Lend Lease, how accurate is this?

There are some other things here to consider, not to put too much emphasis on L/L trucks, but did the Soviets consider the Studebakers that they received in crates and were put together at the ZiS plant domestic? The pattern at the time was to ship more trucks in crates than completed, as one truck could then haul three broke-down/crated trucks into the SU for assembly.

Then another thing is the difference in the trucks themselves. The GAZ-AA was the Ford AA, and a single axle drive, one ton. The Studebakers were 6x6 2 1/2 ton heavy haulers. Their performance in mud and snow (the general state of affairs on the steppes), far exceed the domestic trucks. Here are two pics of the units in snow, the Stude on the left, the GAZ on the right.

 

Back to railroad/locomotive/rolling stock/rails issue . Is it true that probably most of the railways in German occupied territory would be destroyed as the Germans retreated? Is it also true that most of the locomotives/rolling stock on those lines would be saved or destroyed by the Germans as they retreated? If so then wouldn't LL shipments of rails,locmotives and rolling stock become far more important ?

 

It seems you are trying out every possible combination of circumstances to try and increase the contribution of the LL Locomotives. Why is this so important to you?

 

Well my point is that if railways,locomotives ,and rolling stock were destroyed by the Russians as they retrerated in the face of Barbarossa and then by the Germans as they retreated then new railways had to be constructed by the Russians as they conducted their westward offensives. In that case all those rails ,locomotives and rolling stock from LL could become increasingly important. I assume that alot of the pre-war 30,000 locomotives & several hundred thousand rolling stock were probably needed just for industrial purposes . Just because alot of the railway equipment arrived after July,1944 doesn't necessarily make it uncritical to the Soviets in conducting their offensives since there was still alot of ground to cover till Berlin & March-April,1945.

Without LL would the Soviets still win? Without Allied help would they still win? Maybe but it would have been much longer & far costlier probably to the extent that'd be hard to distinguish the winners from the loosers. Could the Soviet people have held on in those circumstances? I understand they were almost near the end of the rope by the end of the war.

Why is all this important to me? Well I guess I feel the Western Allies(not just the US) efforts gets short changed but mainly just trying to get all the facts some of my ideas might be wrong and if proof thatr they are comes to light well I guessed I've learned something new. Sloniskp came up with the fact that if Germans could reach Moscow using alot of horse then maybe the Soviets could reach Berlin using alot of horses. I still think you have to have rail-heads keeping up with your armies in any extended drives but maybe motor transportation is over-rated by some.

 

I think the military importance of trucks on the Eastern front has been overrated :you can't supply an army on long distances by trucks,especially in a country without decent roads and with two rasputitza's a year .

 

Are you quite sure you have reviewed the basic literature on Stalinist Russia or the Third Reich? Or are you going to call proper history books product of left-wing communist propaganda written by socialist sympathizing intellectuals?

I will tell you why being compared to Hitler was an insult even to Stalin.
The Abwehr assessed at the end of 1941 that Belorussians had been turned against the German Army because they were digusted by the brutality the SS committed against the Jews. The average Belorussian peasant could hardly be accused of harboring warm and fussy feelings to Jews. He would also be familiar with purges and mass executions. Yet, Hitler's policies managed to shock even they.

The German Army became immensely unpopular in Ukraine, an area that welcomed them with open arms at the beginning, because the occupation authority mandated collective farms would not be dissolved, requisition of grain and foodstuff were to be increased, all budget slated for the building and maintenance of roads and railroads were to be rendered null and void, and all secondary schools would be closed. The Ukrainians despised Stalin. But they failed to cooperate with the German occupation authorities and in many cases took arms against them, even though they had every reason to expect the Wehrmacht to win.

The Economic Staff East's program for ruling ex-Soviet Eastern Europe was to maintain or intensify Soviet levels of grain requisition while reduce food supplies to a level that all of the industrialized cities would die. The surplus grain would feed Germany.

Now, if you find a document containing solid proof that Stalin intended to raze all cities to the ground, de-industrialize Russia and eliminate literacy, you are free to continue this line of argument and they might even give you the Kluge prize.

As to the OP, he started the thread as flame bait.

 

Yes I can probably agree. Where trucks maybe important are from say a railhead or port to the front but I would only say up to about 300 miles at the most.

 

General G. Zhukov would seem to agree; " Without American `Studebekkers' [sic], we could have dragged our artillery nowhere. Yes, in general, to a considerable degree they provided our front-line transport".

 

For the Red Army in WW 2 the 300 mile comment is about right. That realistically represents the approximate limit of Soviet capacity to advance without repairing the rail system and forward stockpiling supplies over time for another advance. You can measure it youself.

This is the case at Stalingrad. It was the case following Kursk. It was the case in Bagration and there, against virtually no orgainzed defensive resistance once the front line collapsed.

Without alot of the supplies the Western Allies delivered the Soviets wouldn't have been able to pull off such advances. Basically, the Soviets could keep the Germans from winning with the resources they had but, needed Lend Lease to make the difference in eventually winning the war.

 

Where the german aluminium came from?

 

Mostly from Le Baux France, which came under Italian control after the Vichy armistace and BTW the place from which bauxite gets its name.

 

This is incorrect. Alcoa had a "production" capacity unmatched by the rest of the world but bauxite was not a "natural mineral/raw material". At that time (WW2) it was imported from other nations. During the war years Alcoa (and others) imported bauxite ore from the USSR in "reverse lend-lease", processd the ore, and returned it in sheet, ingot, and bar form. We (America) also imported Wolfram (tungsten), chromium, and other rare earths from the USSR in the same reverse lend-lease program.

America received some bauxite from other nations, Canada, and a couple of South American nations I believe. But we had no internal source for the mineral at the time. The mines exist now, but they were generally unknown at the time in commercially viable ores.

 

Wow brndirt1 you may have broken a word record....

Post on November 7th, 2006 & a response on January 23rd, 2010, over THREE YEARS later.

But better late then never I guess. LOL!!!

By all accounts Surinam was a major supplier of Bauxite to the States, production between Surinam / USA initially was roughly 60/40. But with the advent of war, production in Arkansas was seriously ramped up [Arkansas was a major producer going back to to the turn of the century, more then 690,000 tons were produced in 1918 alone, but depressed economic conditions in the 30's reduced out put] and the Surinam share diminished as US output picked up, peaking at 6,233,000 tons in '43 probably making the US the worlds leading producer......


Bauxite production, US / Surinam (metric tons):
1940: 439,000 / 613,900
1941: 973,000 / 1,116,100
1942: 2,602,000 / 1,228,000
1943: 6,233,000 / 1,663,000

The figures vary a bit depending what you read, some I have is the that the US produced 11% of the world production of bauxite in 1937 before production was ramped up in Arkansas, & U.S.S.R. about 6% but Suriname was so important that after the outbreak of war the United States didn't want this strategic ore and the Alcoa installations to fall into foreign hands, so they stationed 3,000 infantry and anti-aircraft defences in Suriname.

1937 World Production
HyperWar: The Big 'L'--American Logistics in World War II [Chapter 3]

Even a brief over view of the lend lease figures you often see posted are impressive enough, [although the figures can sometimes be a little misleading,] but when you see more itemised figures it shows how huge it really was.

Anyway Bauxite/aluminium aside, what's your thoughts on the importance of lend lease, without it is the SU defeated, or the Sovs win but take longer, or perhaps a stalemate?


PS...The Germans pressured the French to produce aircraft & aero engines for the Luftwaffe, France had the Bauxite and smelting capacity, but it lacked the coal necessary to generate electricity. To meet the German demands they said they'd need delivery of 120,000 tons of coal per month, Germany could only promise 4,000 tons, so French built aircraft ended up a only a fraction of what the Nazis wanted.

 

I don't see the Germans winning this one. However that leaves a lot of territory. LL certainly had little effect in 41 (it may still have been "important" for some defititions of important) however as time goes on it's impact increases considerably. Without it the Soviets will have to shift some of their weapons production to building trucks and trains and other infrastrutured. Furthermore they are unlikely to be building trucks as good as the ones they got via LL. Furthermore they are going to be shorter of fuel, food, and explosives. This will probably mean that their counter offensives are delayed and possible not as effective. Especially as the Germans will have more time to prepare and build up strength. This will further increase Soviet losses. The Soviets may well still have the strength to reach Germany in 45 and perhaps even Berlin. Or not. They do however need to win in 45 or they will be in severe trouble due to both lack of manpower and lack of food. I'm not sure either side could sustain a stalemate past or perhaps even into 46.

 

My mistake ANZAC, I had completely overlooked the Arkansas contribution for some strange reason. Probably because I remembered that Montana’s bauxite ore was of too low a grade to be profitably processed at the time, and just for some reason "lumped" the Arkansas ore into the same space. Mea culpa. Did run across a great article in the WW2 Magazine concerning early Lend-Lease though. Here are a couple of sections and a link to the whole three page article.

An oft-quoted statement by First Vice-Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Nikolai Voznesensky summed up the standard line that Allied aid represented "only 4 percent" of Soviet production for the entire war. Lacking any detailed information to the contrary, Western authors generally agreed that even if Lend-Lease was important from 1943 on, as quantities of aid dramatically increased, the aid was far too little and late to make a difference in the decisive battles of 1941–1942.

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a trickle of information has emerged from archives in Moscow, shedding new light on the subject. While much of the documentary evidence remains classified "secret" in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense and the Russian State Archive of the Economy, Western and Russian researchers have been able to gain access to important, previously unavailable firsthand documents. I was recently able to examine Russian-language materials of the State Defense Committee—the Soviet equivalent of the British War Cabinet—held in the former Central Party Archive. 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.

…Given the disruption to Soviet production and Red Army losses, the Soviet Union was understandably eager to put British armor into action as soon as possible. According to Biriukov's service diary, the first 20 British tanks arrived at the Soviet tank training school in Kazan on October 28, 1941, at which point a further 120 tanks were unloaded at the port of Archangel in northern Russia. Courses on the British tanks for Soviet crews started during November as the first tanks, with British assistance, were being assembled from their in-transit states and undergoing testing by Soviet specialists.

The tanks reached the front lines with extraordinary speed. Extrapolating from available statistics, researchers estimate that British-supplied tanks made up 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941, and certainly made up a significant proportion of tanks available as reinforcements at this critical point in the fighting. By the end of 1941 Britain had delivered 466 tanks out of the 750 promised.

A steady stream of British-made tanks continued to flow into the Red Army through the spring and summer of 1942. Canada would eventually produce 1,420 Valentines, almost exclusively for delivery to the Soviet Union. By July 1942 the Red Army had 13,500 tanks in service, with more than 16 percent of those imported, and more than half of those British.

A total of 699 Lend-Lease aircraft had been delivered to Archangel by the time the Arctic convoys switched to Murmansk in December 1941. Of these, 99 Hurricanes and 39 Tomahawks were in service with the Soviet air defense forces on January 1, 1942, out of a total of 1,470 fighters. About 15 percent of the aircraft of the 6th Fighter Air Corps defending Moscow were Tomahawks or Hurricanes.

The Soviet Northern Fleet was also a major and early recipient of British Hurricanes, receiving those flown by No. 151 Wing of the RAF, which operated briefly from Soviet airfields near Murmansk. As early as October 12, 1941, the Soviet 126th Fighter Air Regiment was operating with Tomahawks bought from the United States by Britain. Tomahawks also served in defense of the Doroga Zhizni or "Road of Life" across the ice of Lake Ladoga, which provided the only supply line to the besieged city of Leningrad during the winter of 1941–42. By spring and summer of 1942 the Hurricane had clearly become the principal fighter aircraft of the Northern Fleet's air regiments; in all, 83 out of its 109 fighters were of foreign origin.

Substantial quantities of machine tools and raw materials, such as aluminum and rubber, were supplied to help Soviet industry back on its feet: 312 metal-cutting machine tools were delivered by convoy PQ-12 alone, arriving in March 1942, along with a range of other items for Soviet factories such as machine presses and compressors.

Once again, raw figures do not tell the whole story. Although British shipments amounted to only a few percent of Soviet domestic production of machine tools, the Soviet Union could request specific items which it may not have been able to produce for itself. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. The handing over of forty imported machine tools to Aviation Factory No. 150 in July 1942, for example, was the critical factor in enabling the factory to reach projected capacity within two months.

See:

Did Russia Really Go It Alone? How Lend-Lease Helped the Soviets Defeat the Germans » HistoryNet

So, in light of the article it would seem that the former Soviet Union would most likely have "held on" and eventually prevailed over Hitlerism, but that the Lend-Lease aid from the UK and US was more valuable than sometimes thought. I still maintain that it was the later sheet steel, aluminium ingots/sheets, food, transport, explosives, clothes and boots that was of more practical import since those commodities allowed the Soviets to concentrate their production on weapons and not agriculture, processing of raw materials, and such.

 

Brn;
I guess I see a stalemate or worse for the USSR without LL. I also see stalemate or worse in the "Western Allies go it alone" scenario. Neither side of this argument wants to admit that they couldn't have done without the other but I believe this to be the case.
Railroads? A vital means of mass transport in the road poor USSR of the 1940s who's importance gets overlooked in this day and age.
At any rate; here is a song Woody Guthrie wrote when he was in the Merchant Marine; YouTube - Ramblin' Jack Elliott - Talking Merchant Marine
Was he really a dishwasher? Ah well, what else are you going to do with these artistic types?
JeffinMNUSA

 

I tend to agree, but I think only a possible stalemate and temporary truce of some sort with the SU returning to the fight at a later date. And the extensive rail system of the USSR has to be one of the most important "non-river/canal" transport methods of the vast USSR. That said Lend-Lease contributions to that system must be factored in.

Here is a break down of the new production concerning the rails during the three years and ten months of its (L/L) existence, during this time Soviet production of locomotives was less than 90 new units (BMZ was overrun early in Barbarossa), while importing nearly 2,000 locomotives in the Soviet gauge from America. Also in new production of rails, and rail cars it seems that without the L/L imports the material and man-power would have to be diverted to this end. Sometimes the "value" of a certain sector gets short shrift unless it is realized what would happen without that input.

Railroad rails:
(excluding narrow gauge rails used in the north/south Persia corridor)
Soviet Production; 48,990 rails
Allied Deliveries; 622,100 rails
Total; 671,090
Allied contribution proportion; 92.7%

Locomotives:
(all steam types in service between 1941-45)
Soviet built; 442
(which includes the 359 remaining from pre-war production)
Allied deliveries; 1966
Total; 2408
Allied contribution proportion; 81.6%

Rail cars:
(all types)
Soviet Production; 2635
Allied Deliveries; 11,075
Total; 13,710
Allied contribution proportion; 80.7%

gleaned from:

Accounting For War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defense Burden, 1941-1945, by Joan Beaumont, and Mark Harrison.

Take out those proportions of L/L contribution and the USSR rail system is in desparate straits.

 

Clint;
LL really factored that heavily into maintaining the USSR rail net?! I didn't know. On that note I guess we shift towards the "or worse" column on the "whatif no LL?" scenario. Sorry Avatar fans, the industrial power wins every time-at least here on Planet Earth. And Soviet industry was totally dependent on rail.
JeffinMNUSA

 

On the other hand the Soviets had a considerable stock of RR engines prewar.

But then again if you grow yet another hand. Most of the RR cars and engnies were delivered to Vladivostok. Since the Trans Siberian RR was only a single line in many places this would have allowed for some significantly simpler scheduling. Ie locomotive and cars arrive in Vladivostok fill up with other LL materials and troops headed west and off you go. No need to send back as another's comming in soon. Not sure what impact this sort of thing had but every little bit helps.

 

Well if you consider 359 large steam locomotives considerable if suppose. They had a larger number of small "shuttle engines" for short haul and yard work, but not the large heavy haulers. 1966 of those came from the US during the L/L period. They surely were of "some aid"?