How did the Russians defeat the Nazis

Continuing from yesterday.

The Lend-Lease policy, formally titled An Act to Promote the Defense of the United
States, was a program under which the United States supplied Free France, the
United Kingdom, the Republic of China, and later the USSR and other Allied nations
with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and August 1945. This included warships
and warplanes, along with other weaponry. It was signed into law on March 11,
1941 and ended in September 1945. A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $659
billion today, roughly the current, yearly US military expenses) worth of supplies
was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S. In all, $31.4 billion
went to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion
to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to the other Allies.
Lend-Lease would help the British and Allied forces win the battles of future years;
the help it gave in the battles of 1941 was trivial. In 19431944, about a quarter
of all British munitions came through Lend-Lease. Aircraft (in particular transport
aircraft) comprised about a quarter of the shipments to Britain, followed by food,
land vehicles and ships. Even after the United States forces in Europe and the Pacic
began to reach full strength in 19431944, Lend-Lease continued. Most remaining
allies were largely self-sucient in front line equipment (such as tanks and ghter
aircraft) by this stage, but Lend-Lease provided a useful supplement in this category
even so, and Lend-Lease logistical supplies (including motor vehicles and railroad
equipment) were of enormous assistance. Furthermore, the logistical support of the
Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks. Indeed,
by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built.

According to the Russian historian Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Lend-Lease played a crucial role in winning the war:
On the whole the following conclusion can be drawn: that without these Western
shipments under Lend-Lease the Soviet Union not only would not have been able
to win the Great Patriotic War, it would not have been able even to oppose the
German invaders, since it could not itself produce sucient quantities of arms and
military equipment or adequate supplies of fuel and ammunition. The Soviet authorities
were well aware of this dependency on Lend-Lease. Thus, Stalin told Harry
Hopkins [FDR's emissary to Moscow in July 1941] that the U.S.S.R. could not match
Germany's might as an occupier of Europe and its resources.
Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between
Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the signicance of Lendlease
aid in his memoirs:

I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the
Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived
the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell
about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were discussing
freely among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped
us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to ght Nazi Germany one on
one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have
lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject ocially, and I don't think Stalin
left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in
conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never
made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were
engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of
the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had
traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was
fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.

Delivery was via the Arctic Convoys, the Persian Corridor, and the Pacic Route.
The Arctic route was the shortest and most direct route for lend-lease aid to the
USSR, though it was also the most dangerous. Some 3,964,000 tons of goods were
shipped by the Arctic route; 7% was lost, while 93% arrived safely. This constituted
some 23% of the total aid to the USSR during the war.
The Persian Corridor was the longest route, and was not fully operational until
mid-1942. Thereafter it saw the passage of 4,160,000 tons of goods, 27% of the
total. The Pacic Route opened in August 1941, but was aected by the start of
hostilities between Japan and the US; after December 1941, only Soviet ships could
be used, and, as Japan and the USSR observed a strict neutrality towards each other, only non-military goods could be transported. Nevertheless, some 8,244,000 tons of
goods went by this route, 50% of the total. In total, the U.S. deliveries through
Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks;
12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386 of which were M3 Lees
and 4,102 M4 Shermans); 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras)
and 1.75 million tons of food. Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment,
vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere
to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons
landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has
been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor
alone were sucient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in
the line.

Red army had already pushed back the Wehrmacht from Moscow before lend lease started. Lend lease ended the war faster but the USSR would have won without it. The Wehrmacht was gutted after the first winter

The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945
the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328
ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or
57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel, 4,478,116 tons of foodstus (canned
meats, sugar, our, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920
at cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided
ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted
to 53 percent of total domestic production. One item typical of many was a tire plant
that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred
to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about
eleven billion dollars.

In June 1941, within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR, the rst British
aid convoy set o along the dangerous Arctic sea routes to Murmansk, arriving in
September. It was carrying 40 Hawker Hurricanes along with 550 mechanics and
pilots of No. 151 Wing to provide immediate air defence of the port and train
Soviet pilots. After escorting Soviet bombers and scoring 14 kills for one loss, and
completing the training of pilots and mechanics, No 151 Wing left in November,
their mission complete. The convoy was the rst of many convoys to Murmansk
and Archangelsk in what became known as the Arctic convoys, the returning ships
carried the gold that the USSR was using to pay the US. By the end of 1941, early
shipments of Matilda, Valentine, and Tetrarch tanks represented only 6.5% of total
Soviet tank strength, but over 25% of medium and heavy tanks in service with the
Red Army. First seeing action with the 138 Independent Tank Battalion in the Volga
Reservoir on 20 November 1941, Lend-Lease tanks constituted between 30 and 40%
of heavy and medium tank strength before Moscow at the beginning of December
1941.

>Red army had already pushed back the Wehrmacht from Moscow before lend lease started.

Wrong. Lend lease supported military was already waiting in moscow.

Signicant numbers of British Churchill, Matilda and Valentine tanks were shipped
to the USSR along with the US M3 Lee after it became obsolete on the African
Front, ceasing production in December 1942 and withdrawn from British service in
May 1943. The Churchills, supplied by the arctic convoys, saw action in the Siege
of Leningrad and the Battle of Kursk, while tanks shipped by the Persian route
supplied the Caucasian Front. Between June 1941 and May 1945, Britain delivered
to the USSR: 3,000+ Hurricanes, 4,000+ other aircraft, 27 naval vessels, 5,218 tanks,
5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 2,560
Universal Carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, ¿1.15bn worth of aircraft engines, 600 radar
and sonar sets, Hundreds of naval guns, 15 million pairs of boots.
In total 4 million tonnes of war materials including food and medical supplies were
delivered. The munitions totaled ¿308m (not including naval munitions supplied),
the food and raw materials totaled ¿120m in 1946 index. In accordance with the
Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of 27 June 1942, military aid sent from
Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.[
Especially all support vehicles (trucks, trains, etc.) the USSR received were of great
importance since the USSR lost most of these, like most of their military, in the rst
few month's of Operation Barbarossa. Looking through Soviet diaries, one nds that
the soldiers were extremely greatfull for the US support, especially food. This shows
that the Allies won the Second World War only through a team eort.

RIDF BTFO!

And lets not forget the allied bombing campaign.

From the Russian Historian Oleg Budnitskiy we also learn:
The importance of economic cooperation with the U.S., UK and Canada cannot be
overestimated. According to the dollar rate of 2003, the ination-adjusted value of these supplies amounted to $130 billion. These supplies were critical in some
key areas. For example, in the beginning of 1942, Western tanks fully replenished
Soviet losses, and exceeded them by three times. About 15 percent of the aircraft
used by Soviet air forces were supplied by Allies, including the Airacobra ghter and
Boston bomber. The Allies supplied 15,000 state-of-the-art machines at that time;
for example, famous Soviet ace Alexander Pokryshkin ew Airacobra, as did the rest
of his squadron. He shot down 59 enemy aircraft, and 48 of them were thanks to
American military equipment.
One of the main areas of cooperation was aviation fuel. The USSR could not produce
gasoline with high octane. However, it was this fuel that was used by the
equipment supplied by the Allies. In addition, the Achilles heel of the Soviet Army
was communication and transport. The Soviet industry simply could not meet the
demand either in number or in quality. For example, the army lost 58 percent of its
vehicles in 1941 alone. To recover these losses, the Allies supplied more than 400,000
vehicles, mainly trucks, to the USSR. During the occupation, the German concern
Daimler Benz set up a vehicle assembly line at a factory in Minsk (now the capital
of Belarus). After the liberation of the city, the assembly of American vehicles under
Lend-Lease was organized there. It was not only supplies of nished products, but
also raw materials that were extremely important metals, chemicals and products,
which were either not produced in the USSR or lost to the enemy. For example, more
than half of Soviet aircraft were produced using aluminum supplied by the Allies.