this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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Those with any knowledge bring up lend lease. I'll give them that. Without the material and financial aid the USSR probably would have lost outright or been forced to sue for an unfavorable peace. I'll allow it. Probably true. Lend lease was extremely important in keeping the USSR afloat after Barbarossa kicked off. So the USSR probably loses without the USA.
But what they never want to admit is that not only would the exact same thing happen without the USSR fighting the nazis, the western powers would not have fought nearly as long OR as hard by comparison. Do they really think the USA would have thrown a few million - let alone tens of millions - of lives into the meat grinder trying to stop the fascists? The hell they would have. Because at the end of the day the nazis did not represent as intense a threat to them as they did to the slavs and communists. The Bismarck wasn't going to end up shelling New York harbor to cover an invasion of nazi stormtroopers of the USA. They'd just go back to isolationism, declare it a European problem, and be grateful that the fascists took out those mean nasty commies for them.
Lend lease was important but I’m not so sure about the USSR losing.
Most historians specializing on the Eastern Front agree that Hitler caught the USSR off-guard by only about a year, as Stalin’s purges from 1937 led to a massive reorganization of its military that was still incomplete by 1941. However, the Germans would have had a much harder chance if they had invaded by 1942, when the reorganization would have completed by then.
Even then, the planners of Operation Barbarossa gave themselves only 4 months to crush the Red Army, after which they’d run into significant logistical issues. The German military wasn’t as invincible as people usually think. Nazi Germany suffer from perpetual manpower (both military personnel and industrial labor), logistics, fuel and supply shortage, as well as aging military equipments.
The German blitzkrieg wasn’t a formal military doctrine, unlike the Red Army’s Deep Operation doctrine. It was performed to cover up these weaknesses of the German military because they were unable to wage protracted and sustained warfare without running into manpower and logistics issue.
As such, the German invasion of the USSR was essentially doomed by winter of 1941, when they failed to defeat the Red Army within 4 months. When the Germans failed to reach the Caucasus oil field by the winter of 1942 (Operation Blau) and were instead stuck at Stalingrad, it was all but over for the Germans.
The Soviet industries were already kicked into high gear, after being relocated into the Urals, and by the end of the war the Soviet industrial output had far surpassed Nazi Germany’s (and second only to the United States which was far off to the other side of the world and sustained minimal damage from the war).
So, lend lease did play a role, especially in terms of reducing Soviet casualties and war damages, there’s no doubt about it, but that doesn’t mean that Hitler’s campaign against the USSR wasn’t just as doomed as it would be without the lend lease.