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On 23 Jan 2004, Gary Komar wrote: "Mr. Jennings is correct. The Soviet Union would not have been able to 'fight their fight without allied suport.' However, the contribution of U.S. production and Lend Lease to the Soviet effort has often been exaggerated." Some comments on Gary Komar's points. 1. I agree that "the contribution of U.S. production and Lend Lease to the Soviet effort has often been exaggerated". Particularly when you count the dollar value of Allied lend-lease exports and compare it to the Soviet economy. This puts the contribution of lend-lease to the Soviet war effort at roughly 10% of the total. Counting at factors cost, e.g. by assigning a Sherman the same value as a T-34 - both being roughly equivalent in combat value - the Soviet Cold War estimate of 5% seems closer to the truth (If I remember well, this point is made by Mark Harrison in "Accounting for War"). That, however, says nothing about how critical lend-lease was, to the Soviet war effort. For example, any adult in good health can lose 5% of his/her body mass if these 5% are fat or muscle. If the adult is a large person, then some of these 5% can also be bone tissue, or parts of various organs. However, remove 5% of a person's mass in body water and that person is in serious trouble. Remove 5% of a person's mass in nerve cells and that person dies. 2. The basic fact is that it took the combined efforts of three great powers - the British Commonwealth, the USSR and the USA - to win WWII. Each of these powers was accutely conscious of the need to keep all three in the fight. The Soviets kept asking for a second front, the Western Allies were assigning a very high priority to helping the Soviets. As is the case in such situations, each side would tend to note its own contribution more than the others'. It's easy for the Anglo-American powers to focus on the huge investment that the Battle of the Atlantic represented, ignoring that this destroyed a very small fraction of the German war effort. It's easy for the Soviets to claim that their allies were not pulling their weights, and that having dozens of cruisers everywhere hastened Germany's defeat not one bit, ignoring that you can't apply military power across an ocean without those sunk costs (pardon the bad pun). That being said, it made a lot of sense for the British and the Americans to keep the Soviet Union in the war, and they were very conscious of it at the time. So were the Soviets. As I wrote in my initial post, by the end of 1943 there was a real second front, what with Italy, the air war and the need to fortify Western Europe. 3. Gary Komar quotes 'When Titans Clashed' to the effect that "Left to their own devices, Stalin and his commanders might have taken 12 to 18 months longer to finish off the Wehrmacht." Interestingly enough, Harrison makes the same point (I forgot if it was in "Accounting for War" or "Soviet planning in war and peace"), arguing that without lend-lease the Soviet war effort would only suffer a drop of 2% or so, the bulk of the loss being in "civilian surplus" (which historically increased) and "gross investment" (rebuilding of the country). This supports 'When Titans Clashed', but relies on a linear macroeconomic arithmetic which implies that all elements are substituable, as opposed to my "which 5% of your body mass would you rather lose ?" above. (more later) 4. It seems fairly clear that the Soviets beat Barbarossa on their own. Lend-lease deliveries in 1941 likely had a very marginal effect, given how limited they were. The aircraft figures are not all that relevant either, because the Soviets only managed to contest air superiority and gain an advantage (at great cost) over a sector where the Germans wanted air superiority in mid-1943, by the time of Kursk. Prior to that, the Soviet air force wasn't particularly effective - see Hayward 'Stopped at Stalingrad' - and after that the bulk of the German fighter arm was transferred to Germany, never to return, to fight the Allied strategic bombing campaign. So I would argue that lend-lease was in the "nice to have but not vital" category regarding aircraft. Tanks are a different story, though (see below) 5. Some of the "critical 5%" items, in my opinion, are the 1,000,000 tons of foodstuffs shipped by 1 April 1943. ALso, by 1 March 1943 49,000 tons of TNT and toluene had been shipped to the USSR, increasing to 144,000 tons by the end of October, along with 251,000 tons of other vital chemicals. This was at a time when the chemical industry was the sector of Soviet industry which had generally NOT been evacuated in the face of Barbarossa. As a comparison, according to "Germany in the Second World War" Heer monthly consumption was 5-10,000 tons between July 1941 to June 1942, some 90,000 tons in total, plus about 50,000 tons of powder. The Luftwaffe consumed 132,000 tons of explosives in the same period (on all fronts, although I would say 60-80% of that total would be in Russia). The Soviets were consuming about twice the rate of explosive as the Germans for the army, I don't know about the air force. 60,733 tons of US chemicals and explosives arrived in the USSR by 30 June 1942. I would also include radios, which the Soviets would have been able to pay for had it not been for lend-lease, but which would still have been supplied by the US. Radios are the key to an effective airforce and mobile tactics, and the Soviets couldn' manufacture them in large numbers. Finally, lots of raw materials and technological equipment were made available to the Soviet war effort which would have been very difficult - bordering on impossible - to manufacture domestically. 6. Just for the sake of nitpicking, here are various figures for tanks (since I decided aircraft weren't as important). First, a Russian source <http://www.battlefield.ru/library/lend/intro.html> puts the tank deliveries until June 1942 at 2,249. According to Glantz & House as quoted by Gary Komar, from October 1941 to May 1942 the Allies delivered 2600 armored vehicles. In 1941 and 1942, the Soviets produced 4700 and 24,500 tanks and lost 20,500 and 15,100. So this supports the "Soviets saved themselves" view. Now according to some notes which are either from "Roads to Russia" or from the US statistics about lend-lease (available on the Maxwell.af.mil website) though I will wait for popular demand before taking the trouble of looking up exactly which set of official US data it comes from, 3,180 tanks were shipped (i.e. left the US, doesn't mean "arrived") by the end of 1942, plus (according to 'Comrades in Arms') 2,443 Commonwealth tanks made available to the USSR, of which 1,442 arrived, 470 were sunk and 531 were on the way as of 25 July 1942. So even halving the 1942 figure for US deliveries, we are above 2,600, probably 3,100. That figure for lend-lease tank deliveries by mid-1942 seems to me more correct than the above two (although to be fair part of the difference might be the PQ-16 convoy which arrived in June). This says nothing about how vital that contribution was to the Soviet war effort. Next source: "USSR Table 2" of the Oxford Companion to WWII, figures for tanks. Dec 41-Apr 42: Soviet losses 7,110, production 7,767, Lend-Lease 1,678. May-Oct 42: Soviet losses 13,915, production 12,960, LL 2,904. Nov 42-Dec 43: Soviet losses 31,107, production 28,608, LL 3,798. What this shows is that lend-lease was the difference between the Soviet tank park being down 400 from its Dec 1941 level and being up 3,200. If these figures are correct, the extra 3,600 tanks may well have made the difference between victory and defeat in that critical winter. Had the Soviets not won that victory, they would have had to face a stronger German effort (the German effort in 1942 was weaker than a year before, but in 1943 with economic mobilization kicking in it was probably the strongest ever although more brittle due to a lack of veteran infantry) while their own resources would have been even more strained, as they would have had to replace larger losses than those they sustained historically from a smaller resource base. Note how battlefield losses outstripped domestic production by 2,500 in 1943, despite the Soviet industry being fully mobilized and redeployed by then. Unsurprisingly, the relevant article ("USSR" section on war economy) concludes that lend-lease was vital to the Soviet war effort. Final set of tank figures, from Krivosheev: Available 22 June 1941 22,600 (21,200 light) of which 14,200 were in fighting units including 3,800 operational, received during (rest of ?) 1941 5,600, lost 20,500 (most of which must have been non-operational). Available 1 January 1942 7,700 (6,300 light), received during 1942 27,900, lost 15,000. SP guns, 600 produced, all lost. Available 1 January 1943, 20,600, (11,000 light), received during 1943 22,900, lost 22,400. SP guns 4,400 produced 1,100 lost. So from the above I would say that a little over 3,000 is probably a safe figure for lend-lease tanks reaching Russia by 30 June 1942. As to how vital tanks were, it depends on who you trust. Krivosheev's figures certainly support the notion that the Soviets could have done without lend-lease in that area but they are not very detailed. Regarding conclusions, we can all agree that with *no* support whatsoever, i.e. the Soviet Union faces a "Greater Reich" controlling Continental Europe but at peace and free to trade with the rest of the world, the USSR would likely be defeated. Not necessarily in 1941, but certainly later, as the disparity in resources would simply be too great. It's an open debate whether no lend-lease whatsoever would have made the difference between victory and defeat in Russia. Presumably, the moment of maximum vulnerability for the Soviets would be in late 1942 until late 1943. I personally believe that the Soviets would come very close to collapse in such a case, but that's only an opinion. Lend-lease was extremely important in 1943-44, without which the Soviets would not have been able to destroy most of the German army - which included advancing as they did: mechanized warfare was what killed Germans. I disagree with Harrison that you can discount "gross investment" because some of that "investment" was undoubtedly with an eye to postwar recovery but it also had a military value, like being able to feed the "liberated" populations and rebuilding rail lines to provide the logistics for further advances. Absent lend-lease in that period, Soviet pressure would be considerably less (though Soviet resistance to German attacks would not be correspondingly diminished), which means that the Germans would have had more resources to devote to fighting the Allies, and Germany would not have reached the end of its manpower tether shortly after D-Day. That, in my opinion, would be rather bad news for the Anglo-American forces, not because they couldn't handle additional German forces (assuming of course these didn't make D-Day impossible) but because it would cost many more casualties, while historically the Soviets picked up a large part of the butcher's bill. As a final conclusion, and to repeat something which I already wrote here but believe bears repeating, as long as the Soviet Union was in the war, it wouldn't matter very much how strong it was because Hitler would be the one allocating German military resources, and he did not display the least inclination to make things easy to the West despite postwar German claims that they were fighting to defend Western civilisation against barbaric Soviet hordes. Louis Capdeboscq _________________________________________________________________ Check out the coupons and bargains on MSN Offers! http://shopping.msn.com/softcontent/softcontent.aspx?scmId=1418
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