Would the USSR have fought back the Nazis without the US and Britain?
Given the Second World War has become something like Britain’s founding myth, to make this point feels like denigrating our national story.
Twitter, the fount of all internet slanging matches, is never short of disagreement. It is, though, unusual to find Twitter spats concerning 70-year-old disagreements.
On 2nd January, Elbridge Colby, the principle of the Marathon Institute and former Deputy Assistant US Secretary of Defence, tweeted that “The primary mechanism for Allied victory [in the European Theatre of the Second World War] was the Soviet Union…[and] it seems clear that the Western Allies would not have been able to achieve such a victory without the USSR.”
Not so fast, shot back Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews. He tweeted that this was “misunderstanding the Soviet role in defeating Germany” and there was a tendency to “overrate Soviet military performance in WWII.”
And thus the balloon went up. Twitter users on both sides of the argument piled into the debate, which ultimately settled on the question of whether the USSR could have won as it did without US Lend Lease aid.
Without Uncle Sam's millions of tons of rail lines, jeeps, trucks, aluminium, machine tools and food, the argument went, the Soviets would have lost on the Eastern Front. This is a position that appears to have become more popular – and more emotive – as a result of the current war in Ukraine.
The problem with it is simple: the Red Army was already winning before Lend-Lease arrived in significant amounts. Hardly any US or British aid arrived in Russia in 1941, and very little for the majority of 1942.
Yet the Red Army halted the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December 1941, and had decisively thrust them back by May 1942. The Soviets had won the Battle of Stalingrad by November 1942. By the beginning of spring 1943, the Voronezh-Kharkov offensive pushed back the Nazis across a front of hundreds of miles, and in parts as far as the River Dnieper. Even by the Battle of Kursk, more than 70% of Lend Lease was yet to arrive.
Furthermore, the USSR economy was by this time producing significant amounts of materiel. In 1943 alone, the USSR produced 24,000 tanks and 130,000 artillery pieces of all calibres. Once the Donbass and Southern Ukraine was retaken, this effort was helped further.
It is true that the US and British aid played a significant role in the Soviet victory on the Eastern Front. The food alone probably saved thousands of Soviet citizens from starvation. The type of aid sent likely helped the Soviet economy specialise. Most importantly, the provision of tens of thousands of Studebakers and Jeeps was invaluable for logistics and infantry mobility, and helped the Soviet Army general staff get close to their doctrine of Deep Battle.
Significant, but not decisive. As the West Point History of the Second World War puts it: "Although lend-lease was a great help from 1943 to the end of the war, the Soviets had no cause to feel unduly grateful. It had not arrived during their greatest peril, but only when they began to win the war anyway."
The Soviets “would probably have won the same victory with no assistance at all.”
This is an uncomfortable fact for we Britons. The Eastern Front chewed up 80% of Nazi manpower and the cream of the German Officer Corps (perhaps the greatest in military history), and they would have probably managed it even without our help. This reduces the Western Front to a significant, noble and bloody sideshow.
Given the Second World War has become something like Britain’s founding myth, to make this point feels like denigrating our national story – and for the Bolsheviks and Stalin of all people.
Alas, the USSR was the most important factor in defeating Hitler, they would have done so without Lend-Lease, and it was Zhukov, Rokossovsky and Konev – not Patton, Montgomery or Rommel – who reached the all-time pinnacle of combined arms operational art.
