That the USSR played the
major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany is a claim often heard. And it’s true enough that the German Army’s
losses on the Eastern Front were extremely heavy and
ultimately catastrophic. But the Red Army’s victory was
powerfully assisted—in fact made possible—by America and
Britain. But for the Grand Alliance (as Winston Churchill
called it) with the United States and the United Kingdom it
is probable, indeed, that the Soviet Union would have gone
down to defeat.
Not that the USSR expressed
appreciation for this—rather the reverse. During the war,
the Stalin regime treated its allies with unrelenting
suspicion and distrust, and its own war aims were entirely
selfish. Failure to meet the USSR’s maximum aid demands was
denounced as one more example of capitalist duplicity. As the
regime told it, American and British aid was tendered
grudgingly and tardily—there being many in the “ruling
circles of the imperialist powers” who wished to see Germany
and the USSR fight it out to the point of mutual exhaustion.
The supposed reluctance of the US and the UK to establish a
Second Front was trumpeted as proof of this sinister
conspiracy.
After the war the USSR and later
Russia consistently minimized the significance of the
alliance, claiming that it played a decidedly secondary role
in the defeat of Nazi Germany. This was a legend flattering
to the Worker’s Paradise and the Russian Motherland alike—a
continuation of the two-pronged propaganda line adopted by
the regime during the war. Stalin and his successors viewed
the Great Patriotic War for the Motherland (to give it its
official title in Soviet historiography) as proof for the
ages of the superiority of “scientific socialism.” But there
was less—much less—to this pleasing formulation than met the
eye.
The assistance provided to the USSR
by the Western Allies fell into two categories: direct and
indirect. The former consisted of material aid provided to
the USSR via Lend-Lease; the latter was embodied in the
Western Allies’ actual war effort. While the USSR fought a
straightforward one-front land war, the Western Allies
engaged in a complex three-dimensional global conflict: The
Battle of the Atlantic; the campaigns in North Africa,
Sicily, Italy and northwest Europe; the combined strategic
air offensive; the war in the Pacific and East Asia.
Together, this direct and indirect aid provided the Soviet
state with its margin of victory.
11 March 1941: President
Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act (History Central)
Direct material aid from the
Western allies flowed to the USSR on a scale that few people
realize today. Consider the following list — a very partial
list — of the materials provided by the US alone:
Over 400,000 trucks and jeeps, plus
more than 35,000 motorcycles. By 1945 almost 40% of the
trucks in service with the Red Army were US models and these
were far superior in performance and reliability to their
Soviet-built equivalents. Virtually the entire production of
the Studebaker truck factory in South Bend, Indiana, went to
the USSR. In fact, about 100,000 more trucks were provided
via Lend-Lease than were produced domestically in the USSR
between 1941 and 1945
Some 12,000 armored vehicles of
various types: tanks, armored cars and armored halftracks.
More than 4,000 M4 Sherman medium tanks were delivered and
some Red Army tank brigades were equipped exclusively with
the type. The Red Army used the M3 armored scout car (3,310
delivered) to motorize the submachine gun companies of its
Guards tank brigades. Many of the Red Army’s mechanized
reconnaissance units had US M3 armored halftracks in place
of Soviet-built armored cars
11,400 aircraft including 2,097
P-40 fighters 4,746 P-39 fighters, 2,400 P-63 fighters
and 2,908 A-20 twin-engine light bombers
1,900 steam locomotives and 65
diesel locomotives plus more than 10,000 railroad cars
of various types
1 million miles of field
telephone cable
82 million pounds of barbed
wire
Over 2.5 million tons of
petroleum products.
500 million pounds of aluminum.
Almost all the aluminum used in Soviet wartime aircraft
production came from the US
430 million tons of steel bars
5 million pairs of military
footwear
4.5 million tons of foodstuffs
including 14 million pounds of canned beef, 300 million
pounds of canned pork, 243 million pounds of dried eggs,
160 million pounds of dried milk, 130 million pounds of
milled rice, 500 million pounds of dried beans and 1.5
million bushels of wheat
September 1944, Ladd Field, Alaska: US and
Soviet officers with the 5,000th Lend-Lease aircraft for the
USSR, a P-63A Kingcobra (National Park Service)
Besides all this US aid the Soviet
Union received considerable assistance from the UK,
including 7,000 aircraft of various types, over 5,000 tanks,
over 5,000 antitank guns, over 4,000 trucks and 27 naval
vessels including a battleship.
Lend-Lease benefited the USSR’s war
effort in many ways. For example, the military vehicles
provided via Lend-Lease made it possible for Soviet industry
to concentrate on production of tanks, self-propelled
assault guns and artillery. They also enabled the Red Army
fully to motorize its artillery units and the infantry units
of its armored formations, and to move supplies much more
rapidly. In their absence, the mobility and combat power
of the Red Army as a whole would have been measurably lower.
But even more significant—though
perhaps less immediately obvious—was the value to the USSR
of the Western Allies’ own military effort.
From the beginning of the
Nazi-Soviet War, Hitler was distracted by events elsewhere.
In June 1941, with the United States not yet engaged, such
distractions were minor. The fighting in North Africa and
the Battle of the Atlantic seemed by comparison with the
Eastern Front to be sideshows, while the British strategic
bombing offensive against Germany had so far failed to
produce results. But as the months passed and the US entered
the war, events in distant theaters exercised a growing—for
the Germans baneful—influence on the Eastern Front.
The Battle of El Alamein (23
October-11 November 1942), the Allied invasion of North
Africa (Operation TORCH, 8-16 November 1942) and the
subsequent Tunisian campaign (November 1942-May 1943)
induced Hitler to divert major reinforcements from the
Eastern Front to North Africa in an attempt to succor
Rommel’s Afrika Korps and bolster up the Italians.
But in the end Tunisia was lost, with 230,000 German and
Italian troops taken prisoner. This defeat, coming on the
heels of the Stalingrad debacle, undermined the German
position on the Eastern Front in two ways. First, it
intensified the manpower crisis already affecting the German
Army. Second, it raised a direct threat to Italy, forcing
the Germans to divert even more forces to the Mediterranean
theater. Third, it subtracted Italy from the list of
Germany’s Eastern Front allies. All this worked greatly to
the advantage of the USSR.
Light cruiser USS Savannah just
after she was struck by a German guided bomb off Salerno
(Italy) during Operation AVALANCHE (Navy Department)
But though El Alamein, Tunisia and
Stalingrad were serious reverses—and to some extent marked
the war’s psychological turning point—the German Army in the
East was not yet defeated. The military turning point came
in the Battle of Kursk (5 July-23 August 1943). That summer,
the refurbished German Army attacked with the intention of
cutting off and destroying the large number of Soviet troops
stationed in in the Kursk salient (Unternehmen
Zitadelle—Operation CITADEL). In the greatest
tank battle of the war both sides suffered astronomically
high casualties and the Germans seemed on the brink of a
decisive breakthrough by mid-July. But on 12 July, Hitler
ordered his commanders to suspend the offensive. Two days
earlier US and UK forces had invaded Sicily and the
threat thus posed to Italy and southern France convinced the Führer that Zitadelle
had to be stopped so as to release
troops for
Italy. This set the stage
for a Red Army counterattack in the Kursk sector that
soon expanded into a full offensive. Having thus seized the
initiative on the Eastern Front, the Soviets were never to
relinquish it.
After
Kursk the pressures of a multifront war squeezed Germany
more and more. The Italian Front absorbed some 25-35
divisions. More than 40 divisions were stationed in France
in anticipation of the now-inevitable Allied invasion. Many
more stood idle in occupied Denmark and Norway. The US/UK
Combined Bomber Offensive (Operation POINTBLANK), launched
in the spring of 1943, not only devastated urban Germany but
diverted major elements of the Luftwaffe from the Eastern
Front for the defense of the Reich. In addition to aircraft,
thousands of flak (antiaircraft) guns were required. By 1944 more
than 2,500 medium and heavy flak gun batteries (10,000 88mm and 128mm
guns) were defending Germany, each gun requiring a crew of a
dozen men and countless thousands of rounds of ammunition. All this
deprived the German Army on the Eastern Front of badly
needed manpower, firepower and air support.
German soldiers captured
by the British Army in Normandy, July 1944 (Imperial War
Museum)
The break
came in the summer of 1944, when the German Army suffered
twin catastrophic defeats at the same time: in Normandy and
Byelorussia. The Allied invasion of France (Operation
OVERLORD) on 6 June 1944 and the subsequent Battle of
Normandy ended with the virtual annihilation of the German
Army in the West. Some 40 divisions were destroyed or so
battered as to be rendered combat ineffective, with 400,000 German troops killed, wounded or
taken prisoner. By the time the Allied advance stalled due to supply problems, US and British forces had
reached the western border of the Reich.
The Red
Army’s 1944 summer offensive (Operation BAGRATION) opened on
23 June 1944 and by the time it had run its course, German
Army Group Center was smashed. Of its 34 divisions, 28 were
completely destroyed, with and 450,000 troops killed,
wounded or taken prisoner—a quarter of the German
Army on the Eastern Front. The Red Army’s advance liberated
almost all occupied Soviet territory and, in the north,
brought it close to the border of East Prussia. Though
Germany was to fight on for another eight months, with
OVERLORD and BAGRATION the Grand Alliance had effectively
won the war.
Afterwards there were those in
Russia and elsewhere who minimized the Western Allies’
contribution to that victory—claiming, as noted above, that
the aid provided to the USSR by the US and the UK was
grudging and tardy. That was Stalin’s refrain from 1941 to
1945. But the record is clear that in fact, aid was provided
immediately and unstintingly within the limitations imposed
by distance, available resources and enemy action—as shown
by the high casualties suffered by the Allies’ Arctic
convoys carrying aid to the Soviet port of Archangel. In July 1942, for example, convoy PQ
17 lost 24 out of 35 merchant ships to German U-boats and
air attacks. And the Persian Corridor, which became the main
conduit for Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, was a gigantic,
complex logistical undertaking that involved thousands of
Allied troops and civilian workers.
In retrospect it appears doubtful
that the
USSR, fighting alone or even in alliance with the UK, could
have defeated National Socialist Germany. What made the
difference was the addition of the United States, with its
incomparable productive capacity, to the Grand Alliance.
Winston Churchill certainly knew this. Upon hearing the news of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he breathed a sigh of
relief, remarking that victory was now inevitable.
Stalin knew it too. Indeed, his
nagging doubts about the USSR’s ability to stand up to a
German attack dictated his policy between 1939 and 1941:
peace with Germany at any price, at least until the country
and the Red Army were ready for war. In
his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev tells how in a private
conversation Stalin candidly admitted that without the help
of the Western Allies, the USSR would have lost the war.
Presumably, he knew what he was talking about.
