Shortround6
Major General
Then where do these things come from if not the Western allies? Who was in a position to provide hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.
Accounts are all over the place, from claiming the soviets were saved in 1941/42 by lend lease to the other side saying that without lend lease the Soviets would have taken only a few month to a year and half to defeat the Germans even without the western allies let alone lend lease.
We have statements like this.
"No doubt statistics can be massaged to support any point of view".
followed by
" Lend-lease supplied the USSR with 1.9% of all artillery, 7% of all tanks, 13% of all aircraft, 5.4% of transport in 1943, 19% transport in 1944 and 32.8% in 1945. Lend-lease deliveries amounted to 4% of Russia's wartime production."
which certainly tends to down play the role of lend lease but the very same article says.
" The list of other supplies, equally vital to the Soviet supply effort, is impressive – 57.8 per cent of aviation fuel requirements, 53 per cent of all explosives, almost half the wartime supply of copper, aluminium and rubber tyres. "
Bolding by me. Without the LL explosives and propellents a large part of the Soviet artillery production would have been useless. Likewise tanks do not always fight tanks, they are often used to support infantry but with few HE shells per tank and less machine gun ammo having large numbers of tanks with 1/2 filled ammo bins doesn't contribute that much. (more targets for German anti-tank equipment?)
So which is it? Lend lease supplied little in the way of combat equipment or Lend-lease supplied large amounts of material/supplies that allowed the Soviet troops to perform at a much higher level?
Steel has already been mentioned. Without lend lease rails and wheel sets how well would the soviet rail system have held up?
Armor steel for tanks.
38,000 machine tools for armaments factories. You don't make tanks in blacksmith shops.
Some writers seem to have a skewed view.
from earlier in the article I have quoted several times.
"The aluminum and other alloys, the metallurgic technology, the locomotives, the radios and other smaller items, the foodstuffs, all these items helped to strengthen the USSR in their struggle against Germany and her Allies. There is no question. But to state bluntly that without them the USSR would have collapsed is simply untrue, and this is the perspective most often put forward in English-speaking lands. The USSR is/was a great country, with enormous resources, and the Russian people are among the most resilient in the world. With or without Lend-Lease, Germany would sooner or later have been defeated, simply because such a small country could never sustain a war against one so large and so wealthy. The Second World War was a war of attrition, and Germany simply did not have the resources to outlast the USSR. Once German troops were stopped before Moscow, it was only a question of time. "
Now it is quite true that the USSR had enormous resources but Iron ore, coal and oil in the ground, while perhaps counting towards a country's wealth and resources do little good if you can't get them out of the ground in a timely fashion AND process them into the needed items/equipment. The USSR had resources, it lacked the manufacturing capacity to match the Germans in a war of attrition. If you are only making 1/2 to 1/3 of the steel per year of your opponent due to the capacity of your steel mills it doesn't matter how much iron ore you have in the ground.
A quick example, a single Russian 122mm howitzer, firing 2 rounds per minute will fire about 1 ton of steel in 25 minutes. Four such guns firing at that rate for 3 hours will have launched the equivalent of a T-34 tank towards the enemy. If you have thousands of artillery pieces you can use up a lot of steel very quickly. And this is finished steel. A number of pounds of shavings/swarf will be on the shop floor for each shell made until collected and sent back to the steel mill. Artillery shells, while not armor steel are a high quality steel.
Steel production was a rough indicator of a countries manufacturing capability. Not all of a country's industries were in proportion but it was the easiest measurement.
Unfortunately for the Soviet Union the numbers for 1940-41 for number of things changed dramatically in the last half of 1941. The Soviets did not evacuate ALL factories. They may have lost some sources of supply. They certainly lost around 40% of their agricultural lands, which put a real crimp in food production, back yard potato patches not withstanding.
They also lost a large percentage of their farm machinery.
Soviet steel production in 1942 was less than 1/2 of what was in 1941, it barely reached about 2/3rds in 1945. If your railroads are moving troops and equipment and raw materials to factories they are not moving food stuffs around the country. Rails wear out. Steel wheels on railroad cars wear out. Locomotives wear out.
Every ton of railroad rail supplied by Lend Lease freed up a Russian ton of steel for armament production.
The Lend lease was small in effect and didn't change much argument rarely looks deep into what was really going on.
They also get somethings wrong. It is often claimed that the Soviets blended LL aviation fuel with their own fuel to make higher octane, which may be true to some extent. However the Allies also supplied large amounts of anti-knock compound which was a much more efficient way of raising the octane rating of Soviet fuel.
Mix one gallon of 100 octane with one gallon of 80 octane to make two gallons of 90 something octane? Or add 2-3 CCs of anti knock compound to the gallon of soviet 80 octane to make 90 octane or above? Which is easier to ship?
Why ship small arms ammo when you can supply a Soviet factory with Brass (or copper to make brass ) and propellent and let the soviets provide the other materials, and labor.
The US supplied the Soviet union with 140 million tons of smokeless powder.
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