Significance of Lend-Lease program

Calad said:

Nazi Germany was very corrupted and mismanaged state. No wonder Speer managed to boost significantly German production in the end of the war.

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Hmmm, I thought the 'Speer Boost' was more of an accounting slight-of-hand made into historical myth. Earlier historians point to him 'increasing' fighter production, but recent historians recognize factories had switched from panzer engines to fighter parts months earlier, in response to Cologne and Hamburg burning down... In any case, though, the Germans did bungle the wartime economic mobilization pre-Speer.

More on-topic, Lend-Lease probably helped tie up Luftwaffe resources in the west, even pre-Stalingrad. Losing pilots, planes, and other assorted resources over England wasn't fun for the Nazis, though really, I'm not sure how much resources are freed up if Britain loses Lend-Lease but refuses to peace-out...

What really *is* the question? Are we asking if the war can be won without *any* American involvement? Because if the UK only works on its own resources, then they might fold to U-boats, and we get all-in on the Eastern Front, maybe. Are we suspending Allied aid to the USSR? Because without US-USSR co-op, then Bagration is crazy-Nintendo-hard, Kursk is tricky, though Stalingrad/Uranus probably muddles through. Expect 2+ pages on whether counter-factual Stalingrad is a grand Soviet victory like it is in earth-history, whether alternate-Stalingrad is badly prolonged but still a USSR win, one AAR where it devolves into a 2 year stalemate along the whole Volva, a couple voices claiming possible German victory, and one claim of alien invasion.

Jonathan Fisher

Amallric said:

I don't see how the Soviet Union could have lost in 1942. Even with a total success of Fall Blau, yhe Soviet Union would be far from being destroyed. Unless Stalin was willing to compromise, and he wasn't, there's no way the Wehrmacht proceeds to conquer the rest of the country. It was already bled dry in 1941.

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IMO the more sensible approach was to use the 1941 campaign to establish the starting position for an attempt at a decisive victory in 1942. If there hadn't been a "Battle for Moscow" (both Typhoon and the Soviet counter-offensive) then I don't believe the Wehrmacht would have been as badly battered in 1941. That leaves a possibility - not, I admit, a great one - to push for a decisive victory in 1942. Or, after the historical 1941 campaign, instead of the drive for the Caucasus and the Volga launch the offensive from the same area but then drive north with the Don as your right flank in an attempt to attack the Moscow region from the south. I'm not convinced either plan has a great chance of working, but I think they're more likely to reduce the USSR to a position where it's unable to win the war than the historical attempts. In either case, 1942 is the critical year, the year where historically Soviet morale was at its lowest and German/satellite strength was highest.

I would think less about a decisive German victory in 1942 and more about a long drawn out German victory in 1946 if the decisive Soviet victories of '44 and '45 never happened because they dont have an airforce that can control the air starting in '43 and they don't have the transport capacity to win deep operational victories. If in '46 German troops were still deep in Russia, there's no food imports, less manpower and the bad weather that caused the historical '46 famine, the Soviets are in for a rough time.

The rationale behing Barbarossa was basically the classical Prussian strategy since the times of Moltke the Elder: to destroy the enemy field army in a single, quick and devastating blow and then, only then, proceed to occupy the enemy capital and the rest of the country. In that, there was 100% agreement between Hitler, the OKW and OKH.

The Germans were also aware that the ramshackle state of their motorized transportation and the state of roads in western USSR would make a geographically deep and prolongued camapign into the USSR mostly unwinnable. Accordingly, the plan contemplated nothing more and nothing less that the destruction of the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dnieper river line.

That was a completely unattainable objective for the Germans. In a sense though, they achieved it, because according to their (startingly bad) intelligence about the Soviet army, when they reached the Dvina-Dnieper line they had destroyed a number of Soviet forces equal or even slightly superior to what they thought was the total strength of the Soviet army. The problem was that the Soviet army in June 1941 was more than twice as large as they'd thought it was, that more than half of its strength in western USSR had been deployed in a second strategic echelon deeper into the USSR and that the Soviet state (to the utter surprise of the Germans) was able to mobilize new fighting forces as quickly as the German destroyed them.

Thus, from the very beginning the Germans found themselves embroiled in exactly the kind of war they'd hoped to avoid at all costs: a prolongued war of exhaustion. They were so unprepared for it that the whole strategic reserve available for the decisive Army Group Center amounted to only three (3) infantry divisions, plus they lacked any kind of viable supply strategy for fighting further away than the Dvina-Dnieper line (and indeed, the German supply system had begun to collapse even before reaching that line).

By 1942, the German army was even weaker and as everybody in Berlin and Zossen (even Hitler) acknowledged, a general attack along all the line of the same kind as the Barbarossa operation of the year before was totally out of the question; any offensive would have to be limited to just one of the army groups (with Hitler imposing the southern thrust against his generals' will, who wanted to try again against Moscow).

Nobody has really commented on the significanse of the LL for the UK. They did get three times more support in that regard, and it likely fueled most of their war effort.

marat271 said:

Nobody has really commented on the significanse of the LL for the UK. They did get three times more support in that regard, and it likely fueled most of their war effort.

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That is because the amounts and effect is much less clear. For instance, while the USA provided significant support (which was paid for) to the UK and commonwealth forces, these forces also provided significant support to US forces. For example, Australia and NZ provided logistical support to US forces in south east Asia and the pacific.

US forces benefited from British aid and support for their European operations - Almost all US ambulances were of British origin while many US squadrons used British aircraft until later in the war.

It is also important to consider that the UK provided significant aid/support to other belligerent nations that the USA did not.

Regarding the UK lend-lease, taken from
'Mutual Aid Between the U.S. and The British Empire, 1941-45 R. G. D. Allen'

Comparison of Lend-lease Aid to the British Empire and Reciprocal Aid to the U.S. to V-J Day.
In millions of pounds sterling sterling

Calad said:

Simply: how important lend lease program was? Without it could axis have won UK and USSR?

UK needed all material help from America to be able to fight back nazis, without it would UK even has an army to gifht nazis? USSR has lost most of its military equiment in 1941 and most of its farmland was occupied so would USSR have collapsed on food shortages?

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The UK, I think, could have stayed in the war simply because there was no way for Germany to invade Great Britain.

It's very unclear to me whether USSR could have won the war without lend-lease. There are too many what-ifs.

subnormalized said:

Hmmm, I thought the 'Speer Boost' was more of an accounting slight-of-hand made into historical myth. Earlier historians point to him 'increasing' fighter production, but recent historians recognize factories had switched from panzer engines to fighter parts months earlier, in response to Cologne and Hamburg burning down... In any case, though, the Germans did bungle the wartime economic mobilization pre-Speer.

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You're right according to Adam Tooze. In The Wages of Destruction he basically states that the Germans were already mobilizing a huge part of the economy toward war before Speer took control.

Speer said a lot of things that appear untrue/inconsistent with what we know today.

People seem to quote Tooze on these forums with the same authority that someone would quote Jesus while debating Christianity.

Easy-Kill said:

Don't also forget that British Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union in 1941 was quite significant in comparison to the available strength of the Russian forces. I am going by memory, and I can look some figures up, but the British Emprire provided significant material support in the form of tanks and aircraft. These amounted to 15-20% of tanks/aircraft defending moscow, and ammounted to about 20-25% of Soviet production in 1941.

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The Brits were sending mainly very bad hand-me-down tanks and the Soviets knew it, which is why they considered everything they received from the Brits to be death traps (many being worn out from the desert) suitable only for training roles. This is what happens when you try to foist idiotically designed British tanks to what was the world's leading tank engineering nation at that point.

By contrast they loved the American Sherman - because they got brand-new models that refused to breakdown and they inexplicably received a greater proportion of them were armed with the 76mm gun than what the US Army got. Shermans actually went to Guards tank units while the T-34 was limited to regular tank armies.

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Soviet LL, while very useful, was also not significant before late 1943. The evidence lies in the routes themselves. Murmasnk wasn't usable for most of the year because of the weather. Vladivostok was barred from receiving military supplies due to agreements with Japan. Iran was ultimately the main route of military supplies, but '42 and '43 was needed to improve that route before it started delivering goods at full capacity. By this time Kursk had already been won, and Kiev retaken. It's very hard to argue the Soviets couldn't have won completely even without LL.

People seem to quote Tooze on these forums with the same authority that someone would quote Jesus while debating Christianity.

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Because Tooze bridges the very real gaps in Germany's wartime economic narrative, that people have kept accepting at face value without really analyzing such incompatible notions like "Germany wasn't fully mobilized" and yet "Germany was in fact short of everything and the economy was overheating to the point of collapse".

Zinegata said:

The Brits were sending mainly very bad hand-me-down tanks and the Soviets knew it, which is why they considered everything they received from the Brits to be death traps (many being worn out from the desert) suitable only for training roles. This is what happens when you try to foist idiotically designed British tanks to what was the world's leading tank engineering nation at that point.

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IIRC, Brooke/Auchinlech complained that during his North Africa campaign, Churchill diverted a considerable amount of newly produced tanks to Russia rather than reinforcing the British forces in North Africa. Churchills move was political (Stalin was threatening to negotiate peace with the Germans, IIRC), not operational in a military sense.

The British tanks were poor by design - not from wear and tear - so the russians might still have considered them death-traps. And rightly so.

To be fair, British tank design differed from Soviet ditto on a tactical level. The soviet crew was trained, and the soviet tank built for a different approach than the british tank could deliver (being - to a great extent - infantry tanks).

nwinther said:

The British tanks were poor by design - not from wear and tear - so the russians might still have considered them death-traps. And rightly so.

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No, it was the American M3 that was considered a death trap ("coffin for seven brothers"). The British tanks were mostly just considered useless - too slow and too under-gunned. Though they did like the Valentine - while it was no match for the T-34, it was an improvement on the T-26 which still made up the bulk of the USSR's tank force in 1941. In fact, they liked it enough to ask the British to continue building it just for them until 1943.

nwinther said:

IIRC, Brooke/Auchinlech complained that during his North Africa campaign, Churchill diverted a considerable amount of newly produced tanks to Russia rather than reinforcing the British forces in North Africa. Churchills move was political (Stalin was threatening to negotiate peace with the Germans, IIRC), not operational in a military sense.

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Some of the stocks were new deliveries via the Murmansk route but quite a lot of the British LL contribution through Iran consisted of hand-me-down tanks from the 8th Army after it concluded the El Alamein campaign.

Semper Victor said:

An example of the first are for example locomotives: the USSR only produced a handful of locomotives after June 1941, while the western allies supplied the Soviets with around 2,000 locomotives and more than 11,000 freight cars; the production capacity freed up by this massive amount of help could then be employed in building tanks, heavy artillery, etc.

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Oh jesus not the locomotives again.

Look into the number of rolling stock in USSR pre-war, and wartime losses, and transportation network loss, and transportation demand. And never again mention locomotives and LL again in one sentence...

If the Soviets didn't have use for those locomotives they wouldn't have requested them. Considering the lengths the lengths that Soviets resorted to in order to conserve their rail they would have needed to produce those themselves (at the cost of producing further heavy tanks probably) or sacrificed efficiency in some other area.

DarthMaur said:

Oh jesus not the locomotives again.

Look into the number of rolling stock in USSR pre-war, and wartime losses, and transportation network loss, and transportation demand. And never again mention locomotives and LL again in one sentence...

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Soviet locomotives available before 22 June 1941: 25,000 locomotives (aprox.), without stats about their usability or repair condition.

Soviet locomotive production in 1940: 928 units.
Soviet locomotive production in 1941: 708 units.
Soviet locomotive production in 1942: 9 units.
Soviet locomotive production in 1943: 43 units.
Soviet locomotive production in 1944: 32 units.
Soviet locomotive production in 1945: 8 units.

Total amount of locomotives supplied by the western allies during the war: 1966 units.

Total number of locomotives destroyed or captured by the Wehrmacht up to 1st January 1943: 1338 units.

Taking into accout that the Soviet railroads were heavily taxed during the war (especially during 1941 due to the relocation of industry to the interior regions of the USSR and in 1942), even the loss of a 5% of the total number of locomotives (plus an 11% of the freight car stock) would have had an impact on the Soviet war effort. Either take the impact and move less men, raw resources, and war material, or to divert the industrial capacity needed to produce that rolling stock out of producing weapons.

Another related factor are rails. During the war, the Germans destroyed 52,400 km of railroad line, of which 48,000 km were restored by May 1945. On top of it, the Soviets added 6,700 km of new lines during the war years. The Soviet Union produced 48,990 rails during the war, while the western allies supplied 622,100 rails (or 92.7% of the total amount).

If all those items had not been supplied by the western allies to the USSR, probably the Soviets would have still won, but at an even higher cost than they historically suffered.

Exactly. Trucks, jeeps, aluminium, avgas, etc, massive amount of help to quote you.

Locomotives, drop in the bucket of existing rail stock.

I read some stuff (I'll have to dig it up) which talked about how although the number of actual tanks and planes given is not a lot compared to Soviet production-- it came at a pretty critical time when soviet industry was in chaos and many factories had been captured-- and that something like 30-40% of the medium-heavy tank force around Moscow in December '41.

Lend-lease to the allies was vital obviously, but to the USSR I'm not sure if it was absolutely necessary-- however, if the USSR did not get lend-lease it would have been a much tougher fight-- who knows, maybe we'd end up with an East and West Poland with Germany being completely completely capitalist after the war.

British tanks in late 1941-42 came handy, but I think the nitpick is that this help was not, stricltly speaking, "Lend-lease".