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Together with other recently published sources, including the wartime diaries of N. I. Biriukov, a Red Army officer responsible from August 1941 on for the distribution of recently acquired tanks to the front lines, this newly available evidence paints a very different picture from the received wisdom. In particular, it shows that British Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 played a far more significant part in the defense of Moscow and the revival of Soviet fortunes in late 1941 than has been acknowledged.
The links not working, but I am assuming based on the quote that this is the Alex Hill piece? If so this is an article somewhat summarizing his findings which he actually included in his book:
His calculation of the total numbers has been called into question as well as the numbers of tanks actually deployed on the front and how they were used. This thread at Axis History forum goes into great detail about the piece:
This post seems to sum up the issue with the numbers pretty well:
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First off he gives numbers for December 31st, by which time the offensive had already been almost a month old. Secondly, as Hanny pointed out, he gives numbers for the remaining tanks on December 31 rather than what they were at the beginning of the month. Simultaneously he quotes figures for Valentines and Matildas which were supplied throughout 1941 but not those that made it to the end of December 1941. Then does his math and comes up with a skewed %.
It also seems that he contradicts himself. At first he notes that "According to the British Military Mission in Moscow, by 9 December 1941 about 90 British tanks had been in action with Soviet forces." Then not half a page later he claims "It is reasonable to suggest that British-supplied tanks constituted in the region of 30-40 per cent of the heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and that they made up a significant proportion of such vehicles available as reinforcements at this critical juncture." How does the latter make sense in light of the former?
Overall the significance of those tanks was reported by Hill and had been parroted a few times since, most notably in the BBC documentary about the Arctic convoys. The issue is that, as pointed out above, there are serious flaws in the claims. To summarize:
-The percent calculations are not correct and the British LL tanks represented far lower portions of total armor assets during the critical months.
-The number of British tanks actually serviceable (as reported by STAVKA) was only around 50% of the total due to lack of spare parts and issues experienced due to the cold weather.
-While the British tanks were heavily armored, they were NOT heavily armed. They were great in a support role, but the main Soviet offensive armored formations were composed of Soviet tanks.
-A large portion of the British tanks (per German reports) were entrenched "hull down" and essentially used as pill boxes within the defensive works around Moscow. This is where the Germans first and primarily encountered, British tanks around Moscow.
Finally, from the article itself...
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Lend-Lease aid did not “save†the Soviet Union from defeat during the Battle of Moscow.
...and that was the crux of my argument all along.
Yes, that's the link - I can no longer edit the original link.
Just pointing out that the Soviets did receive aid, both military and otherwise, including not just tanks, but aircraft, trucks, tools, foodstuffs, etc.
Yes the article says, "Lend-Lease aid did not “save” the Soviet Union from defeat during the Battle of Moscow." It does, however, say that "During the bitter fighting of the winter of 1941–1942, British aid made a crucial difference." This would seem to contradict your earlier claim: "When the Germans were stopped at Moscow in late 1941, there was no real influence on that battle from the British."
Rather the issue is not whether "British and western allied contributions early in the war proved decisive in deciding the outcome," in that the article in no ways makes such a claim, but whether such aid made a "crucial difference", not between longer term, strategical, victory or defeat, but in the more immediate tactical fortunes of war.
That said, it is highly doubtful that even the Germans breaking through to capture Moscow, would have altered the basic strategical situation, that being that they were under-resourced, under-equipped, and under-manned to achieve their military and political objectives. The issue, rather, is whether it would have posed significant military or political difficulties for Stalin and the Soviets. I don't think that anyone can say, definitively, that it wouldn't have.
Yes, that's the link - I can no longer edit the original link.
Just pointing out that the Soviets did receive aid, both military and otherwise, including not just tanks, but aircraft, trucks, tools, foodstuffs, etc.
Yes they did, with the vast majority of that aid arriving beginning in late 1943 through 1944 and even after the war. The role of LL per folks like Glantz and van Creveld is that it dramatically shortened the war, but it did not determine the outcome.
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Yes the article says, "Lend-Lease aid did not “save†the Soviet Union from defeat during the Battle of Moscow." It does, however, say that "During the bitter fighting of the winter of 1941–1942, British aid made a crucial difference." This would seem to contradict your earlier claim: "When the Germans were stopped at Moscow in late 1941, there was no real influence on that battle from the British."
Rather the issue is not whether "British and western allied contributions early in the war proved decisive in deciding the outcome," in that the article in no ways makes such a claim, but whether such aid made a "crucial difference", not between longer term, strategical, victory or defeat, but in the more immediate tactical fortunes of war.
My initial response was directed at btownboss who claimed that the Soviets would have lost if not for the British. I was countering that claim.
I will let my response as to the merits of Alex Hill's article stand. I think he greatly exaggerated the role those tanks played and I am far from the only person who argues that point. Unless we want to say on this specific day, in this specific place, during this specific engagement, this particular British tank proved "crucial"...but that's just getting silly.
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That said, it is highly doubtful that even the Germans breaking through to capture Moscow, would have altered the basic strategical situation, that being that they were under-resourced, under-equipped, and under-manned to achieve their military and political objectives. The issue, rather, is whether it would have posed significant military or political difficulties for Stalin and the Soviets. I don't think that anyone can say, definitively, that it wouldn't have.
Losing Moscow would most likely not altered the strategic situation much, as you said. I would agree with you that its loss would have created great difficulties for Stalin. It most likely would have been turned into an earlier "Stalingrad". Hitler wouldn't give up the prize and Stalin would have no choice but to commit everything he had into taking it back.
Interesting question in that scenario would be, if the Soviets were heavily concentrating their resources on retaking Moscow, would Hitler have been prescient enough to move forward with Case Blue and simply adopt a defensive posture on the Moscow front. Give up the city and some territory in exchange for achieving their greater strategic objectives.
"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.
"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
Once again, not an argument over whether Allied assistance, through Archangel, Murmansk, and Iran, made the difference between victory or defeat, but to what degree it was of vital assistance in standing up to the Germans and stemming the tide.
It was large-scale military technical assistance from the Allies, especially the U.S., but also the UK and Canada. Volumes of this support are assessed differently. In the Soviet tradition, it was assumed that it was 4 percent of the total production capacity of the USSR, but the latest research shows that in reality the level was as high as 7 percent. The importance of economic cooperation with the U.S., UK and Canada cannot be overestimated.
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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 fighter and Boston bomber. The Allies supplied 15,000 state-of-the-art machines at that time; for example, famous Soviet ace Alexander Pokryshkin flew Airacobra, as did the rest of his squadron. He shot down 59 enemy aircraft, and 48 of them were thanks to American military equipment.
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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.
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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.
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It was not only supplies of finished 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.
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In the first protocol of Lend-Lease (there were four of them), only 20 percent of deliveries were in military equipment, while 80 percent were related to industrial and food production. The Allies supplied 1900 locomotives to the USSR, while only 446 locomotives were produced in the country itself during the same period, as well as 11,000 carriages, while only a few more than 1,000 were made in the USSR.
The first shipments of tanks were dispatched in 1941, amounting to 487 Matilda II, Valentines and Tetrarch tanks from the UK and 182 M3A1 Stuart light tanks and M3 Lee medium tanks from the USA.
In 1942, Britain provided a further 2,487 tanks and the USA 3,023 tanks. The first units equipped with Valentines and Matildas went into service in the Staraya Russa and Valdai areas in December 1941 and January 1942. At the beginning of 1943, there were 1,023 Lend-Lease tanks in Russian units although 6,179 had been received since 1941.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that these British and American tanks were sterling examples of the technology, but some tanks were better than no tanks. Note that of the 6,179 tanks supplied up until 1943, some 5,156 had apparently been lost to attrition. American supplies of aluminum were critical in the manufacture of the T-34's engines.
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The first foreign aeroplanes to arrive were two squadrons of Hawker Hurricans, which were flown in combat by RAF pilots in the autumn of 1941 and then handed over to the Russians.
Not so long ago, referring to any technique sent to the USSR under Lend-Lease, the authors have always noted the insignificance of foreign supplies in comparison with domestic production, as well as a very nasty and archaic quality of design data samples. Now, when the struggle against bourgeois falsifiers successfully over the last victory, you can more or less objectively analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the individual samples of armored vehicles Anglo-American production of significant quantities applied in parts of the Red Army.
Once again, not an argument over whether Allied assistance, through Archangel, Murmansk, and Iran, made the difference between victory or defeat, but to what degree it was of vital assistance in standing up to the Germans and stemming the tide.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that these British and American tanks were sterling examples of the technology, but some tanks were better than no tanks. Note that of the 6,179 tanks supplied up until 1943, some 5,156 had apparently been lost to attrition. American supplies of aluminum were critical in the manufacture of the T-34's engines.
At the same time there are plenty of other articles countering the role of these supplies...
Let’s look at the statistics for arms shipments from that year. From the onset of the war until the end of 1941, the Red Army received 1.76 million rifles, automatic weapons, and machine guns, 53,700 artillery and mortars, 5,400 tanks, and 8,200 warplanes. Of these, our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition supplied only 82 artillery weapons (0.15%), 648 tanks (12.14%), and 915 airplanes (10.26%). In addition, much of the military equipment that was sent – in particular, 115 of the 466 tanks manufactured in the UK – did not even make it to the front in the first year of the war.
As a result, between 1941 and 1942 only 7% of the wartime cargo shipped from the US made it to the Soviet Union. The bulk of the weapons and other materials arrived in the Soviet Union in 1944-1945, once the winds of war had decisively shifted.
Now, that article is a little slanted back towards the old Soviet, it didn't matter that much claims. Similar to how other articles are now overstating the goal, with the truth somewhere in between.
I made this post years ago when debating this topic...
The numbers involved seem staggering and people see thousands of tanks and aircraft, hundreds of thousands of trucks, thousands of tons of fuel and immediately assume that this aid could have not possibly been anything but decisive in determining the outcome of the war. Here is my own post (#98) from this thread that I am quoting:
*******
All good points, but in terms of Lend Lease, we need to account for WHEN the shipments arrived, not just the total of the shipments received throughout the war. I have had a difficult time finding specific resources on what was shipped and when, but the sources I have found generally work with the assertion, that Lend Lease aid did not begin to impact the Soviet war effort in sufficient quantity until mid-1943 and peaked in 1944.
Here are the stats by year in tonnage shipped and by route. The tonnage is quoted by date of shipment. In general it took 3 months for the aid to actually arrive and an additional 2-3 months for military hardware to reach the front. So, there is some delay, if we assume equal shipments, of up to 6 months in terms of material actually reaching the combat zone.
***Stats were taken from Axis History Forum***
1941: 360,778t, of which 13,502t Persian Gulf, 193,229t Soviet Far East, 153,977t North Russia.
1942: 2,453,097t of which 705,259t Persian Gulf, 734,020 Soviet Far East, 949,711 North Russia, 64,107 Soviet Artic.
1943: 4,794,545t of which 1,606,979 Persian Gulf, 2,388,577 Soviet Far East, 681,043 North Russia, 117,946 Soviet Artic.
1944: 6,217,622t of which 1,788,864 Persian Gulf, 2,848,181 Soviet Far East, 1,452,775 North Russia, 127,802 Soviet Artic.
1945 3,673,819t (last shipments 20 Sept) of which: 44,513 Persian Gulf, 2,079,320 Soviet Far East, 726,725 North Russia, 680,723 Black Sea, 142,538 Soviet Arctic.
In terms of percentage, the aid arrived like this:
1941: 2%
1942: 14%
1943: 27%
1944: 36%
1945: 21%
So, less then 16% of aid was even shipped in 41/42, the bulk, or 84% arrived in 43-45, which would mean the aid primarily arrived post-Kursk.
I have found some sources that quoted of the 450k or so trucks sent to the Soviets, only 17% of them had arrived before Kursk. US shipments of aircraft did not begin to arrive in any quantity until mid-1943 via the Siberian route. None of the quoted rail stock arrived until July of 1944, the list goes on.
The general point being is that everyone recognizes Kursk as the point that the Germans were essentially defeated. I fully recognize that Lend Lease aid played a vital role in accelerating the German defeat, but I do not accept that it was a decisive factor in determining the outcome of the war. If we want to see a battle that was really impacted by Lend Lease, look at Soviet operations in the Balkans and Operation Bagration. The degree of mobility evidenced is directly tied to the Lend Lease supplies, but were these battles the ones decided the war? Most would say no.
The other assertion is that the Soviets would have starved to death without LL aid. Certainly some suffering was avoided with LL aid. However, in Mark Harrisons book "Accounting for War" he makes a very good argument based on Soviet GNP that by 43-45 they were investing more in their civilian sector then the sum of LL aid that was reaching them. Meaning, by the time the LL aid was arriving in quantity, the Soviet economy had recovered sufficiently to begin rebuilding the liberated areas. This would seem as evidence that while the Russian people may have had to suffer longer without LL, the Soviets were certainly not doomed without it.
I'll leave it with some quotes...
"The Russians paid a price that cannot be measured in dollars. It is the millions of Nazi soldiers killed or taken prisoner, the Nazi tanks turned into heaps of scrap iron on the battlefield, and the guns and trucks abandoned by the retreating German armies that determined the outcome of WW2."
~Edward Stettinius, US Secretary of State
"We never thought that our Lend-Lease aid was the main factor in the Soviet victory over Hitler on the Eastern Front. It was achieved by the heroism and blood of the Russian army."
~Harry Hopkins, Chief Advisor to FDR, FDR's personal emissary to Churchill and one of the largest proponents of Lend Lease.
"I believe there is now hardly anyone in the United States who would dare assert that the deliveries of equipment and foodstuffs under Lend-Lease were the main factor ensuring the victory of the Soviet people and the Red Army in that war. Nevertheless, the Americans who were involved in Lend-Lease still feel enormous satisfaction from knowing that the cargoes we delivered helped fill a gap in supplying the Soviet people and their armed forces."
~John Hazard, Deputy Director of the Soviet Department of the Lend-Lease Administration from 1941 to 1945
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When you look at the timeline of the Eastern Front against the timeline for Lend Lease deliveries, strategic bombing campaigns and western actions in Africa, Italy and France; the picture that is painted is one that clearly supports the assertion that the Soviets were the ones that were far and away responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany. They had stopped the German advance at Moscow, bled them dry at Stalingrad and shattered their backs at Kursk. All before western involvement had more then a minor impact on the course of the war.
Not really mentioned by me here, but important to point out is that those early 1941 shipments from Britain were NOT "LL" but equipment actually purchased with gold by the USSR from Britain. Those convoy ships returned with Soviet payment on board. Early US aid to the Soviet Union followed the same protocol and we accepted payment for it. Is it really "LL" if it's being paid for in gold bullion?
NOW...with all of that laid out we are ultimately left quibbling over the meaning of a word...
We both agree that the Soviet Union was not going to lose the war in the absence of LL supplies. What we are essentially arguing over is the meaning of the term "crucial". Can you define for me what you mean by "crucial"? To me that term implies that without that help they would have lost, but you already agreed that wouldn't be the case.
My take on LL has been (and I have stated such on this board for a number of years) influenced by the writings of Glantz and van Creveld among others that the role of LL was in shortening the war by 18-24 months. Certainly it was "crucial" in that respect and many more Soviet lives would have been lost without it. In fact, one can clearly see an influence of when LL aid began to vastly improve the mobility and deep strike capability of the Red Army during their operations in 1944. However, I have not seen any convincing evidence that the Soviets would have been defeated at Moscow, Stalingrad or Kursk without LL aid. Since the entire Eastern Front hinged on those battles and the entire war hinged on the Eastern Front, I am quite confident with my take on the role of LL to the Soviet war effort.
Now, if we want to talk about the British...there is a nation that was EXTREMELY dependent on US LL in order to prosecute their war effort.
Now, that article is a little slanted back towards the old Soviet, it didn't matter that much claims. Similar to how other articles are now overstating the goal, with the truth somewhere in between.
I agree that the truth is "somewhere in between" - where remains an open question, it seems to me.
The Soviets were at pains to diminish and explain away any assistance they received, as well as cover up their and Stalin's incompetence at the start of the war, so the background here is much more of suppressing information than making it freely available. On the other hand, Russia Beyond the Headlines is a media organization owned and run by the Russian state, so might just be grinding a different set of knives (oligarchic rather than proletarian). I thought the oddly anachronistic reference to "the struggle against bourgeois falsifiers" to be quite interesting - in other words, it is largely the same people, just wearing new hats.
Note that I specifically linked articles and quoted sections that referenced assistance early in the war (prior to 1943) in meeting crucial needs and overcoming critical shortages in that period. It wasn't just a handful of soon to be outmoded tanks (which was pretty much all tanks in the field at the time), and nothing else of any real importance.
But President Roosevelt believed Germany would sooner or later turn against Soviet Russia and sought language in the Lend-Lease Act that would to allow him to extend the program to other countries, including the Soviet Union. Shipments to Russia — at first paid for with Russian gold — started shortly after the German invasion in June 1941. By late 1941 there was a visible surge of support in America for the Soviet war effort and a growing respect for the sacrifice and determination of the Soviet people. The country was formally added to the Lend-Lease list in November 1941 and became the second largest recipient (after the British Commonwealth) of munitions and other materials valued at $11.3 billion. About a quarter of this aid was in the form of munitions and 75 percent consisted of industrial equipment, raw materials and food.
I'm not making any final judgments. I don't think we can look at any one category of assistance and say that it wasn't needed (or "crucial"), or that without it there wouldn't have been dire consequences. While it is doubtful that Allied assistance made the difference between victory and defeat, based on German deficiencies alone, we also can't be sure what would have happened without it. Did Allied aid help stave off mass starvation and famine, for instance? We can't simply blithely assume that all the possible resulting chain reactions would simply have cancelled each other out, and made no difference. While we know that Stalin and the Soviet state survived and ultimately triumphed, we can't be sure that was in any way guaranteed. For all we know, in front of Moscow, both sides were on the verge of defeat.
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