What the USSR received from the Western allies in 1941-1945
What is lend-lease? This is a form of interstate relations, meaning a system of transferring on loan or lease of military equipment, weapons, ammunition, strategic raw materials, food, various goods and services to an ally country.
At the same time, the conditions for settling settlements for this assistance are stipulated. Materials destroyed, lost, used during the period of hostilities were not subject to payment. Property left over from the end of the war and suitable for civilian purposes is paid off as a long-term loan or returned to the supplier.
It was on these conditions that deliveries to the Soviet Union were made from the USA, Great Britain and Canada. The Great Patriotic War ended 65 years ago, but the debate about the role this allied assistance of the USSR played in achieving Victory in 1945 is still ongoing.
FIRST DELIVERIES
On July 12, an agreement was signed on joint actions of the governments of the USSR and Great Britain in the war against Germany, in which both governments pledged to provide each other with all kinds of assistance and support.
At the end of August, the first convoy of ships called "Dervish" (RO-O) arrived in Arkhangelsk. It included the Argus aircraft carrier, on which the Hurricane fighter planes were delivered to the USSR. They formed the basis of the 78th Aviation Regiment of the Northern Fleet Air Force, commanded by the famous pilot B. F. Safonov, the first ace in the USSR, twice awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
A few days later Churchill wrote to Stalin: “The War Cabinet has decided to send another 200 Tomahawk fighters to Russia. Of these, 140 will be shipped to Arkhangelsk from here, and 60 of those ordered in the United States."
Some of these fighters managed to take part in the autumn-winter battle near Moscow.
In August-September 1941, England was able to send to the USSR not only planes, but also medium tanks "Matilda" and "Valentine".
In the United States, the public reaction to the news of the German invasion of the USSR was not as definite as in England.
The rapprochement of the Soviet Union with fascist Germany, the signing of a non-aggression pact and a friendship treaty with her in August 1939, the Americans greeted in the highest degree negative. Anti-Soviet sentiments revived, 55% of the Americans surveyed spoke out against the assistance of the USSR. Nevertheless, two days after Germany's attack on the USSR, US President F. Roosevelt invited the press to his office and said: "Of course, we are going to provide all possible assistance to Russia."
The legal basis for the first deliveries from the United States to the USSR was the official extension of the Soviet-American trade agreement of 1937 and the issuance of licenses for the export of weapons to the USSR with the provision of American ships for transportation. The first tripartite document, which specifically indicated the required amount of certain weapons, military equipment and other materials, was the Moscow Protocol of the Three Powers based on the results of a conference held in Moscow from September 29 to October 2, 1941. The document was signed by VM Molotov from the USSR, A. Harriman from the USA and Lord Beaverbrook from the UK.
The protocol recorded the needs of the USSR for various types of weapons, military equipment and materials, the capabilities of Britain and the United States in meeting them. The amount in dollars as the cost of what was requested was not specified in the protocol.
An interesting fact - A. Harriman, instructing the US delegation, repeated: "Give, give and give, not counting on a return, no thoughts of getting anything in return."
As the famous English historian Alexander Werth writes in his book Russia in the War, Lord Beaverbrook was fully aware of the fact that “the Russians are now the only people in the world seriously weakening Germany, and that it is in the interests of England to do without some things and transfer them Russia.
The protocol specifically provided for the delivery to the USSR of 3000 aircraft, 4500 tanks, as well as various equipment, raw materials, food, materials and medical supplies - only 1.5 million tons of cargo to be shipped from the USA and England to the USSR. Their total cost is more than $ 1 billion”.
Until October 1941, the USSR paid for the materials received in cash from its gold reserves. The first ship with a secret cargo - 10 tons of gold on board was sent from the USSR to the shores of the United States in September 1941.
On October 30, Roosevelt, in a message to Stalin, approved the Moscow Protocol and gave orders from November 1941 to carry out supplies to the USSR on the basis of the Lend-Lease Law. Officially, the decision on Lend-Lease was recorded by the President of the United States only on June 11, 1942 in the Agreement on the Principles Applied to Mutual Assistance in the Waging of the War against Aggression. On behalf of the USSR, it was signed by the Ambassador to the United States, M. M. Litvinov, after the departure from the United States of V. M. Molotov, who held talks with the American leadership.
Roosevelt told Stalin that American supplies would be carried out on an interest-free loan of $ 1 billion, payable over a decade, starting in the sixth year after the end of the war.
However, it should be noted that deliveries from the United States were delayed in the volume planned for 1941.
So, according to the plan for October-November, instead of 41 ships with cargo, only 28 left the Soviet coast.
More precisely in 1941 Great Britain fulfilled its obligations. Instead of the 600 promised planes, it delivered 711 to the USSR, 466 out of 750 tanks, and 300 out of 600 tankettes. In addition, at that time, the USSR received from the British a certain number of guns and anti-tank rifles.
AIRCRAFT, TANKS, CARS …
After the Moscow Protocol, which was in effect until June 30, 1942, the main countries of the anti-Hitler coalition signed three more similar documents, each for a one-year term: in Washington - November 6, 1942, London - October 19, 1943, and Ottawa - April 17, 1944. They determined the volume and composition of lend-lease supplies until the end of World War II.
What kind of military equipment and weapons, materials were included in the list of lend-lease supplies and were received in the Soviet Union? Until mid-1942, the USSR received 3,100 aircraft from the Allies. Among them are the Airacobra fighters, which have earned high praise from our pilots, including three times Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Pokryshkin. After all, 48 of the 59 German planes he shot down, he wrote down to his combat account, flying on "Airacobras".
Our pilots also spoke well of the Mitchell B-25 and Boston A-20 bombers from the United States. But the British "Hurricanes" did not delight the Soviet pilots. Fighters "Spitfire" outnumbered these aircraft in a number of performance characteristics, but they were few.
More restrained, but still positive assessments were given by Soviet pilots to other types of Lend-Lease aircraft (Tomahawk R-40, Kittyhawk R-47, etc.). On the other hand, the sailors enthusiastically greeted the deliveries of the Catalina flying boats.
By October 1, 1944, the USSR received 14,700 aircraft from the Allies. In total, for all the years of the Great Patriotic War, the Allies sent 22,195 aircraft to the Soviet Union (according to other sources - 18,297). During the war, the USSR produced at its factories, according to Russian data, 143,000 aircraft (according to foreign data - 116,494). Thus, every fifth or sixth aircraft in the Red Army Air Force was Lend-Lease.
The share of lend-lease supplies in the aviation of the Soviet Navy exceeded 20% (2148 aircraft).
The cost of the aviation Lend-Lease in the USSR as a whole amounted to 3.6 billion dollars, or about 35% of the total amount of allied assistance.
Our aviation required high-octane gasoline, which was a weak point of the Soviet economy. The shortage of aviation gasoline was compensated for by lend-lease supplies. More than 1.5 million tons of this fuel came from the USA, Great Britain and Canada, which slightly exceeded its production in the USSR.
The main material for the construction of the aircraft is aluminum. By November 1942, the Soviet Union had lost 60% of its aluminum production capacity. The need for aluminum, according to AI Mikoyan, was 4000 tons per month and, in addition, 500 tons of duralumin. All western supplies of aluminum during the war amounted to 325 thousand tons.
The tank Lend-Lease account was opened by British armored vehicles that landed at the pier of the Arkhangelsk port from the ships of the Dervish convoy on August 31, 1941. In total, 12 788 tanks were sent to the USSR during the war years (7500 from the USA, 5218 from England).
In the Soviet Union, 110,000 tanks were produced during this period. Thus, the Red Army included 12% of imported tanks.
Most of all in the Red Army were American medium tanks "General Sherman" with a 75-mm cannon and armor thickness of 38-100 mm and "Stuart", armed with 75-mm and 37-mm cannons.
Of the British tanks, the aforementioned medium tanks "Valentine" and "Matilda" were the most massive in Lend-Lease deliveries. The first of them was armed with a 60-mm gun, the second with a 40-mm cannon. The British also supplied the Churchill heavy tank with armor up to 152 mm and a 75 mm cannon.
The Allies also sent 4,912 anti-tank guns, 8,218 anti-aircraft guns, 376,000 shells, 136,000 machine guns and 320,000 tons of explosives to the Soviet Union.
In the summer and autumn of 1941, the USSR cargo vehicle fleet lost 159 thousand vehicles (58% of the original composition), as well as a number of factories that produced component parts for vehicles. The lack of vehicles negatively affected the mobility of artillery and the possibility of redeployment.
Lend-lease vehicles came to the rescue, mainly from the United States. It was they who largely solved the problem of moving gun mounts. These are, first of all, "Studebakers", "Doji", "Willys", "Fords".
In total, from the allies, mainly from the United States, the Soviet Union received 427,386 (according to other sources - 477,785) cars of various models and 35,170 motorcycles.
More than 500 warships and boats were delivered to the Soviet Navy under Lend-Lease. These include 28 frigates, 89 minesweepers, 78 large submarine hunters, 60 patrol boats, 166 torpedo boats, and 43 landing craft.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the ships began to enter the USSR only in 1944, and mostly to the Pacific Fleet, on the eve of the war with Japan.
From the allies of the USSR, he received about 1000 radar stations and sonars. 25 percent of all Lend-Lease was food.
MAIN ROUTES
There were four main routes for the delivery of lend-lease cargo to the USSR.
The first, the shortest, along which 4 million cargoes (22.6%) were transported, ran across the North Atlantic in the area between Svalbard and the shores of Norway occupied by the Germans. From August 1941 to May 1945, 41 Arctic convoys crossed from Iceland and England to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. In total, there were 811 ships in convoys.
As a result of attacks by German submarines and aircraft, 100 ships (82 British and American, 9 Soviet and 9 other countries) were killed along the way, and with them thousands of American, British, Canadian and Soviet sailors.
The second route of lend-lease supplies, dubbed the "Persian Corridor", ran from the shores of the United States and England through the Persian Gulf and Iran. This route transported 4.2 million tons of cargo (23.8%). It became operational in 1942, after the occupation troops of England and the Soviet Union entered Iran in accordance with the Anglo-Soviet-Iranian agreement.
In Iran, the allies built additional highways and railways, airfields, aircraft workshops and car assembly plants. From here, the planes that arrived and brought were ferried by Soviet pilots to the territory of the USSR to the front, and cars loaded with Lend-Lease materials, on their own, overcoming a difficult, more than a thousand-kilometer path through deserts and mountainous terrain, went to the Soviet border to the Azerbaijani city of Julfa or to the Iranian ports on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea.
On the third, the Pacific route, which operated throughout the war, the volume of cargo delivered to the USSR was the largest and amounted to 8 million tons (47.1%). Lend-Lease materials were loaded onto ships in the ports of the west coast of the United States and arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Magadan and Vladivostok.
There were no convoys on the Pacific route. All ships sailed alone, on "drip flights", but almost every ship had cannons, machine guns and small military teams. The losses here were incomparably smaller than in the northern convoys, but up to a dozen torpedo ships can be counted.
The fourth route was special, associated with aviation lend-lease. This is the so-called ALSIB. American planes were ferried along it to the USSR on their own along the Alaska - Chukotka - Yakutia - Krasnoyarsk route. From Krasnoyarsk, fighters with complex wings were loaded onto railway platforms and transported to the European part of the country, while bombers themselves flew to front airfields.
About 8,000 aircraft were delivered to the USSR along this route, including 5,000 Airacobra and Kingcobra fighters, about 2,000 Boston A-20 and Mitchell B-25 bombers, as well as 710 Douglas C-47 transport aircraft..
The total cost of lend-lease aid to the USSR, according to the calculations of Russian economists and historians (N. V. Butenina and others) of the post-Soviet years, is more than $ 12 billion (at the price of the war years).
Igor KRASNOV
PhD in Economics
REMEMBER, APPRECIATE, THANK YOU
OPINIONS OF RUSSIAN AND BRITISH EXPERTS ON THE ASSISTANCE PROVIDED TO THE SOVIET UNION ON THE LAND-LEASE
Throughout the four years of the war, the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition supplied the USSR with weapons, ammunition, foodstuffs, military equipment under Lend-Lease … How significant was this assistance and could the Soviet Union have won without the support of Great Britain and the United States? Russian and British experts tried to answer this question during the Moscow-London video bridge in RIA Novosti. There was also a correspondent for the Military-Industrial Courier, who quotes the statements of some of its participants.
Oleg RZHESHEVSKY
Scientific Director of the Center for the History of War and Geopolitics of the Institute of General History
- I know one thing: thanks, among other things, to American, British, Canadian aid, aid from other countries, we jointly won the war. They won a victory over an extremely dangerous and powerful enemy who crushed the whole of Europe and managed to put together a military bloc from aggressive countries.
Without a doubt, the help we received under Lend-Lease, primarily through the famous northern convoys (they went to the Soviet Union from Great Britain in 1941-1942 and later), was of great importance. Especially in the early years of the war, although in 1941 it was very, very insignificant.
The moral factor had a much greater effect then, and not only for the army, but for our entire people. The realization that we are not alone, that we are fighting alongside such powerful allies as Great Britain and the United States, was of great importance in raising the morale of the soldiers at the front and the population in the rear.
Lend-Lease assistance is highly appreciated in our country. There is not a single serious work in which this help is not mentioned, it is not given an appropriate assessment. And today we can once again express our gratitude for this to the leadership and peoples of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition.
Richard OVERY
Professor at the University of Exeter
- How important was the help for your country to win that war? We remember that the Soviet Union, even before the receipt of full-fledged aid under the Lend-Lease, managed to push the fascists away from the walls of Moscow. You have to understand: profound changes and preconditions for this turning point occurred in the Soviet troops even before the start of supplies under Lend-Lease.
But Lend-Lease, in my opinion, was extremely important. He helped the Soviet Union in the systematic supply of the army with weapons and ammunition, supplies of materiel and fuel. In addition, foodstuffs, raw materials, technologies were supplied … All this allowed the USSR to redirect its industry to the production of, first of all, weapons and military equipment.
It seems to me that diverse supplies, not only of weapons and military equipment, but also of various materials and equipment, helped the Soviet Union to more successfully carry out large-scale offensive operations, including in 1943-1944. Therefore, their importance cannot be diminished in any way.
