How the Soviets won the war (WWII, that is)

 

I am going to borrow a bit from a Telegram channel I've been following (Conflict History and News*) since around the time Russia started its full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022. This photo was posted here. What are you looking at, you might ask? These are fleets of military transport vehicles provided by the United States to the Soviet Union (or USSR) during WWII. This photo was apparently taken in 1944. 

To give you the scope of the lend-lease program and what the US provided the USSR in the way of military supplies, here is a probably incomplete list:

— Through this program, the U.S. provided over $11 billion in essential supplies and equipment to the USSR, including:

- 400,000 vehicles
- 14,000 aircraft
- 13,000 tanks
- 8,000 tractors
- 4.5 million tons of food
- 2.7 million tons of petroleum products.

That is quite a lot of equipment and food. Would the USSR have been successful in their efforts against Nazi Germany's eastern front without all that assistance? Doubtful, as even Soviet leaders of the era would acknowledge:

— Stalin himself toasted the Lend-Lease program at the 1943 Tehran Conference, stating "Without American machines the United States sent to us, we would lose the war."

— Nikita Khrushchev similarly wrote that "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war."

I certainly won't diminish the efforts and sacrifices of the Soviets during WWII. I will note that the USSR would not have succeeded and would have been greatly diminished as a power without the vast amount of tangible support provided by the US. Stalin undoubtedly had more imperial ambitions when accepting our aid, and we saw the fruits of that in the immediate post WWII era when Stalin's regime had succeeded in controlling vast swaths of eastern Europe, and invaded with impunity so-called Warsaw Pact nations that tried to achieve independence or even try modest reforms during the 1950s and 1960s (Hungary and Czechoslovakia come to mind). Lend-lease was probably the best bad option available during WWII, and at least in ending the Nazi threat, it was clearly a success. Just remember to tell the tankies that the USSR could not have succeeded without us "evil" capitalists.

*That particular Telegram channel can be useful if you have any interest in military history, but you do have to deal with some very noxious politics. There are easily better channels available if you are interested in the current war against Ukraine or other conflicts around the globe.