For those who can read Russian, I can recommend some more detailed sources:
1.
View attachment 765552
2.
View attachment 765551
The latter is the most comprehensive overview of aircraft received by the USSR under the Lend-Lease program to date.
Appreciate the sources, that's always helpful.
I read the memoirs of General Nikitin, who was in charge of supplying Soviet troops with fuel during the war - he NEVER mentioned the supply of gasoline and high-octane components under the Lend-Lease in his book. It is very amusing to read how the volumes of oil production and refining decreased in the USSR, but there was still enough gasoline. Apparently the Soviets had a secret magic for that.
In that lend lease PDF posted upthread, aside from all the tanks, aircraft, other weapons, ammunition and fuel, I was struck by the vast quantities of rare metals and every other kind of industrial chemical and precursor they were shipping to Russia. Even rails, as in train rails? Am I reading that correctly?
I spent quite a bit of time and efforts to satisfy my amateur interest in the history of the Soviet Air Force. Below I provide the most common conclusions:
I would say that you are not the only person in the world who has made this effort, and I hope I will be forgiven for playing Devil's Advocate here:
1. The true history of the Soviet Air Force in World War II is still not written.
That is probably true. And for two major reasons, but I'll circle back to that.
2. I doubt it will ever be written, as there are too few people interested in it.
I'm not so sure about this part, but it is true that there are relatively few sources in English, (which is used not only by Anglophones but as a kind of international Lingua Franca for those who speak many other languages) as people tend to focus much more on the air forces of their own home country.
However there is still significant interest in WW2, and in the Soviets specifically, not least because of the ongoing wars involving the Russians to this day. There is a lot to learn which is worth learning. There are definitely some serious people, including academics and military think tanks and so on, as well as amateurs like many of us here, pursuing an active interest in the reality of the Soviet-German war and specifically on the aviation side of it, as there are many important questions to answer (such as the use of tactical air power to affect a ground war). But again, more on that in a second.
3. If it does get written, it will be quite tragic. New historical documents that became available in last decades rather favor this view.
I think that is true as well, though probably not in the way you mean.
4. The price paid by the Soviets for the victory was extremely high. The road to Berlin was abundantly covered with the blood of soldiers - and pilots, among others. Not only the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, but also the incompetence of the Stalin's regime were to blame for this.
Here is where we start to part ways. I'm not a professional WW2 expert, but having been studying it for a very long time as an amateur, like so many of us in here, I can see pretty clearly that
every nation had serious blunders and made catastrophic mistakes during the war, and every nation also had their successes and triumphs. The Germans made serious mistakes too, in other words. Hitler's Nazi regime was also, much like the Soviets under Stalin, not a believer in transparency, democracy, good government, oversight, truth, or honesty. They did not typically admit their own mistakes, setbacks and errors when they could manage to conceal them.
The Soviets started out
very much on their back foot, and this was indeed largely the fault of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. But the Soviet's also just as clearly rallied, in part with the help of Lend-Lease and other contributions from Western Allies, but certainly not exclusively for this reason. As the war progressed, they applied good strategy, fielded improved weaponry, and outfought the Germans.
The classic example, which is low-hanging fruit but which most people reading this can easily verify, was Stalingrad. It was a bloody nightmare, very costly for the Soviets, but one in which they also completely fooled the German high-leadership, one in which they waited with ruthless patience for exactly the right moment when the Nazi head was in the noose, and which they exploited, including largely with the use of their best available technologies (KV and T-34 tanks, Katyusha rockets, and a variety of newer and improved aircraft types) to utterly annihilate a vast army of the Germans and their other Axis allies.
Another very well known example was at Kursk, which has certain echoes of recent events in roughly the same area.
Soviet losses are still the subject of historical discussions, in which official Russian historians try in every possible way to hide the truth by manipulating of numbers.
Official Russian historians, especially now under the late Putin regime, may do this, but not all Russian or Russian-speaking historians have. And during the sadly brief detante which we experienced during the 90s, many records from Russia became available to western researchers. More on that in a moment.
5. Russian propaganda widely uses the lack of reliable historical research, replacing it with myths. As a result, Russia is turning (or has already turned) into a fascist dictatorship.
Both the Soviets
and their enemies were fascist dictatorships, it bears keeping in mind.
PS. May be, my opinion was still too optimistic...
Or it may also be a bit selective in the other direction
.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkmO7tm8AU
This is a video by a very good American historian,
David M. Glantz. He is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, an instructor at the Army Staff College and a top researcher on the Soviets. He got his hands on Soviet records in the early 1990s, and in this video, he discusses the scope and scale of the fighting in the Soviet-German war, and the surprising fact revealed by these records, that there appear to be at least two major tank battles that occurred in 1941 which were on a much larger scale than had been previously known. One which may have been bigger than Kursk. And that the Germans suffered far more losses during the earlier phases of the invasion than previously thought.
The reason, he points out, is that both the Nazis and the Soviets were totalitarian regimes, and they only released news about their war when one or both sides thought they could gain a propaganda advantage thereby. In some cases, they saw no such advantage, so nothing came out. It's a really sinister, kind of scary thing to consider. The German records may to some extent have been more available to us, but not all of them, and not always enough to penetrate their own intentional obfuscation of many important events and even major incidents during the war. It's important to keep in mind, that w
hile the Soviets lied, and were an evil and dishonest regime, so were the Nazis.
Post WW2, in the 1950s and 60s, we had a lot of memoirs by former German fighter aces, bomber pilots, tank aces and so on. Many of these stories were quite gripping and interesting to read. Some, like say Hans Ulrich Rudel's memoir, were also more or less openly sympathetic to the twisted cause he once fought for. Others were definitely
not sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but still tended to glorify the German kit and pilots / soldiers over that of their enemies, especially the Soviet enemy who had no voice in the West. Not that this is unusual or bad, necessarily, because all fighter pilots do that. But it's unbalanced, since (until much more recently) there are so few Soviet pilot's narratives to provide the other half of the story. Even now we basically only have a few short interviews and fragments.
At the same time in the 50s and 60s, we in the West were fighting wars against communism. People in Eastern Europe (including half of Germany) and parts of Asia were suffering under Soviet Marxist rule, (or Maoist, in some parts of Asia). The US also to be blunt about it, brought former Nazi scientists into our weapons and space programs, and Nazi spys into our intelligence community. The Soviets did the same, of course, but that had little influence on Western culture.
All of this had a tendency to influence our outlook such that some people downplay Soviet contributions in the war, and tend to denigrate Soviet technology and capability. And that is something that has bitten us in the ass, including in the aviation world when our pilots first encountered planes like the MiG 17, MiG 19, and MiG 21, in ground warfare due to the RPG and other anti-tank weapons, during the Vietnam war in general, in the Space program with Sputnik. Just to cite a few examples.
We tend to forget that
it was in fact mainly the Soviets who defeated the Third Reich. No matter how much you dislike Stalin, or Putin, I think it's foolish to ignore this.
And this includes a rather vast quantity of German military kit which was destroyed on the Russian front. A huge number of German-war graves with 'Töte im Osten' inscribed on them.
With regard to WW2, I just think the blanket dismissal of Soviet air power in WW2 tends to teach us incorrect lessons about the use of airpower during the war, and about all tactial aircraft in general. That is my main interest in it. That, and I just don't like spreading falsehoods even when they are comforting ones. Missing in Action is a fun film, but as painful as it is to admit, I know Churck Norris didn't go win the Vietnam War for us.