convertibility of the ruble. If the bill went to units of production, then it is not clear how tanks were compared to aircraft, and food to aluminum.
Voznesensky himself was soon arrested in the Leningrad case and shot in 1950, and, accordingly, he could not comment. Nevertheless, the figure of 4% was subsequently widely quoted in the USSR as reflecting the official point of view on the significance of Lend-Lease.
Lend-Lease debts and their payment
Immediately after the war, the United States sent a proposal to the countries receiving lend-lease assistance to return the surviving military equipment and pay off the debt in order to obtain new loans. Since the Lend-Lease law provided for the write-off of used military equipment and materials, the Americans insisted on paying only for civilian supplies: railway transport, power plants, steamships, trucks and other equipment that was in the recipient countries as of September 2, 1945. The United States did not demand compensation for the military equipment destroyed during the battles.
Great Britain
The volume of the UK's debt to the USA amounted to $4.33 billion, to Canada - $1.19 billion. The last payment of $83.25 million (in favor of the USA) and $22.7 million (Canada) was made on account of the location of American bases in the UK
China
China's debt to the United States for lend-lease deliveries amounted to $187 million. Since 1979, the United States has recognized the People's Republic of China as the sole legitimate government of China, and therefore the heir to all previous agreements (including lend-lease deliveries). However, in 1989, the US demanded that Taiwan (not China) repay its Lend-Lease debt. The further fate of Chinese debt is not clear.
USSR (Russia)
The volume of American Lend-Lease deliveries amounted to about 11 billion US dollars. According to the lend-lease law, only equipment that survived during the war was subject to payment; to agree on the final amount, immediately after the end of the war, Soviet-American negotiations began. At the 1948 negotiations, the Soviet representatives agreed to pay only a small amount and were met with a predictable refusal from the American side. The 1949 negotiations also came to nothing. In 1951, the Americans twice reduced the amount of the payment, which became equal to $ 800 million, but the Soviet side agreed to pay only $ 300 million. According to the Soviet government, the calculation should have been carried out not in accordance with the real debt, but on the basis of a precedent. This precedent was to be the proportions in determining the debt between the United States and Great Britain, which were fixed as early as March 1946.
An agreement with the USSR on the procedure for repaying lend-lease debts was concluded only in 1972. Under this agreement, the USSR undertook to pay $722 million by 2001, including interest. By July 1973, three payments were made for a total of $48 million, after which the payments were terminated due to the introduction by the American side of discriminatory measures in trade with the USSR (Jackson-Vanik Amendment). In June 1990, during the talks between the presidents of the United States and the USSR, the parties returned to the discussion of debt. A new deadline for the final repayment of the debt was set - 2030, and the amount - $674 million.
After the collapse of the USSR, the debt for assistance was reissued to Russia (Yeltsin, Kozyrev), as of 2003, Russia owes about 100 million US dollars.
Thus, out of the total volume of US lend-lease deliveries of $11 billion, the USSR, and then Russia, paid $722 million, or about 7%.
However, it should be noted that, taking into account the inflationary depreciation of the dollar, this figure will be significantly (many times) less. So, by 1972, when the amount of debt for lend-lease in the amount of $722 million was agreed with the United States, the dollar had depreciated 2.3 times since 1945. However, in 1972, only $48 million was paid to the USSR, and an agreement to pay the remaining $674 million was reached in June 1990, when the purchasing power of the dollar was already 7.7 times lower than at the end of 1945. Given the payment of $674 million in 1990, the total amount of Soviet payments in 1945 prices amounted to about 110 million US dollars, that is, about 1% of the total cost of Lend-Lease supplies. But most of what was delivered was either destroyed by the war, or, like shells, was spent on the needs of the war, or, at the end of the war, in accordance with the lend-lease law, returned to the United States.
France
On May 28, 1946, France signed a package of treaties with the United States (known as the Bloom-Byrnes Agreement) that settled the French debt for lend-lease supplies in exchange for a series of trade concessions from France. In particular, France has significantly increased quotas for showing foreign (primarily American) films on the French film market.
By 1960, almost all countries had repaid their debts, except for the USSR.
During the 1948 negotiations, the Soviet representatives agreed to pay a small amount, but the US rejected this offer. Negotiations in 1949 also proved fruitless. In 1951, the American side reduced the amount it demanded to 800 million dollars, but the USSR was ready to pay only 300 million, referring to the proportions agreed by Great Britain and the USA in 1946. Only in 1972 did Soviet and American representatives sign an agreement in Washington on a phased payment The Soviet Union paid $722 million until 2001. By July 1973, only $48 million had been paid, after which further payments ceased: the Soviet side thus protested against the restrictions imposed on trade between the two countries. Only in June 1990, the presidents of the USSR and the USA agreed to pay off the debt by 2030. The agreed amount was measured at 674 million dollars.
Now it's easy to say that Lend-Lease meant nothing - you can't check
Stalin, both during and after the war, stubbornly did not want to advertise the help of the allies of the USSR, so that the crown of the winner belonged only to him. In the Soviet military-historical literature of the “stagnant period”, it was stated that Lend-Lease deliveries amounted to only 4% of all weapons and military equipment produced in the USSR during the war years.
Numerical data confirming the above statements of Zhukov and Mikoyan can be found in the studies of I.P. Lebedev 2) who writes: “During the war, the USSR received 18,700 (according to other sources, 22,200) aircraft from the allies to help under Lend-Lease, including Air Cobra, Kitty Hawk, Tomahawk, and Hurricane fighters. ", medium bombers B-25, A-20 "Boston", transport C-47, 12,200 tanks and self-propelled units, 100 thousand kilometers of telephone wire, 2.5 million telephones; 15 million pairs of boots, more than 50 thousand tons of leather for footwear, 54 thousand meters of wool, 250 thousand tons of stew, 300 thousand tons of fat, 65 thousand tons of cow butter, 700 thousand tons of sugar, 1860 steam locomotives, 100 tank cars on wheels, 70 electric diesel locomotives, about a thousand self-unloading wagons, 10 thousand railway platforms With their help, 344 thousand tons of explosives, almost 2 million tons of oil products, and another 2.5 million tons of special steel for armor, 400 thousand tons of copper and bronze, 250 thousand tons of aluminum were delivered from the allies to the front and rear. aluminum, according to experts, it was possible to build 100 thousand fighters and bombers - almost as many as our aircraft factories produced during the entire war "(Lebedev I.P. 1)
The contribution of other allies should also be noted. Assistance in armaments and war materials provided to the Soviet Union by Great Britain from the summer of 1941 to 8 September 1945 amounted to 318 million pounds sterling, or 15% of the total aid. It was during the first months of the war that the British military assistance that Stalin asked for and received was very substantial. English "spitfires", "Hurricanes" defended not only our capital, but defended Stalingrad, the North and South of Russia, the Caucasus, Belarus. It was on the Hurricanes that Heroes of the Soviet Union Amet Khan Sultan, I. Stepanenko, A. Ryazanov won their victories twice.
Beginning with the third protocol (entered into force on July 1, 1943), Canada began to take a direct part in providing assistance to the USSR. Canadian deliveries included armaments, industrial equipment, non-ferrous metals, steel, rolled metal, chemicals, and food. To assist the USSR in 1943-1946. approximately CAD 167.3 million was spent, or 6.7% of the total aid.
We also point out that the annotated list of ships and vessels, including the battleship, handed over to us by the allies under lend-lease, is over four hundred pages.
It should be added that the USSR received assistance from the allies not only under the Lend-Lease program. In the United States, in particular, the “Committee for Assistance to Russia in the War” (Russia War Relief) was created. “With the money raised, the committee purchased and sent medicines, medicines and equipment, food, clothing to the Red Army, the Soviet people. In total, during the war, the Soviet Union was provided with assistance in the amount of more than one and a half billion dollars. In England, a similar committee was chaired by Clementine Churchill, the Prime Minister's wife.
The Soviet government noted that supplies from the United States and other countries "contributed to the success of the Red Army in liberating their native land from fascist invaders and in accelerating the overall victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany and its satellites"
Notes
1) “It can be definitely said that Stalin would never have been able to launch a large-scale counter-offensive of the Red Army if it were not for the 150 thousand heavy Studebaker trucks received from the USA” (Bunich I. Operation “Thunderstorm”, or Error in the third sign. T 2. St. Petersburg, 1994. P. 269. The adverb "never" is highlighted by I. Bunich.
2) I.P. Lebedev - major general of aviation, member of the procurement commission of the USSR in the USA; worked to receive A-20 Boston bombers.
The downplaying of the role of Western supplies in the Soviet military conditions was aimed primarily at asserting the myth of the “economic victory of socialism” in the Great Patriotic War and the superiority of the Soviet military economy over the war economies of the capitalist countries, not only Germany, but also Great Britain and the USA. It was only after 1985 that other assessments of allied assistance began to come across in Soviet publications. So, Marshal G.K. Zhukov, in post-war conversations with the writer K.M. Simonov, stated:
“Speaking about our readiness for war from the point of view of the economy, the economy, one cannot hush up such a factor as subsequent assistance from the allies. First of all, of course, from the side of the Americans, because the British in this sense helped us minimally. When analyzing all sides of the war, this cannot be discounted. We would be in a difficult position without American gunpowder, we would not be able to produce the amount of ammunition that we needed. Without the American Studebakers, we would have nothing to carry our artillery on. Yes, they largely provided our front-line transport in general. The production of special steels, necessary for the various needs of the war, was also associated with a number of American supplies.At the same time, Zhukov emphasized that "we entered the war while still continuing to be an industrially backward country compared to Germany." The authenticity of K. Simonov's transmission of these conversations with Zhukov, which took place in 1965-1966, is confirmed by the statements of G. Zhukov, recorded as a result of interception by security agencies in 1963: “Now they say that the allies never helped us ... But you can’t to deny that the Americans gave us so many materials, without which we could not form our reserves and could not continue the war ... We did not have explosives, gunpowder. There was nothing to equip rifle cartridges. The Americans really helped us out with gunpowder, explosives. And how much they drove us sheet steel! How could we quickly start producing tanks if it weren't for American help with steel? And now they present the matter in such a way that we had all this in abundance.
The fleet of the Red Army was also provided to a large extent by Western supplies. The production of automobiles in the USSR in 1940 was 145,390; in 1941, 124,476; in 1942, 34,976; in 1943, 49,266; in 1944, 60,549; At the same time, in the first half of 1941, 73.2 thousand cars were produced, and in the second - only 46.1 thousand, so from the beginning of the war until the end of 1945, the total production of cars can be determined at 265.6 thousand. things. During the war years, 409.5 thousand cars were delivered from the USA to the USSR, which was 1.5 times higher than Soviet production during the war years. By the end of the war (as of May 1, 1945), Lend-Lease vehicles accounted for 32.8% of the Red Army's vehicle fleet (58.1% were domestically produced vehicles and 9.1% were captured vehicles). Given the greater carrying capacity and better quality, the role of American vehicles was even higher (Studebakers, in particular, were used as artillery tractors). The pre-war fleet of Soviet cars (both those that were in the Red Army and withdrawn from the national economy with the outbreak of war) was badly worn out. Before the war, the needs of the Red Army in vehicles were determined at 744 thousand cars and 92 thousand tractors, but there were 272.6 thousand cars and 42 thousand tractors. It was planned to withdraw 240 thousand cars from the national economy, including 210 thousand trucks (GAZ-AA and ZIS-5), however, due to the heavy wear and tear of the fleet (for passenger cars, cars belonging to the 1st and 2nd categories , i.e., those that did not require immediate repair, there were 45%, and for trucks and special ones - 68%), in fact, only 206 thousand vehicles were withdrawn from the national economy in the first months of the war, while by August 22, 1941. irretrievable losses of cars reached 271.4 thousand. It is obvious that without Western supplies, the Red Army would not have gained the degree of mobility that it had at least from the middle of 1943, although until the end of the war the use of vehicles was constrained by a lack of gasoline.
Gasoline in the USSR in 1941-1945 10,923 thousand tons were produced (including 2,983 thousand tons in 1941), and 267.1 thousand short, or 242.3 thousand metric tons, were received from the USA under Lend-Lease, which amounted to only 2, 8% of total Soviet production during the war (minus production for the first half of 1941). True, the actual role of American gasoline was somewhat higher due to higher octane numbers. The USSR could not satisfy its own needs for this type of fuel, and the shortage of motor gasoline in the Red Army continued until the end of the war. Obviously, this situation was partly a consequence of the irrational drawing up of requests for help under Lend-Lease by the Soviet side - it would be more expedient to ask for fewer cars and more gasoline.
Also, the functioning of the Soviet railway transport would have been impossible without Lend-Lease. The production of railway rails (including narrow gauge rails) in the USSR changed as follows (in thousand tons) 1940-1360, 1941-874, 1942-112, 1943 - 115, The USSR was supplied with 685.7 thousand short tons of railway rails, which is equal to 622.1 thousand metric tons. This is about 56.5% of the total production of railway rails in the USSR from mid-1941 to the end of 1945. If we exclude narrow gauge rails from the calculation, which were not supplied under Lend-Lease, then American deliveries will amount to 83.3% total Soviet production.
Even more noticeable was the role of Lend-Lease deliveries in maintaining the number of Soviet locomotives and railway cars at the required level. The production of mainline steam locomotives in the USSR changed as follows: in 1940–914, in 1941–708, in 1942–9, in 1943–43, in 1944–32, in 1945–8. and in 1941 - 1, after which their release was discontinued until 1945 inclusive. Mainline electric locomotives in 1940 were produced 9 pieces, and in 1941 - 6 pieces, after which their production was also discontinued. Under Lend-Lease, 1900 steam locomotives and 66 diesel-electric locomotives were delivered to the USSR during the war years. Thus, lend-lease deliveries exceeded the total Soviet production of steam locomotives in 1941-1945. 2.4 times, and electric locomotives - 11 times. The production of freight cars in the USSR in 1942-1945 totaled 1,087 units compared to 33,096 in 1941. Under Lend-Lease, a total of 11,075 cars were delivered, or 10.2 times more than Soviet production in 1942 —1945 It is known that during the First World War, the transport crisis in Russia at the turn of 1916-1917, which largely provoked the revolution of February 1917, was caused by insufficient production of railway rails, steam locomotives and wagons, since the industrial capacity and the resources of rolled products were reoriented to the production of weapons . During the Great Patriotic War, only Lend-Lease deliveries prevented the paralysis of railway transport in the Soviet Union.
In providing the national economy with non-ferrous metals, Western supplies were of decisive importance. Figures for the Soviet production of basic non-ferrous metals in 1941-1945. are still secret, so here you have to rely not on official data, but on estimates.
The facts of conscious overestimation of reporting - an indelible vice of the socialist planned economy, are known in relation to weapons and military equipment in the USSR both in the pre-war and post-war years.
According to our estimates, based on the decrease in labor costs per unit of various types of weapons and equipment in 1941-1943, the production of tanks and combat aircraft during the war years was at least doubled. With this in mind, the share of Western deliveries of weapons and military equipment turns out to be approximately twice as high as it is commonly believed.
But perhaps most important to the Soviet Union was the supply of sophisticated machine tools and industrial equipment. Back in 1939-1940. the Soviet leadership placed orders for imported equipment for the production of artillery weapons. Then these orders, placed mainly in the United States, were delivered to the USSR under Lend-Lease. Namely, in special machines for artillery production during the war years in the USSR there was the greatest need. However, these orders contained a major miscalculation. A significant proportion of the equipment was intended for the production of purely offensive weapons - powerful naval and super-heavy land guns designed to destroy enemy fortifications. Naval guns were not needed, since shipbuilding was curtailed with the start of the war, and super-heavy land artillery was also not needed, since the Red Army had to fight the corresponding fortifications only at the very end of the war, and not on the scale that was thought before it began.
In general, we can conclude that without Western supplies, the Soviet Union would not only not be able to win the Great Patriotic War, but would not even be able to resist the German invasion, not being able to produce a sufficient amount of weapons and military equipment and provide it with fuel and ammunition. This dependence was well understood by the Soviet leadership at the beginning of the war. For example, Presidential Special Envoy F.D. Roosevelt, G. Hopkins reported in a message dated July 31, 1941, that Stalin considered it impossible to resist the material power of Germany, which had the resources of occupied Europe, without American help from Great Britain and the USSR. Roosevelt, back in October 1940, announcing his decision to allow the military department to provide weapons and equipment that are excessive for the needs of the American armed forces, as well as strategic materials and industrial equipment to those countries that can protect American national interests, allowed inclusion in the number of these countries and Russia.
The Western allies assisted the USSR in preparing for war not only with Lend-Lease supplies. The struggle against the United States and Great Britain forced Germany to build submarines, diverting scarce metal, equipment and skilled labor to this. Only in 1941-1944. German shipbuilding produced submarines with a total displacement of 810,000 tons. The main forces of the German fleet were thrown into the fight against the fleets and merchant shipping of Western countries (including convoys with supplies to the USSR under Lend-Lease). The Western allies also diverted significant ground forces of the Wehrmacht (in the last year of the war - up to 40%). The strategic bombing of Germany by Anglo-American aircraft slowed down the growth of its military industry, and in the last year of the war, the production of gasoline in Germany was practically brought to naught, completely paralyzing the Luftwaffe. From March to September 1944, the production of aviation gasoline in Germany, which was carried out almost exclusively at synthetic fuel plants - the main object of allied bombing at that time, decreased from 181 thousand tons to 10 thousand tons, and after some growth in November - up to 49 thousand .t - in March 1945, it completely came to naught. The main forces of German aviation, especially fighter aviation, acted against the air forces of England and the USA, and it was in the fight against the Western allies that the Luftwaffe suffered the bulk of their losses. The Soviet estimate of the losses of German aviation on the Soviet-German front: 62,000 vehicles and 101,000 aircraft, which amounted to irretrievable combat losses of German aviation throughout the war, is far from reality, since it was obtained by simply multiplying the number of German aircraft in individual theaters of war by the time of deployment of hostilities in a given theater, without taking into account the comparative intensity of hostilities (in sorties) in different theaters. Meanwhile, in the West, the intensity of fighting in the air was on the whole higher than in the East, and the best German pilots fought there. So, in July and August 1943, when significant forces of the Luftwaffe were concentrated on the Eastern Front during the battles for Kursk, Orel and Kharkov, out of 3213 irretrievably lost combat aircraft, only 1030 vehicles, or 32.3%, fell on the Eastern Front. Probably , about the same part of all irretrievable losses during the war suffered by the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front.
Since, without the assistance of Great Britain and the USA, the USSR could not have waged war against Germany, the statements of Soviet propaganda about the economic victory of socialism in the Great Patriotic War and the ability of the USSR to defeat Germany on its own are nothing more than a myth. Unlike Germany, in the USSR, the goal of creating an autarchic economy capable of providing the army in wartime with everything necessary for waging a modern war, which was outlined as early as the 1930s, was not achieved. Hitler and his advisers miscalculated not so much in determining the military and economic power of the USSR, but in assessing the ability of the Soviet economic and political system to function in the face of a severe military defeat, as well as the ability of the Soviet economy to effectively and quickly use Western supplies, and Great Britain and the United States to implement such supplies in the required quantity and in a timely manner.
Historians now face a new problem - to assess how Western supplies of industrial equipment under Lend-Lease, as well as supplies from Germany as part of reparations, contributed to the formation of the Soviet military-industrial complex, capable of conducting an arms race on equal terms with the West, right up to the very last time, and to determine the degree of dependence of the Soviet military-industrial complex on imports from the West for the entire post-war period.
DISCUSSION TOPIC
There are different opinions about the role of Lend-Lease in the defeat of German Nazism and its allies. So, Churchill called him " the most selfless act in the history of all countries". And in Stalin's message to US President Truman dated June 11, 1945, it was noted that "the agreement on the basis of which the United States throughout the war in Europe supplied the USSR with strategic materials and food under Lend-Lease, played an important role and to a large extent contributed to the successful completion of the war against the common enemy - Hitler's Germany".
Of the almost 18 million tons of cargo sent to the Soviet Union, more than a quarter - over 4.5 million tons - were foodstuffs
American food, coming from the United States under Lend-Lease, made life easier for the warring country. Foreign products helped to survive in the post-war years
Lend-Lease food supplies provided the Red Army with high-calorie nutrition throughout the entire period of the war(!!!).
In Arkhangelsk alone, during the first war winter, 20,000 people perished from starvation and disease - every tenth inhabitant. And if not for the 10,000 tons of Canadian wheat left with the consent of Stalin, the number of deaths would have been much greater.
Undoubtedly, such an assessment is the only correct one and fully reflects the gratitude for the help of the Soviet people and the Armed Forces of the USSR, which in the first place felt its results. Unfortunately, with the beginning of the Cold War, the significance of Lend-Lease was either hushed up or downplayed in our country. It became widely believed that lend-lease supplies were not essential for the victory over Germany, because. they accounted for an insignificant share of the total production of weapons, ammunition and military equipment in the USSR in 1941-1945, that the Americans received huge profits, and the Soviet people actually paid for them with their blood.
You can't call it all wrong. But a more detailed analysis allows us to reconsider our attitude towards Lend-Lease and find out the whole truth, since the truth cannot be incomplete and partial. An incomplete truth is a lie that is used, taken out of the context of the big picture. They are used not at all for good purposes, but to incite discord, enmity and misunderstanding.
And why this is done is another question and has nothing to do with the help of the allies.
REMEMBER
This incredible amount of cargo was delivered across the seas, in which the ships of the convoys died en masse under the blows of aviation and the German submarine fleet. Therefore, part of the aircraft traveled from the American continent to the USSR under its own power - from Fairbanks through Alaska, Chukotka, Yakutia, Eastern Siberia to Krasnoyarsk, and from there - by echelons.
Years have passed. Many participants in the transportation of Lend-Lease cargo are no longer alive. But the peoples of the countries participating in the anti-Hitler coalition remember the heroic deeds of the sailors of the transport and military fleets. It is envisaged to install memorial plates to the participants of the Northern convoys, made in the USA (Portland), in Arkhangelsk on the Sedov embankment. By a joint decision of both chambers, the Alaska State Congress on May 1, 2001 approved the creation of monuments in Alaska, Russia and Canada in memory of the Lend-Lease program.
Unfortunately, only the Russian government has not yet expressed words of gratitude on behalf of the people of the Russian Federation for the enormous and disinterested assistance provided by the United States and Great Britain in 1941-1945. our country. Even in the main museum of the Great Patriotic War on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow there is not the slightest mention of the joint struggle on the seas and oceans, of the courage of those who, at the risk of their lives, delivered everything necessary for the Victory to the USSR.
Therefore, it would be right and timely to pay tribute to Lend-Lease and the Northern convoys in a special section of the museum on Poklonnaya Gora. It is high time to erect in Moscow a monument to Franklin Roosevelt, a great and sincere friend of the Soviet people, who did a lot for the triumph of the anti-Hitler coalition.
The Russian people should long ago stop being plagued by soviet cattle and in their feelings be guided by the facts of real history, and not by its ersatz - the Kremlin's propaganda for the domestic consumer.
Southern Lend-Lease Route
On the face of it, Mr. Roosevelt was being dragged into an apparently unprofitable business. Just look at the order of payments for Lend-Lease:
- materials destroyed or lost during the war, as well as those that became unsuitable for further use, were not subject to payment;
- materials that turned out to be suitable for civilian needs after the war were paid in full or on the terms of a long-term loan;
- the customer country could purchase the materials that were not received before the end of the war, and the generous American government promised to credit the payment.
The only thing that somehow justified the Americans was the right provided by the "Lend-Lease Law" to reclaim the surviving military materials back.
Under Lend-Lease, an endless wave of cargo went to our country, from foppish officer boots with cowboy stitching to the tops to tanks and aircraft.
However, the official point of view of the USSR on Lend-Lease was expressed in the following lines:
Therefore, it is not surprising that when the American film "The Unknown War" went to the cinemas of the country in the 80s, many were shocked: ace Pokryshkin told how he had been flying the American Airacobra fighter for almost the entire war since 1942, how the northern caravans were going with supplies of aid.
Until now, we believe that the allies supplied us with everything unnecessary, stale in warehouses. And we recall how Churchill himself once said: "The tank named after me has more shortcomings than I myself." But excuse me, Lend-Lease equipment was accepted by our commissions, it was we who ordered a list of the necessary (or we could ask for simple pitchforks as weapons!). And then, this "Willis" is a bad car ?!
In fact, we did not ask the Americans for "Willis" at all, but for motorcycle sidecars. But US Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius in January 1942 advised Ambassador Litvinov of jeeps, which the American army had already successfully used. We tried and soon asked for more. In total, during the war we received 44,000 Willys MB and Ford GPW (General Purpose Willys) command vehicles. There were no emblems on them, so they were all called "Willis".
Most of all, American trucks US 6 hit the Soviet Union - about 152,000 copies. They were produced by two firms, Studebaker and REO. In each cabin of the Red Army soldier, a brand new crisp leather jacket made of sealskin was waiting, but this luxury was immediately confiscated for more important matters - they say, our driver will travel even in an overcoat. "Studers", as the front-line soldiers called these trucks, turned out to be the most suitable transport for harsh front-line conditions (in particular, due to the lower compression ratio, they were less sensitive to the quality of gasoline
The total number of cars delivered to the USSR under Lend-Lease amounted to 477,785 units, not counting spare parts, which would be enough to assemble more than one thousand cars.
On August 12, 1941, the first naval Lend-Lease convoy headed for the USSR. Cargo went to our northern ports: Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Severodvinsk (Molotovsk). The return convoys carried the QP index.
From American, Canadian and English ports, ships first arrived in the deep Icelandic Hvalfjord north of Reykjavik. There, no less than 20 ships each, they were grouped into caravans, after which, under the protection of warships, they were sent to us. True, there was a less dangerous route: through Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Nogaevo (Magadan), Nakhodka and Khabarovsk.
The official Soviet history left a lot of questions about Lend-Lease. It was believed that the West, under any pretext, delayed deliveries, because it was waiting for the Stalin regime to collapse. Then how to explain the haste with the spread by the Americans of the "Lend-Lease Law" to the USSR?
Stalin showed the highest art of diplomacy in order to turn Lend-Lease into a benefit for the USSR. Discussing deliveries with Churchill, Stalin was the first to use the word "sell", and pride did not allow the Prime Minister to demand payment from the USSR. In Roosevelt, Stalin figured out the skeptical Churchill, his comrade in persuasion. And whenever the northern convoys threatened to stop, Roosevelt began to bombard Churchill with panic dispatches. As a result, Churchill was forced to share with the Soviets even the equipment that was intended for the British army under Lend-Lease. For example, the Bantam light all-terrain vehicles, which the British themselves had - the cat cried.
The northern convoys were interrupted only twice - in the 42nd, when Great Britain was building up forces for a major operation in Africa, and in the 43rd, when the Allied landings in Italy were being prepared.
Even Stalin did not forget to regularly reprimand the allies for "poorly packed cargo." And the Soviet ambassador in London, comrade. Maisky did not hesitate to hint to Churchill that if the USSR could no longer fight the Germans, then the whole burden of the war would fall on the shoulders of the British. Churchill even had to retort that until June 22, 1941, he was not at all sure that Russia would not take the side of Hitler against Great Britain.
The Pravda newspaper in its Lend-Lease report noted that British deliveries had begun... June 22, 1941! It is certainly known that on July 20 the first English sea caravan headed for us with help.
It is also known that in September 1941, two British squadrons of Hurricane fighters arrived on the northern front. We know about the French Normandy squadron that fought on our soil. What about British pilots?
But this is so, by the way. And here is an "automobile" example: during the battle for Moscow, Marshal Zhukov's GAZ-61 all-wheel drive emka was constantly followed by Bantam with guards - one of those that the British soldier did not get.
On September 29, 1941, the Moscow Conference of representatives of the USSR, Great Britain and the USA at the highest level discussed the issue of military supplies, and on November 7, 1941, Roosevelt extended the Lend-Lease Law to the USSR. By the way, the States had not yet entered the world war!
The technical training of drivers and technical staff of the Red Army left much to be desired. In this regard, the Main Automobile Directorate raised the issue of training the personnel of automobile units in the basics of maintaining, operating and repairing imported equipment. Books on operation and repair were translated into Russian and published - they were attached to each machine. But for a simple Red Army driver, such books turned out to be too complicated. Then brochures were printed with extremely simplified content and instructions like: “Driver! You can’t pour kerosene into a Studebaker car. He won’t go on it, this is not a lorry for you!” On the pages of such "short guides" a soldier of the Red Army could find a sequence of repair operations for all cases of front-line automotive life: "Do this; if you see such and such a result, do this: first, second. third ...". Nevertheless, thousands of Lend-Lease vehicles were ruined by the drivers.
There is another mysterious page in the history of Lend-Lease. On September 19, 1941, Churchill wrote to Stalin: "I attach great importance to the question of opening a through route from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian not only by rail, but also by a highway, in the construction of which we hope to attract the Americans with their energy and organizational abilities." However, large-scale hostilities in the Persian Gulf began long before this message. The British "commandos" carried out the operation to capture the Iraqi port of Basra back in April 1941. And the first Lend-Lease American plant started working there before the German attack on the USSR!
On July 25, British troops entered Iran from the south, and Soviet troops from the north. British losses in clashes with the regular army of Reza Shah Pahlavi amounted to 22 people killed and 42 wounded. Our losses are unknown. Later, a small area in the south of the country (the port of Bushehr, Fars province) went to the Americans.
An interesting fact: a group of American military specialists sent to Iran was led by the Soviet ones - I.S. Kormilitsyn and his deputy L.I. Zorin. Controlled transportation by the southern route, none other than Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan - Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR.
There was only one land route from this region at that time - from Bandar Shahpur along the Trans-Iranian railway through Ahvaz and Qom to Tehran. There was no more or less developed transport network between the border ports of Iraq and Iran.
In preparation for receiving Lend-Lease cargoes, the ports at Khorramshahr, Bandar Shahpur and Basra were reconstructed. From Ahvaz, a railway line descended south to Khorramshahr with a branch line to the Iraqi village of Tanuma (on the left bank of the Shatt al-Arab, opposite Basra). The American construction company "Folspen" rolled off the highway from Tanum through Khorramshahr and Ahvaz to the north of Iran.
Automotive equipment arrived in the form of assembly kits - in boxes, and the cars were assembled right on the shore. Aircraft and car assembly plants have grown in the port of Khorramshahr, a car assembly plant has grown in the port of Bushehr (Willis, Dodges, Studebakers and GMC were assembled there), and a car assembly plant in Basra.
Local residents worked for them - Arabs and Persians, the administration consisted of Americans and British, and Soviet military specialists accepted the products. The locals were paid little, and the build quality was very low at first. Then our military experts insisted on improving the working and living conditions of workers, and improving their skills. Barrack towns were built, life and food were established, wages became piecework, and they began to fine fines for marriage. Things got better very soon.
Driving cars for more than 2000 km through mountains and passes, on roads and without them turned out to be extremely difficult. On the way there was a run-in, and the cars were loaded to the limit - they were carrying spare parts, weapons, food, medicines.
Through titanic efforts in the first half of 1942, it was possible to lay an extensive system of roads across the territory of Iran, build food, rest and technical prevention points, establish the protection of columns and parking lots, which was important - gangs and wild Qashqai tribes incited by the Nazis raged on the roads.
While the British were in charge in the Persian Gulf, 2000 cars a month came to the USSR, although a plan was set - to hand over 120 cars a day.
In March 1943, the Americans took over the supervision of the Trans-Iranian Railway and the ports of the Persian Gulf. Since the middle of the year, assembly plants have been operating in the towns of Ash-Shuaiba (southwest of Basra, Iraq) and Andimeshk, on the Trans-Iranian Railway. Immediately the flow increased - up to 10,000 cars per month began to arrive from the south. Only the car assembly plant in Andimeshk sent about 78,000 cars to the USSR - that's what American mass production technology means! All in all, we received two-thirds of Lend-Lease vehicles by the southern route.
With the removal of the front from the borders of the USSR, this route lost its significance, and in 1945 Lend-Lease cargo went through the Black Sea. The assembly of cars in Iran and Iraq began to be curtailed, enterprises were dismantled. On October 15, 1944, personnel were withdrawn from the Soviet military camp in Ash-Shuaiba. On October 24, Soviet receivers in Basra ceased their activities. In November 1944, the last cars were assembled in Andimeshk, at the same time the Soviet representative office in Bandar Shahpur was liquidated.
We preferred to keep quiet about all this. Soviet troops in Iran, military experts in Iraq, foreign vehicles in the Red Army. All this is difficult and incomprehensible to ordinary people. If you start explaining, you will have to remember that similar enterprises worked in the USSR. For example, the Gorky Automobile Plant has been assembling American cars since November 1941. Even when GAZ was heavily bombed in the summer of 1943, work continued right under the open sky. In October 1944, assembly equipment and technical staff were sent to Minsk, where they occupied the premises of the Daimler-Benz auto repair plant (future MAZ) recaptured from the Germans. The first 50 trucks of this company went to the front in November 1944. Moscow ZIS and KIM were also involved in the assembly of "lend-lease" - in the same place they repaired the cars that returned from the front. In addition, many small enterprises were engaged in Lend-Lease vehicles. I wonder if these cars were counted among those 205,000 units that, according to Soviet statistics, our factories produced during the war years?
In a word, it is not far from a complete reassessment of the role of our allies in the victory over Germany!
But now it's time to return the "hose" borrowed from a neighbor. In 1946-47, after a major overhaul, we handed over part of the cars to the allies. According to eyewitnesses, it happened like this: the Allies drove a ship with a press and scissors to the port. A special commission meticulously accepted the equipment, checked the conformity of the factory equipment, after which it was immediately sent ... under the press and loaded onto barges in the form of "cubes". Who, one wonders, in the West needed cars of dubious assembly, and even those that had been in the hands of the Red Army?
Under these pressures, rare models disappeared without a trace, including reconnaissance cars RC (reconnaissance car) of the American company Bantam. Of the 2675 "Bantikov" produced, as our drivers called them, almost all of them ended up in the USSR in the first year of the war.
Victory without allies?
Could we have won without Western allies? That is, suppose that England and the United States did not participate in the Second World War at all. What would the Soviet Union have lost then? Let's start with lend-lease. We like to quote Gosplan Chairman Nikolai Voznesensky, who said that lend-lease assistance amounted to no more than 4% of the total Soviet production during the war years. So be it, although no one has yet figured out how to correctly determine the then ratio between the dollar and the ruble. But if we take a few natural indicators, it becomes clear that without the help of the Western allies, the Soviet military economy could not satisfy the needs of the front. Approximately half of all aluminum consumed by Soviet industry during the war years, the main part of alloying additives, without which it was impossible to produce high-quality armor, more than a third of aviation gasoline consumed in the USSR and explosives used during the war came under Lend-Lease. Cars delivered under lend-lease accounted for a third of the front-line fleet. Not to mention the fact that Lend-Lease delivered the bulk of the wagons, locomotives and rail, thanks to which the Soviet railway transport functioned smoothly. Lend-lease also received the bulk of radio stations and radars, as well as a variety of industrial equipment, tanks, aircraft, anti-aircraft guns, etc. And American stew and melange should not be forgotten.
Just think: would we have won if we had produced half as many aircraft, a quarter as many tanks, a third as little ammunition, if we didn’t have enough vehicles to transport troops, if we had several times fewer radio stations, there were no radars and a lot of other imported equipment.
We must not forget that the most severe defeats on the Eastern Front, such as the defeat in Belarus and Romania, the Wehrmacht began to bear after landing in Normandy, where the best German tank divisions and the main aviation forces were transferred. And in general, two-thirds of their losses the Luftwaffe suffered in the fight against the Western allies. Also, almost the entire German navy acted against England and America. And in the last year of the war, the Anglo-American troops diverted more than a third of the German ground forces.
Just imagine for a moment that the USSR would have fought Germany one on one. Then the entire power of the Luftwaffe and the German fleet, as well as the entire German land army, would fall upon the Red Army. And the Soviet troops, having half as many aircraft, would never have gained air supremacy, would not have been able to defend Sevastopol and Leningrad for a long time under the overwhelming superiority of the German fleet, and would hardly have won victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. I'm afraid that in a one-on-one duel between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, a Soviet defeat would be very likely.
And now let's try to imagine the exact opposite situation: the Soviet Union does not participate in the war, remains neutral and supplies Germany with raw materials and food (option - in 1942 the USSR is defeated and withdraws from the war, as described in Robert Harris' science fiction novel "Vaterland" and based on his Hollywood film). How would the struggle between England and the USA against Germany end then? The economic potential of the Western allies would still exceed the German one, which would ensure in the long term the dominance of the Anglo-American air force and fleet and would rule out a German landing on the British Isles. The war would be reduced mainly to the strategic bombing of German territory. However, in terms of ground forces, the armies of England and the United States would have to catch up with the Wehrmacht for a long time. Based on what we know about the development of the American and German nuclear projects, it can be argued that the non-participation of the USSR in the war would not have had a significant impact on the speed of their implementation. The gap between the Germans and the Americans on the way to the atomic bomb in 1945 was at least three years, since the Americans carried out a chain reaction in the reactor at the end of 1942, and for the Germans such an experiment in March 1945 ended in failure. So there is no doubt that the United States would have received an atomic bomb at a time when Germany would have been far from it. The Americans, of course, would not waste this scarce weapon on the already defeated Japan, but, having accumulated nuclear warheads, would have dropped dozens of nuclear bombs at the end of 1945 or at the beginning of 1946 on Berlin and Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt -Maine. Probably, the war would have ended with the surrender of Germany after the destruction of its largest cities and industrial zones. So it can be said with certainty that the Red Army, with its heroic resistance, saved the Germans from the horrors of atomic bombings.
Quote: Lend-lease payment
This is perhaps the main topic for speculation by people who are trying to somehow denigrate the Lend-Lease program. Most of them consider it their indispensable duty to declare that the USSR, they say, paid for all the goods supplied under Lend-Lease. Of course, this is nothing more than a delusion (or a deliberate lie). Neither the USSR, nor any other countries that received aid under the Lend-Lease program, in accordance with the law on Lend-Lease during the war, paid not a cent for this aid, so to speak. Moreover, as it was already written at the beginning of the article, they were not obliged to pay after the war for those materials, equipment, weapons and ammunition that were used up during the war. It was necessary to pay only for what remained intact after the war and could be used by the recipient countries. Thus, there were no Lend-Lease payments during the war. Another thing is that the USSR did send various goods to the USA (including 320,000 tons of chrome ore, 32,000 tons of manganese ore, as well as gold, platinum, and timber). This was done as part of the reverse Lend-Lease program. In addition, the same program included free repair of American ships in Soviet ports and other services. Unfortunately, I could not find the total amount of goods and services provided to the Allies under the reverse Lend-Lease. The only source I found claims that this same amount was $2.2 million. However, I personally am not sure of the authenticity of these data. However, they may well be considered as a lower limit. The upper limit in this case will be the amount of several hundred million dollars. Be that as it may, the share of reverse lend-lease in the total lend-lease trade between the USSR and the allies will not exceed 3-4%. For comparison, the amount of reverse lend-lease from Great Britain to the USA is 6.8 billion dollars, which is 18.3% of the total volume of exchange of goods and services between these states.
So, no payment for Lend-Lease occurred during the war. The Americans provided the bill to the recipient countries only after the war. The United Kingdom owed $4.33 billion to the United States and $1.19 billion to Canada. The last payment of $83.25 million (to the United States) and $22.7 million (Canada) was made on December 29, 2006. The volume of China's debt was set at 180 million. dollars, and this debt has not yet been repaid. The French paid off the United States on May 28, 1946, by granting the United States a series of trade preferences.
The debt of the USSR was determined in 1947 in the amount of 2.6 billion dollars, but already in 1948 this amount was reduced to 1.3 billion. Nevertheless, the USSR refused to pay. The refusal followed in response to new concessions from the United States: in 1951, the amount of the debt was again revised and this time amounted to 800 million. was again reduced, this time to 722 million dollars; maturity - 2001), and the USSR agreed to this agreement only on condition that it was granted a loan from the Export-Import Bank. In 1973, the USSR made two payments totaling $48 million, but then stopped payments in connection with the introduction in 1974 of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1972 Soviet-American trade agreement. In June 1990, during the talks between the presidents of the United States and the USSR, the parties returned to the discussion of debt. A new deadline for the final repayment of the debt was set - 2030, and the amount - 674 million dollars. At the moment, Russia owes the US $100 million for Lend-Lease deliveries.
LITERATURE
Lebedev I.P. Once again about Lend-Lease. - USA: Economics. Policy. Ideology. 1990, No. 1
Lebedev I.P. Aviation lend-lease. - Military History Journal, 1991, No. 2
Kotelnikov V.R. Aviation lend-lease. - Questions of history. 1991, no. 10
Berezhnoy S.S. Ships and Lend-Lease ships. Directory. SPb., 1994
Ilyin A. Lend-Lease Allied Aircraft. - International life. 1995, No. 7
Allies in the War 1941–1945 M., 1995
Kashcheev L.B., Reminsky V.A. Lend-Lease cars. Kharkov, 1998
Sokolov B.V. The truth about the Great Patriotic War (Collection of articles). - St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 1989. Book on the site: http://militera.lib.ru/research/sokolov1/index.html
LETTER FROM THE US SECRETARY OF STATE
D. ACHESON TO THE AMBASSADOR OF THE USSR TO THE USA A.S. PANYUSHKIN
ON THE SETTLEMENT OF PAYMENTS UNDER LEND-LEASE
Your Excellency,
The United States Government does not require payment for items of a "military nature" (weapons, ammunition, and instruments of war, excluding ships) that may have remained in the possession of the Soviet Union at the time the war ended. However, the position of the United States Government is that the terms of any settlement must reserve the right of the United States Government, as provided in Article V of the Basic Lend-Lease Agreement, to return to the United States by the Soviet Government such items of a "military nature" and must contain an undertaking by the Soviet Governments, as stipulated in Article III of the Basic Lend-Lease Agreement, obtain the prior consent of the Government of the United States before transferring such items to a third party. The position of the Government of the United States in this matter is to adhere to the settlements already reached with other recipient countries of Lend-Lease goods that have Basic Lend-Lease Agreements similar to that concluded with the Soviet Government.
The United States government also does not require payment for "civilian" items that were lost, destroyed, or consumed during the war. The Government of the United States asks for payment only for those items of "civilian type" which remained in the possession of the Soviet Union at the time of the end of the war, and offered to transfer the right to such items, subject to the payment of a mutually satisfactory amount on terms agreed between our two Governments. These "civilian type" items consist of Lend-Lease shipments of peacetime value to the Soviet economy and which remained under the control of the Soviet Government on September 2, 1945, or subsequently received by the Soviet Government, with the exception of ships, items of a "military nature" referred to above, and some Lend-Lease items, the right to own which was transferred to the Soviet Government on the basis of the Agreements of May 30, 1945 and October 15, 1945.
In order to provide a basis for determining the fair value of "civilian" items remaining in the possession of the Soviet Union at the time of the end of the war, the United States Government carefully compiled, from its own records, a detailed conjectural inventory of such items. During the preparation of this inventory, the most generous allowances for military casualties were made. The cost of this inventory, taking into account shipping prices minus the most generous allowances for depreciation, amounted to a total of 2 billion 600 million dollars. The Government of the United States, in an attempt to establish a mutually satisfactory sum representing the fair value of these items to the Soviet economy in peacetime, first named an amount of $1,300,000,000, payable in thirty annual installments beginning five years after July 1, 1946, with annual an interest rate of 2%, payable annually from July 1, 1945. Subsequently, in further efforts to expedite the negotiations to a mutually satisfactory conclusion, the United States Government expressed its readiness to accept an even smaller sum, initially at $1 billion and later at $800 million. Moreover, in the interests of a speedy settlement, the United States Government has repeatedly expressed its willingness to further reduce this amount, provided that the Soviet Government, for its part, increase its present offer to an amount more closely reflecting the value of the items to the peacetime Soviet economy.
The Soviet Government took the position that the Lend-Lease settlement should, firstly, provide for the contribution of the Soviet Union to the victory over the common enemy and, secondly, should be consistent with other existing Lend-Lease settlements. The Soviet Government, however, refers only to a settlement with the British Government.
With regard to the first principle put forward by the Soviet Government, the United States Government believes that it has fully recognized the contribution of the Soviet Union to the defeat of the common enemy, completely writing off the entire Lend-Lease contribution of the United States to the war effort of the Soviet Union and asking for payment only for those items of "civilian character" who remained in the Soviet Union by the time the war ended. It should be noted that the entire lend-lease aid provided by the United States to the Soviet Union during the war amounted to approximately 10 billion 800 million dollars and represented an extensive contribution of skill, labor and resources of the United States to helping the peoples of the Soviet Union in defeating the aggressor states. . It should also be noted that the amount of compensation currently being offered by the United States Government is $800 million. These facts clearly show that The United States government does not ask for payment for Lend-Lease wartime assistance, amounting to approximately $10 billion. This means that the Government of the United States, for its part, fully recognizes the community of interests of our two Governments in achieving a common victory and fully pays tribute to the role played by the Soviet Government in these conditions...
Please accept again, Your Excellency, the assurances of my highest consideration.
Dean ACHESON
WUA RF. F. 192. Op. 18b. P. 177. D. 1. L. 125-131. Copy.
The history of lend-lease is mythologized by both supporters of the Soviet regime and its opponents. Read about the real volumes of Lend-Lease and its contribution to the Victory in this article.
From the editor of the site:
The history of Lend-Lease is mythologized both by opponents of Soviet power and by its supporters. The former believe that without military supplies from the USA and England, the USSR could not have won the war, while the latter believe that the role of these supplies is completely insignificant. We bring to your attention a balanced view of this question by the historian Pavel Sutulin, originally published in his LiveJournal.
History of Lend-Lease
Lend-lease (from the English "lend" - to lend and "lease" - to lease) is a kind of lending program for allies by the United States of America through the supply of machinery, food, equipment, raw materials and materials. The first step towards Lend-Lease was taken by the United States on September 3, 1940, when the Americans transferred 50 old destroyers to Britain in exchange for British military bases. On January 2, 1941, Treasury Department official Oscar Cox prepared the first draft of the Lend-Lease Act. On January 10, this bill was submitted to the Senate and the House of Representatives. On March 11, the Law was approved by both chambers and signed by the President, and three hours later the President signed the first two directives to this law. The first of them ordered the transfer of 28 torpedo boats to Britain, and the second - to betray Greece 50 75-mm guns and several hundred thousand shells. Thus began the history of Lend-Lease.The essence of Lend-Lease was, in general, quite simple. Under the Lend-Lease Act, the United States could supply machinery, ammunition, equipment, and so on. countries whose defense was vital to the States themselves. All deliveries were free. All machinery, equipment and materials spent, expended or destroyed during the war were not subject to payment. Property left after the end of the war and suitable for civilian purposes had to be paid for.
As for the USSR, Roosevelt and Churchill made a promise to supply it with the materials necessary for the war immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union, that is, on June 22, 1941. On October 1, 1941, the First Moscow Protocol on the supply of the USSR was signed in Moscow, the expiration date of which was determined on June 30. The Lend-Lease Law was extended to the USSR on October 28, 1941, as a result of which the Union was granted a loan of 1 billion dollars. During the war, three more protocols were signed: Washington, London and Ottawa, through which supplies were extended until the end of the war. Officially, Lend-Lease deliveries to the USSR ceased on May 12, 1945. However, until August 1945, deliveries continued according to the “Molotov-Mikoyan list”.
Lend-Lease deliveries to the USSR and their contribution to the victory
During the war, hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo were supplied to the USSR under Lend-Lease. For military historians (and, perhaps, for everyone else), of course, allied military equipment is of the greatest interest - we will start with it. Under Lend-Lease, the following were delivered to the USSR from the USA: light M3A1 “Stuart” - 1676 pieces, light M5 - 5 pieces, light M24 - 2 pieces, medium M3 “Grant” - 1386 pieces, medium M4A2 “Sherman” (with 75 mm gun) - 2007 pieces, medium M4A2 (with 76 mm gun) - 2095 pieces, heavy M26 - 1 piece. From England: infantry "Valentine" - 2394 pieces, infantry "Matilda" MkII - 918 pieces, light "Tetrarch" - 20 pieces, heavy "Churchill" - 301 pieces, cruising "Cromwell" - 6 pieces. From Canada: "Valentine" - 1388. Total: 12199 tanks. In total, during the war years, 86.1 thousand tanks were delivered to the Soviet-German front.
"Valentine" "Stalin" goes to the USSR under the Lend-Lease program.
Thus, lend-lease tanks accounted for 12.3% of the total number of tanks produced / delivered to the USSR in 1941-1945. In addition to tanks, ZSU / self-propelled guns were also supplied to the USSR. ZSU: M15A1 - 100 pcs., M17 - 1000 pcs.; SPG: T48 - 650 pcs., M18 - 5 pcs., M10 - 52 pcs. A total of 1807 units were delivered. In total, during the war in the USSR, 23.1 thousand self-propelled guns were produced and received. Thus, the share of self-propelled guns received by the USSR under lend-lease is 7.8% of the total number of equipment of this type received during the war. In addition to tanks and self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers were also supplied to the USSR: English "Universal Carrier" - 2560 units. (including from Canada - 1348 units) and American M2 - 342 units, M3 - 2 units, M5 - 421 units, M9 - 419 units, T16 - 96 units, M3A1 "Scout" - 3340 units ., LVT - 5 pcs. Total: 7185 units. Since armored personnel carriers were not produced in the USSR, lend-lease vehicles accounted for 100% of the Soviet fleet of this equipment. Criticism of Lend-Lease very often draws attention to the poor quality of the armored vehicles supplied by the Allies. This criticism really has some grounds, since American and British tanks in terms of performance characteristics were often inferior to both Soviet and German counterparts. Especially considering that the Allies usually supplied the USSR with not the best examples of their equipment. For example, the most advanced modifications of the Sherman (M4A3E8 and Sherman Firefly) were not delivered to Russia.
Where the best situation has developed with the supply of Lend-Lease aircraft. In total, during the war years, 18,297 aircraft were delivered to the USSR, including from the USA: R-40 Tomahawk fighters - 247, R-40 Kitahawk - 1887, R-39 Airacobra - 4952, R-63 " Kingcobra - 2400, P-47 Thunderbolt - 195; A-20 Boston bombers - 2771, B-25 Mitchell - 861; other types of aircraft - 813. 4171 Spitfires and Hurricanes were delivered from England In total, Soviet troops received 138 thousand aircraft for the war. Thus, the share of foreign equipment in the revenues to the domestic fleet was 13%. True, even here the Allies refused to supply the USSR with the pride of their Air Force - the strategic bombers B-17, B-24 and B- 29, of which 35,000 were produced during the war.
Under Lend-Lease, 8,000 anti-aircraft and 5,000 anti-tank guns were delivered. In total, the USSR received 38 thousand units of anti-aircraft and 54 thousand anti-tank artillery. That is, the share of Lend-Lease in these types of weapons was 21% and 9%, respectively. However, if we take all Soviet guns and mortars as a whole (receipts for the war - 526.2 thousand), then the share of foreign guns in it will be only 2.7%.
During the war years, 202 torpedo boats, 28 patrol ships, 55 minesweepers, 138 submarine hunters, 49 landing ships, 3 icebreakers, about 80 transport ships, about 30 tugboats were transferred under Lend-Lease to the USSR. There are about 580 ships in total. In total, the USSR received 2588 ships during the war years. That is, the share of Lend-Lease equipment is 22.4%.
Lend-lease deliveries of cars became the most noticeable. A total of 480,000 vehicles were supplied under Lend-Lease (of which 85% were from the USA). Including about 430 thousand trucks (mainly US 6 companies Studebaker and REO) and 50 thousand jeeps (Willys MB and Ford GPW). Despite the fact that the total receipts of cars on the Soviet-German front amounted to 744 thousand units, the share of Lend-Lease equipment in the Soviet vehicle fleet was 64%. In addition, 35,000 motorcycles were delivered from the USA.
But the supply of small arms under Lend-Lease was very modest: only about 150,000 thousand units. Considering that the total receipts of small arms in the Red Army during the war amounted to 19.85 million units, the share of Lend-Lease weapons is approximately 0.75%.
During the war years, 242.3 thousand tons of motor gasoline were supplied to the USSR under Lend-Lease (2.7% of the total production and receipt of motor gasoline in the USSR). The situation with aviation gasoline is as follows: 570 thousand tons of gasoline were supplied from the USA, 533.5 thousand tons from Britain and Canada. In addition, 1483 thousand tons of light gasoline fractions were supplied from the USA, Britain and Canada. From light gasoline fractions, as a result of reforming, gasoline is produced, the yield of which is approximately 80%. Thus, 1186 thousand tons of gasoline can be obtained from 1483 thousand tons of fractions. That is, the total supply of gasoline under Lend-Lease can be estimated at 2230 thousand tons. In the USSR, about 4,750 thousand tons of aviation gasoline were produced during the war. Probably, this number also includes gasoline produced from fractions supplied by the Allies. That is, the USSR's production of gasoline from its own resources can be estimated at about 3350 thousand tons. Consequently, the share of Lend-Lease aviation fuel in the total amount of gasoline supplied and produced in the USSR is 40%.
622.1 thousand tons of railway rails were supplied to the USSR, which is equal to 36% of the total number of rails supplied and produced in the USSR. During the war, 1900 steam locomotives were delivered, while in the USSR 800 steam locomotives were produced in 1941-1945, of which 708 were produced in 1941. If we take the number of steam locomotives produced from June to the end of 1941 as a quarter of the total production, then the number of locomotives produced during the war will be approximately 300 pieces. That is, the share of Lend-Lease steam locomotives in the total volume of steam locomotives produced and delivered in the USSR is approximately 72%. In addition, 11,075 wagons were delivered to the USSR. For comparison, in 1942-1945, 1092 railway cars were produced in the USSR. During the war years, 318 thousand tons of explosives were supplied under Lend-Lease (of which the United States - 295.6 thousand tons), which is 36.6% of the total production and supply of explosives to the USSR.
Under lend-lease, the Soviet Union received 328 thousand tons of aluminum. If we believe B. Sokolov (“The role of Lend-Lease in the Soviet military efforts”), who estimated Soviet aluminum production during the war at 263 thousand tons, then the share of Lend-Lease aluminum in the total amount of aluminum produced and received by the USSR will be 55%. Copper was delivered to the USSR 387 thousand tons - 45% of the total production and supply of this metal to the USSR. Under lend-lease, the Union received 3606 thousand tons of tires - 30% of the total number of tires produced and delivered to the USSR. 610 thousand tons of sugar were supplied - 29.5%. Cotton: 108 million tons - 6%. During the war years, 38.1 thousand metal-cutting machine tools were delivered from the USA to the USSR, and 6.5 thousand machine tools and 104 presses from Great Britain. During the war, the USSR produced 141,000 m/r of machine tools and forging presses. Thus, the share of foreign machine tools in the domestic economy amounted to 24%. The USSR also received 956,700 miles of field telephone cable, 2,100 miles of marine cable, and 1,100 miles of submarine cable. In addition, 35,800 radio stations, 5,899 receivers and 348 locators, 15.5 million pairs of army boots, 5 million tons of food, and so on, were delivered to the USSR under Lend-Lease.
According to the data summarized in diagram No. 2, it can be seen that even for the main types of supplies, the share of Lend-Lease products in the total volume of production and supplies to the USSR does not exceed 28%. In general, the share of Lend-Lease products in the total volume of materials, equipment, food, machinery, raw materials, etc. produced and delivered to the USSR. Usually estimated at 4%. In my opinion, this figure, in general, reflects the real state of affairs. Thus, it can be stated with a certain degree of certainty that Lend-Lease did not have any decisive impact on the USSR's ability to wage war. Yes, such types of equipment and materials were supplied under Lend-Lease, which accounted for a large part of the total production of such in the USSR. But would the lack of supplies of these materials become critical? In my opinion, no. The USSR could well redistribute production efforts in such a way as to provide itself with everything necessary, including aluminum, copper, and locomotives. Could the USSR do without Lend-Lease at all? Yes, I could. But the question is what would it cost him. If there were no Lend-Lease, the USSR could go in two ways to solve the problem of the shortage of those goods that were supplied under this Lend-Lease. The first way is to simply close your eyes to this deficit. As a result, there would be a shortage of cars, aircraft and a number of other items of equipment and machinery in the army. Thus, the army would certainly be weakened. The second option is to increase our own production of products supplied under Lend-Lease by attracting excess labor to the production process. This force, accordingly, could only be taken at the front, and thereby, again, weaken the army. Thus, when choosing any of these paths, the Red Army turned out to be a loser. As a result - the prolongation of the war and unnecessary sacrifices on our part. In other words, although Lend-Lease did not have a decisive influence on the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front, it nevertheless saved hundreds of thousands of lives of Soviet citizens. And for this alone, Russia should be grateful to its allies.
Speaking about the role of Lend-Lease in the victory of the USSR, we should not forget about two more points. Firstly, the vast majority of machinery, equipment and materials were supplied to the USSR in 1943-1945. That is, after the turning point in the course of the war. So, for example, in 1941, under Lend-Lease, goods worth approximately $ 100 million were delivered, which amounted to less than 1% of the total supply. In 1942, this percentage was 27.6. Thus, more than 70% of Lend-Lease deliveries fell on 1943-1945, and in the most terrible period of the war for the USSR, the help of the allies was not very noticeable. As an example, in diagram No. 3, you can see how the number of aircraft supplied from the USA changed in 1941-1945. An even more telling example is cars: on April 30, 1944, only 215 thousand units were delivered. That is, more than half of the Lend-Lease vehicles were delivered to the USSR in the last year of the war. Secondly, not all of the equipment delivered under Lend-Lease was used by the army and navy. For example, out of 202 torpedo boats delivered to the USSR, 118 did not have to take part in the hostilities of the Great Patriotic War, since they were commissioned after it ended. All 26 frigates received by the USSR also entered service only in the summer of 1945. A similar situation was observed with other types of equipment.
And, finally, at the end of this part of the article, a small stone in the garden of Lend-Lease critics. Many of these critics do not emphasize the insufficiency of allied supplies, reinforcing this with the fact that, they say, the United States, at their level of production, could supply more. Indeed, the United States and Britain produced 22 million small arms, and delivered only 150,000 thousand (0.68%). Of the tanks produced, the Allies supplied the USSR with 14%. The situation was even worse with cars: in total, about 5 million cars were produced in the USA during the war years, and about 450 thousand were delivered to the USSR - less than 10%. And so on. However, this approach is clearly wrong. The fact is that deliveries to the USSR were limited not by the production capabilities of the allies, but by the tonnage of the available transport ships. And just with him, the British and Americans had serious problems. The Allies simply did not physically have the number of transport ships necessary to transport more cargo to the USSR.
Supply routes
Lend-lease cargoes entered the USSR via five routes: via Arctic convoys to Murmansk, via the Black Sea, via Iran, via the Far East, and via the Soviet Arctic. The most famous of these routes, of course, is Murmansk. The heroism of the sailors of the Arctic convoys is glorified in many books and films. It is probably for this reason that many of our fellow citizens got the false impression that the main Lend-Lease deliveries went to the USSR precisely by Arctic convoys. Such an opinion is pure delusion. On the diagram No. 4 you can see the ratio of the volume of cargo transportation on various routes in long tons. As we can see, not only did most of the Lend-Lease cargo not pass through the Russian North, but this route was not even the main one, yielding to the Far East and Iran. One of the main reasons for this state of affairs was the danger of the northern route due to the activity of the Germans. On diagram #5 you can see how effective the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were in dealing with Arctic convoys.
The use of the trans-Iranian route became possible after the Soviet and British troops (from the north and south, respectively) entered the territory of Iran, and already on September 8, a peace agreement was signed between the USSR, England and Iran, according to which British and Soviet troops were quartered in Persia. troops. From that moment on, Iran began to be used for deliveries to the USSR. Lend-lease cargoes went to the ports of the northern tip of the Persian Gulf: Basra, Khorramshahr, Abadan and Bandar Shahpur. Aircraft and car assembly plants were set up in these ports. From these ports, goods went to the USSR in two ways: by land through the Caucasus and by water through the Caspian Sea. However, the Trans-Iranian route, like the Arctic convoys, had its drawbacks: firstly, it was too long (The route of the convoy from New York to the coast of Iran around the South African Cape of Good Hope took about 75 days, and then it took more time and the passage of cargo for Iran and the Caucasus or the Caspian). Secondly, German aviation interfered with navigation in the Caspian Sea, which only in October and November sank and damaged 32 ships with cargo, and the Caucasus was not the most peaceful place: in 1941-1943 alone, 963 bandit groups with a total number of 17,513 were eliminated in the North Caucasus Human. In 1945, instead of the Iranian route, the Black Sea route was used for supplies.
However, the most safe and convenient route was the Pacific route from Alaska to the Far East (46% of total supplies) or across the Arctic Ocean to Arctic ports (3%). Basically, Lend-Lease cargo was delivered to the USSR from the USA, of course, by sea. However, most of the aviation moved from Alaska to the USSR under its own power (the same AlSib). However, along this path there were also difficulties, this time connected with Japan. In 1941 - 1944, the Japanese detained 178 Soviet ships, some of them - the Kamenets-Podolsky, Ingul and Nogin transports - for 2 or more months. 8 ships - transports "Krechet", "Svirstroy", "Maikop", "Perekop", "Angarstroy", "Peacock Vinogradov", "Lazo", "Simferopol" - were sunk by the Japanese. Transports "Ashgabat", "Kolkhoznik", "Kyiv" were sunk by unidentified submarines, and about 10 more ships died under unclear circumstances.
Lend-lease payment
This is perhaps the main topic for speculation by people who are trying to somehow denigrate the Lend-Lease program. Most of them consider it their indispensable duty to declare that the USSR, they say, paid for all the goods supplied under Lend-Lease. Of course, this is nothing more than a delusion (or a deliberate lie). Neither the USSR, nor any other countries that received aid under the Lend-Lease program, in accordance with the law on Lend-Lease during the war, paid not a cent for this aid, so to speak. Moreover, as it was already written at the beginning of the article, they were not obliged to pay after the war for those materials, equipment, weapons and ammunition that were used up during the war. It was necessary to pay only for what remained intact after the war and could be used by the recipient countries. Thus, there were no Lend-Lease payments during the war. Another thing is that the USSR did send various goods to the USA (including 320,000 tons of chrome ore, 32,000 tons of manganese ore, as well as gold, platinum, and timber). This was done as part of the reverse Lend-Lease program. In addition, the same program included free repair of American ships in Russian ports and other services. Unfortunately, I could not find the total amount of goods and services provided to the Allies under the reverse Lend-Lease. The only source I found claims that this same amount was $2.2 million. However, I personally am not sure of the authenticity of these data. However, they may well be considered as a lower limit. The upper limit in this case will be the amount of several hundred million dollars. Be that as it may, the share of reverse lend-lease in the total lend-lease trade between the USSR and the allies will not exceed 3-4%. For comparison, the amount of reverse lend-lease from Great Britain to the USA is 6.8 billion dollars, which is 18.3% of the total volume of exchange of goods and services between these states.So, no payment for Lend-Lease occurred during the war. The Americans provided the bill to the recipient countries only after the war. The United Kingdom owed $4.33 billion to the United States and $1.19 billion to Canada. The last payment of $83.25 million (to the United States) and $22.7 million (Canada) was made on December 29, 2006. The volume of China's debt was set at 180 million. dollars, and this debt has not yet been repaid. The French paid off the United States on May 28, 1946, by granting the United States a series of trade preferences.
The debt of the USSR was determined in 1947 in the amount of 2.6 billion dollars, but already in 1948 this amount was reduced to 1.3 billion. Nevertheless, the USSR refused to pay. The refusal followed in response to new concessions from the United States: in 1951, the amount of the debt was again revised and this time amounted to 800 million. was again reduced, this time to 722 million dollars; maturity - 2001), and the USSR agreed to this agreement only on condition that it was granted a loan from the Export-Import Bank. In 1973, the USSR made two payments totaling $48 million, but then stopped payments in connection with the introduction in 1974 of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1972 Soviet-American trade agreement. In June 1990, during the talks between the presidents of the United States and the USSR, the parties returned to the discussion of debt. A new deadline for the final repayment of the debt was set - 2030, and the amount - 674 million dollars. At the moment, Russia owes the US $100 million for Lend-Lease deliveries.
Other types of supplies
Lend-lease was the only significant type of allied supplies to the USSR. However, not the only one in principle. Before the adoption of the lend-lease program, the United States and Britain supplied the USSR with equipment and materials for cash. However, these deliveries were quite small. For example, from July to October 1941, the United States supplied the USSR with goods worth only 29 million dollars. In addition, Britain provided for the supply of goods to the USSR on account of long-term loans. Moreover, these deliveries continued even after the adoption of the Lend-Lease program.
Do not forget about the many charitable foundations created to raise funds in favor of the USSR around the world. The USSR and private individuals provided assistance. Moreover, such assistance even came from Africa and the Middle East. For example, the “Russian Patriotic Group” was created in Beirut, the Russian Medical Aid Society in the Congo. The Iranian merchant Rakhimyan Ghulam Hussein sent 3 tons of dried grapes to Stalingrad. And the merchants Yusuf Gafuriki and Mammad Zhdalidi transferred 285 heads of cattle to the USSR.
Literature
1. Ivanyan E. A. History of the USA. M.: Drofa, 2006.
2. / A Brief History of the United States / Under. ed. I. A. Alyabiev, E. V. Vysotskaya, T. R. Dzhum, S. M. Zaitsev, N. P. Zotnikov, V. N. Tsvetkov. Minsk: Harvest, 2003.
3. Shirokorad A. B. Far East Final. M.: AST: Transizdatkniga, 2005.
4. Schofield B. Arctic convoys. Northern naval battles in World War II. Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2003.
5. Temirov Yu. T., Donets A. S. War. Moscow: Eksmo, 2005.
6. Stettinius E. Lend-Lease is a weapon of victory (http://militera.lib.ru/memo/usa/stettinius/index.html).
7. Morozov A. Anti-Hitler coalition during the Second World War. The role of lend-lease in the victory over a common enemy (http://militera.lib.ru/pub/morozov/index.html).
8. Russia and the USSR in the wars of the XX century. Losses of the armed forces / Under the general. ed. G. F. Krivosheeva. (http://www.rus-sky.org/history/library/w/)
9. The national economy of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. Statistical collection. (http://tashv.nm.ru/)
10. Materials of Wikipedia.
11. Lend-Lease: how it was. (http://www.flb.ru/info/38833.html)
12. Aviation lend-lease in the USSR in 1941-1945 (http://www.deol.ru/manclub/war/lendl.htm)
13. Soviet historiography of Lend-Lease (http://www.alsib.irk.ru/sb1_6.htm)
14. What do we know and what do we not know about the Great Patriotic War (http://mrk-kprf-spb.narod.ru/skorohod.htm#11)
Lend-Lease - a program of "crediting" to the US allies during the Second World War. The deliveries included military equipment, food, equipment and raw materials. How long did we pay off Lend-Lease debts?
What helped?
Historian Lebedev writes that during the Great Patriotic War, the USSR received more than 18,000 aircraft from the United States (including Air Cobra, Kittik-Hawk, and Tomahawk fighters) and 12,000 tanks. Communication equipment: 100 thousand kilometers of telephone wires, 2 million telephones. Food products: 15 million pairs of boots, more than 50 thousand tons of leather for shoes; as well as more than a million tons of food and provisions; several thousand steam locomotives, wheeled tanks, locomotives and self-loading wagons. They delivered to the front more than 300 thousand tons of explosives, oil products; and military-technical plants received copper and bronze, aluminum and special steel.
In total, the volume of American deliveries amounted to about 11 billion US dollars. According to the law on lend-lease, it was necessary to pay only for what survived during the war. Negotiations on the final amount of the payment began in 1948.
How much should?
Negotiations between the USSR and the USA regarding Lend-Lease debt took place in several rounds. The Americans put up a debt of 2.7 billion dollars. During negotiations in 1948, the Soviet representatives agreed to pay a small amount. Naturally, this caused a refusal from the Americans. In 1949, negotiations also came to nothing. In 1951, the US government twice reduced the debt to $800 million, but the USSR agreed to pay only $300 million.
Only by 1972 did the US and the USSR reach an agreement on the payment of debts. According to the document, the USSR undertook to pay $722 million by 2001, including interest. In 1973, the USSR made payments in the amount of 48 million dollars, but the payment of the debt was suspended due to unfavorable trade measures for the USSR (the Jackson-Vanik amendment). Only in 1990 did the parties again return to the discussion of debt. They set a new Lend-Lease maturity date - 2030 and a final amount of $674 million.
After the collapse of the USSR, the lend-lease debt was reissued to Boris Yeltsin. Thus, out of a total supply of $11 billion, the USSR (later the Russian Federation) undertook to pay $722 million, i.e. 7% of the $11 billion supply.
How much was paid?
By 1973, there were 3 payments totaling $48 million. 3 mandatory payments were negotiated: $12 million on October 18, 1972, $24 million on July 1, 1973, $12 million on July 1, 1975. Under an agreement with the United States, the balance - 674 million - was to be paid by 2001. In 1990, under a new agreement, the Soviet side pledged to pay 674 million dollars by 2030 - adjusted for inflation, a total of 100 million dollars of the 1946 model.
After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation signed bilateral agreements with the former republics on the "zero option", according to which the Russian Federation assumes all the debts of the USSR. In exchange for this, the former republics of the Soviet Union refused a share of the assets of the USSR. So, on April 2, 1993, the Russian Federation assumed the debts of the USSR, including lend-lease obligations. The debts were divided into government debts (Paris Club) and debts to banks (London Club). The US lend-lease debt was finally paid and closed as part of the settlement with the Paris Club on August 21, 2006.
“Few people know that military supplies under Lend-Lease (lend-lease) were not at all free for rent - Russia, as the assignee of the USSR, paid the last debts on them already in 2006,” writes historian and publicist Yevgeny Spitsyn.
In the issue of lend-lease (from English lend - to lend and lease - to rent, rent - ed.) For the USSR, there are many subtleties that it would be nice to understand - on the basis of historical documents.
Not exactly free
The Lend-Lease Act or the "Law for the Defense of the United States", which was passed by the US Congress on March 11, 1941, gave the President of the United States "the right to lend or lease to other states various goods and materials necessary for the conduct of hostilities", if these actions, by definition of the President, were vital to the defense of the United States. Various goods and materials were understood as weapons, military equipment, ammunition, strategic raw materials, ammunition, food, civilian goods for the army and rear, as well as any information of major military importance.
The lend-lease scheme itself provided for the fulfillment by the recipient country of a number of conditions: 1) materials destroyed, lost or lost during hostilities were not subject to payment, and the property that survived and was suitable for civilian purposes should be paid in full or in part in order to repay a long-term loan issued by the USA; 2) the surviving military materials could remain with the recipient country until the United States requests them back; 3) in turn, the tenant undertook to help the United States with all the resources and information he had.
By the way, and few people know about this either, the Lend-Lease Act obliged countries that applied for American assistance to submit an exhaustive financial report to the United States. It is no coincidence that US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., during a hearing in the Senate Committee, called this provision unique in all world practice: "For the first time in history, one state, one government provides another with data on its financial situation."
With the help of lend-lease, the administration of President F.D. Roosevelt was going to solve a number of urgent tasks, both foreign policy and domestic. Firstly, such a scheme made it possible to create new jobs in the United States itself, which had not yet fully recovered from the severe economic crisis of 1929-1933. Secondly, lend-lease allowed the US government to exert some influence on the recipient country of lend-lease assistance. Finally, thirdly, by sending his allies only weapons, materials and raw materials, but not manpower, President F.D. Roosevelt fulfilled his campaign promise: "Our guys will never participate in other people's wars."
The initial term for Lend-Lease deliveries was set to June 30, 1943, with further annual extensions as needed. And Roosevelt appointed the former Secretary of Commerce, his assistant Harry Hopkins, as the first administrator of this project.
And not only for the USSR
Contrary to another common misconception, the lend-lease system was not created under the USSR. At the end of May 1940, the British were the first to ask for military assistance on the basis of special lease relations (an analogue of operational leasing), since the actual defeat of France left Great Britain without military allies on the European continent.
The British themselves, who initially requested 40-50 "old" destroyers, proposed three payment schemes: a gratuitous gift, cash payment and leasing. However, Prime Minister W. Churchill was a realist and perfectly understood that neither the first nor the second proposals would cause enthusiasm among the Americans, since the warring England was actually on the verge of bankruptcy. Therefore, President Roosevelt quickly accepted the third option, and in the late summer of 1940 the deal went through.
Then, in the depths of the American Treasury Department, the idea was born to extend the experience of one private transaction to the entire sphere of all interstate relations. Having connected the Military and Naval Ministries to the development of the lend-lease bill, the US presidential administration on January 10, 1941 submitted it to both houses of Congress, which was approved by them on March 11. Meanwhile, in September 1941, the US Congress, after a long debate, approved the so-called "Victory Program", the essence of which, according to the American military historians themselves (R. Layton, R. Coakley), was that "America's contribution to the war will be weapons, not armies."
Immediately after the signing of this program by President Roosevelt, his adviser and special representative Averell Harriman flew to London, and from there to Moscow, where on October 1, 1941, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V.M. Presidential Special Representative A. Harriman signed the First (Moscow) protocol, which marked the beginning of the spread of the Lend-Lease program to the Soviet Union.
Then, on June 11, 1942, the “Agreement between the governments of the USSR and the USA on the principles applicable to mutual assistance in waging a war against aggression” was signed in Washington, which finally regulated all the fundamental issues of military-technical and economic cooperation between the two main participants in the “anti-Hitler coalition” ". In general, in accordance with the signed protocols, all Lend-Lease deliveries to the USSR are traditionally divided into several stages:
Before lend-lease - from June 22, 1941 to September 30, 1941 (before the signing of the protocol); The first protocol - from October 1, 1941 to June 30, 1942 (signed on October 1, 1941); The second protocol - from July 1, 1942 to June 30, 1943 (signed on October 6, 1942); Third protocol - from July 1, 1943 to June 30, 1944 (signed on October 19, 1943); The fourth protocol - from July 1, 1944 to September 20, 1945 (signed on April 17, 1944).
On September 2, 1945, with the signing of the act of surrender of militaristic Japan, World War II was completed, and on September 20, 1945, all Lend-Lease deliveries to the USSR were stopped.
What, where and how much
The US government has never published detailed reports of what and how much was sent under the Lend-Lease program to the USSR. But according to the updated data of the doctor of historical sciences L.V. Pozdeeva (“Anglo-American relations during the Second World War 1941-1945”, M., “Nauka”, 1969; “London - Moscow: British public opinion and the USSR. 1939 -1945", M., Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1999), which were extracted by her from closed American archival sources dated 1952, Lend-Lease deliveries to the USSR were carried out along five routes:
Far East - 8,244,000 tons (47.1%); Persian Gulf - 4,160,000 tons (23.8%); Northern Russia - 3,964,000 tons (22.7%); Soviet North - 681,000 tons (3.9%); Soviet Arctic - 452,000 tons (2.5%).
His compatriot, the American historian J. Herring, wrote just as frankly that “Lend-Lease was not the most disinterested act in the history of mankind ... It was an act of prudent selfishness, and Americans have always clearly imagined the benefits that they can derive from it.”
And this was true, since Lend-Lease turned out to be an inexhaustible source of enrichment for many American corporations. Indeed, in fact, the United States was the only country of the anti-Hitler coalition that received a significant economic gain from the war. Not without reason, in the United States itself, the Second World War is sometimes called the “good war”, which, for example, is evident from the title of the work of the famous American historian S. Terkeli “The Good War: An Oral History of World War II” (“The Good War: Oral History of the Second world war" (1984)). In it, he frankly, with cynicism, noted: “Almost the whole world during this war experienced terrible upheavals, horrors and was almost destroyed. We came out of the war with incredible equipment, tools, labor and money. For most Americans, the war turned out to be fun ... I'm not talking about those unfortunate ones who lost their sons and daughters. But for everyone else, it was a damn good time."
Almost all researchers of this topic unanimously say that the Lend-Lease program noticeably revived the economic situation in the United States, in the balance of payments of which Lend-Lease operations became one of the leading items during the war. To carry out Lend-Lease deliveries, President Roosevelt's administration began to widely use the so-called "fixed profit" contracts (cost-plus contracts), when private contractors themselves could set a certain level of income in relation to costs.
In cases where significant volumes of specialized equipment were required, the US government acted as a lessor, buying all the necessary equipment for subsequent leasing.
Only numbers
Of course, lend-lease deliveries brought victory over the enemy closer. But here are some real numbers that speak for themselves.
For example, during the war years, more than 29.1 million units of small arms of all main types were produced at the enterprises of the Soviet Union, while only about 152 thousand units of small arms were supplied to the Red Army from American, British and Canadian factories, i.e. 0.5%. A similar picture was observed for all types of artillery systems of all calibers - 647.6 thousand Soviet guns and mortars against 9.4 thousand foreign ones, which was less than 1.5% of their total number.
For other types of weapons, the picture was somewhat different, but also not so “optimistic”: for tanks and self-propelled guns, the ratio of domestic and allied vehicles was, respectively, 132.8 thousand and 11.9 thousand (8.96%), and for combat aircraft - 140.5 thousand and 18.3 thousand (13%).
And one more thing: out of almost 46 billion dollars, which cost all Lend-Lease assistance, for the Red Army, which defeated the lion's share of the divisions of Germany and its military satellites, the United States allocated only 9.1 billion dollars, that is, a little more than one-fifth of the funds .
At the same time, the British Empire received more than 30.2 billion, France - 1.4 billion, China - 630 million, and even the countries of Latin America (!) received 420 million dollars. In total, 42 countries received deliveries under the Lend-Lease program.
It must be said that recently the overall Lend-Lease deliveries have begun to be evaluated somewhat differently, but this does not change the essence of the overall picture. Here are the corrected data: out of 50 billion dollars, almost 31.5 billion were spent on supplies to the UK, 11.3 billion to the USSR, 3.2 billion to France and 1.6 billion to China .
But, perhaps, with the general insignificance of the volume of overseas assistance, it played a decisive role precisely in 1941, when the Germans stood at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, and when only some 25-40 km remained before the victorious march along Red Square?
Let's take a look at the arms delivery statistics for this year. From the beginning of the war until the end of 1941, the Red Army received 1.76 million rifles, machine guns and machine guns, 53.7 thousand guns and mortars, 5.4 thousand tanks and 8.2 thousand combat aircraft. Of these, our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition supplied only 82 artillery pieces (0.15%), 648 tanks (12.14%) and 915 aircraft (10.26%). Moreover, a fair part of the military equipment sent, in particular 115 out of 466 British-made tanks, did not reach the front in the first year of the war.
If we translate these deliveries of weapons and military equipment into a monetary equivalent, then, according to the well-known historian, Doctor of Science M.I. Frolov (“Vain attempts: against belittling the role of the USSR in the defeat of Nazi Germany”, Lenizdat, 1986; -1945 in German historiography”, S-P., LTA Publishing House, 1994), which for many years successfully and worthily argues with German historians (W. Schwabedissen, K. Uebe), “until the end of 1941, a difficult period for the Soviet state - materials worth 545 thousand dollars were sent to the USSR under lend-lease from the United States, with a total cost of American supplies to the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition of 741 million dollars. That is, less than 0.1% of American aid was received by the Soviet Union during this difficult period.
In addition, the first Lend-Lease deliveries in the winter of 1941-1942 reached the USSR very late, and in these critical months, the Russians, and Russians alone, offered real resistance to the German aggressor on their own soil and with their own means, without receiving any significant assistance from Western democracies. By the end of 1942, the agreed delivery programs to the USSR were completed by the Americans and the British by 55%. In 1941-1942, the USSR received only 7% of the goods sent from the United States during the war years. The main amount of weapons and other materials was received by the Soviet Union in 1944-1945, after a radical change in the course of the war.
Part II
Now let's see what the combat vehicles of the allied countries were, which initially went under the Lend-Lease program.
Of the 711 fighters that arrived from England to the USSR before the end of 1941, 700 were hopelessly outdated machines such as Kittyhawk, Tomahawk and Hurricane, which are significantly inferior to the German Messerschmitt and the Soviet Yak in terms of speed and maneuverability and not even had cannon weapons. Even if the Soviet pilot managed to catch the enemy ace in a machine gun sight, their rifle-caliber machine guns were often completely powerless against the rather strong armor of German aircraft. As for the latest Airacobra fighters, only 11 of them were delivered in 1941. Moreover, the first Airacobra arrived in the Soviet Union disassembled, without any documentation and with a fully exhausted motor resource.
This, by the way, also applies to two squadrons of Hurricane fighters armed with 40-mm tank guns to combat enemy armored vehicles. The attack aircraft from these fighters turned out to be completely worthless, and they stood idle in the USSR throughout the war, because there were simply no people willing to fly them in the Red Army.
A similar picture was observed with the vaunted British armored vehicles - the Wallentine light tank, which Soviet tankers dubbed "Valentina", and the Matilda medium tank, which the same tankers called even more scathingly - "Farewell, Motherland", Thin armor, fire hazardous carburetor engines and antediluvian transmission made them easy prey for German gunners and grenade launchers.
According to the authoritative testimony of the personal assistant of V.M. Molotov, V.M. Berezhkov, who, as an interpreter of I.V. -lease obsolete Hurricane-type aircraft and evaded the supply of the latest Spitfire fighters. Moreover, in September 1942, in a conversation with the leader of the US Republican Party, W. Wilkie, in the presence of the American and British ambassadors and W. Standley and A. Clark Kerr, the Supreme Commander directly put the question to him: why did the British and American governments supply the Soviet Union poor quality materials?
And he explained that it was, first of all, about the supply of American P-40 aircraft instead of the much more modern Airacobra, and that the British were supplying useless Hurricane aircraft, which were much worse than the German ones. There was a case, Stalin added, when the Americans were going to supply the Soviet Union with 150 Airacobras, but the British intervened and kept them. "Soviet people ... are well aware that both the Americans and the British have planes equal to or even better in quality than German cars, but for unknown reasons some of these planes are not delivered to the Soviet Union."
The American ambassador, Admiral Standley, had no information on this matter, and the British ambassador, Archibald Clark Kerr, admitted that he was aware of the Air Cobras, but began to justify sending them to another place by saying that these 150 cars in the hands of the British would bring "much more benefit to the common cause of the allies than if they got into the Soviet Union.
Promised three years waiting?
The United States promised to send 600 tanks and 750 aircraft in 1941, but sent the first only 182 and 204, respectively.
The same story repeated itself in 1942: if the Soviet industry that year produced more than 5.9 million small arms, 287 thousand guns and mortars, 24.5 thousand tanks and self-propelled guns and 21.7 thousand aircraft, then under Lend-Lease in January-October 1942, only 61 thousand small arms, 532 guns and mortars, 2703 tanks and self-propelled guns and 1695 aircraft were delivered.
Moreover, since November 1942, i.e. in the midst of the battle for the Caucasus and Stalingrad and the operation "Mars" on the Rzhev ledge, the supply of weapons almost completely stopped. According to historians (M.N. Suprun “Lend-Lease and Northern Convoys, 1941-1945”, M., Andreevsky Flag Publishing House, 1997), these disruptions began already in the summer of 1942, when German aviation and the submarines destroyed the infamous PQ-17 Caravan, abandoned (by order of the Admiralty) by British escort ships. The result was disastrous: only 11 out of 35 ships reached Soviet ports, which was used as an excuse to suspend the next convoy, which sailed from British shores only in September 1942.
The new Caravan PQ-18 lost 10 transports out of 37 along the way, and the next convoy was sent only in mid-December 1942. Thus, for 3.5 months, when the decisive battle of the entire Second World War was going on on the Volga, less than 40 ships with Lend-Lease cargoes came to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk one by one. In connection with this circumstance, many had a legitimate suspicion that in London and Washington all this time they were simply waiting to see in whose favor the battle of Stalingrad would end.
Meanwhile, since March 1942, i.e. just six months after the evacuation of more than 10 thousand industrial enterprises from the European part of the USSR, the growth of military production began, which by the end of this year exceeded the pre-war figures by five times (!). Moreover, it should be noted that 86% of the entire workforce were old people, women and children. It was they who in 1942-1945 gave the Soviet army 102.5 thousand tanks and self-propelled guns, more than 125.6 thousand aircraft, more than 780 thousand artillery pieces and mortars, etc.
Not only weapons. And not only allies...
There were also deliveries under Lend-Lease that were not related to the main types of weapons. And here the numbers are really solid. In particular, we received 2,586 thousand tons of aviation gasoline, which was 37% of what was produced in the USSR during the war years, and almost 410 thousand cars, i.e. 45% of all vehicles of the Red Army (excluding captured cars). Food supplies also played a significant role, although during the first year of the war they were extremely insignificant, and in total the United States supplied approximately 15% of meat and other canned food.
And there were machine tools, rails, steam locomotives, wagons, radars and other useful property, without which you won’t get much.
Of course, after reading this impressive list of Lend-Lease supplies, one could sincerely admire the American partners in the anti-Hitler coalition, if not one nuance: at the same time, American industrial corporations also supplied to Nazi Germany ...
For example, the oil corporation "Standard Oil", owned by John Rockefeller Jr., only through the German concern "IG Farbenindustry" sold gasoline and lubricants to Berlin for 20 million dollars. And the Venezuelan branch of the same company sent 13 thousand tons of crude oil to Germany every month, which the powerful chemical industry of the Third Reich immediately processed into first-class gasoline. Moreover, the matter was not limited to precious fuel, and tungsten, synthetic rubber and a lot of different components for the automotive industry, which the German Fuhrer was supplied by his old friend Henry Ford Sr., went to the Germans from across the ocean. In particular, it is well known that 30% of all tires manufactured at its factories went to supply the German Wehrmacht.
As for the total volume of Ford-Rockefeller deliveries to Nazi Germany, there is still no complete information on this subject, since this is the strictest commercial secret, but even the little that has become public and historians makes it clear that trade with Berlin in the years by no means did not calm down.
Lend-Lease is not charity
There is a version that the lend-lease assistance from the United States was almost charitable. However, upon closer examination, this version does not stand up to scrutiny. First of all, because already during the war, under the so-called "reverse lend-lease", Washington received the necessary raw materials with a total value of almost 20% of the transferred materials and weapons. In particular, 32,000 tons of manganese and 300,000 tons of chromium ore were sent from the USSR, the importance of which in the military industry was extremely high. Suffice it to say that when, during the Nikopol-Krivoy Rog offensive operation of the troops of the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian fronts in February 1944, the German industry lost Nikopol manganese, the 150-mm frontal armor of the German "royal tigers" began to withstand the impact of Soviet artillery shells where worse than a similar 100-mm armor plate, which used to be on ordinary "tigers".
In addition, the USSR paid for allied supplies in gold. So, only on one British cruiser "Edinburgh", which was sunk by German submarines in May 1942, there were 5.5 tons of precious metal.
A significant part of the weapons and military equipment, as expected under the Lend-Lease agreement, was returned by the Soviet Union at the end of the war. Having received in return an invoice for a round sum of 1300 million dollars. Against the background of writing off Lend-Lease debts to other powers, this looked like outright robbery, so I.V. Stalin demanded to recalculate the “allied debt”.
Subsequently, the Americans were forced to admit that they were mistaken, but they added interest to the final amount, and the final amount, taking into account these interests, recognized by the USSR and the USA under the Washington Agreement in 1972, amounted to 722 million greenbacks. Of these, 48 million were paid to the United States under L.I. Brezhnev, in three equal payments in 1973, after which the payments were stopped due to the introduction by the American side of discriminatory measures in trade with the USSR (in particular, the notorious "Jackson-Vanik Amendment" - auth.).
Only in June 1990, during new negotiations between Presidents George W. Bush Sr. and M.S. Gorbachev, did the parties return to the discussion of the Lend-Lease debt, during which a new deadline for the final repayment of the debt was set - 2030, and the remaining amount of the debt - 674 million dollars.
After the collapse of the USSR, its debts were technically divided into debts to governments (Paris Club) and debts to private banks (London Club). The lend-lease debt was a debt obligation to the US government, that is, part of the debt to the Paris Club, which Russia fully repaid in August 2006.
According to own estimates
US President F.D. Roosevelt said bluntly that “helping the Russians is money well spent,” and his successor in the White House, G. Truman, back in June 1941, on the pages of The New York Times, said: “If we see, that Germany is winning, we must help Russia, and if Russia wins, we must help Germany, and in this way let them kill each other as much as possible "...
The first official assessment of the role of Lend-Lease in the overall victory over Nazism, which was then replicated in various interpretations in many encyclopedias and scientific papers, was given by a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR N.A. USSR during the Patriotic War" (M., Gospolitizdat, 1948) wrote: "If we compare the size of the deliveries of industrial goods to the USSR by the allies with the size of industrial production at the socialist enterprises of the USSR, it turns out that the share of these deliveries in relation to domestic production in the period of the war economy will be only about 4%.
The American scientists, military and officials themselves (R. Goldsmith, J. Herring, R. Jones) admit that "all allied assistance to the USSR did not exceed 1/10 of Soviet arms production", and the total volume of Lend-Lease supplies, taking into account the famous American stew "Second Front", amounted to about 10-11%.
Moreover, the famous American historian R. Sherwood in his famous two-volume book “Roosevelt and Hopkins. Through the Eyes of an Eyewitness” (M., Foreign Literature, 1958), written at the height of the Cold War, Harry Hopkins was quoted as saying that “the Americans never believed that Lend-Lease aid was the main factor in the Soviet victory over Hitler on Eastern front. The victory was achieved by the heroism and blood of the Russian army.
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