No Lend-Lease for Soviet Union

plenka

Banned
If the Western Allies stopped sending LL aid to SU after 41, how much longer, and bloodier would Eastern front be? Aid provided by the LL can not be underestimated, because it enabled SU to concentrate more of its manpower to building war materiel and to be liable for conscription, instead of working in mines and in the fields to fuel the war effort.
 

Deleted member 1487

For one thing from 1943 on there would be massive famine. 38% of the civilian ration would have had to be cut to make up for the loss of LL. Over 50% of Soviet aluminum would have been lost, IIRC 38% of their explosives, a lot of high capacity labor saving machinery would have been lost, all of their high octane avgas would have been gone and so on.

We've actually had a number of threads where this has been discussed in depth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_the_USSR
In total, the US deliveries through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[26] of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[27] 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras)[28] and 1.75 million tons of food.[29]
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.[30][31]
The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil), 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.[32]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#British_deliveries_to_the_USSR
In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of 27 June 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.[33][34] In June 1941 within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic sea routes to Murmansk arriving in September. It was carrying 40 Hawker Hurricanes along with 550 mechanics and pilots of No. 151 Wing to provide immediate air defence of the port and train Soviet pilots. After escorting Soviet bombers and scoring 14 kills for one loss, and completing the training of pilots and mechanics, No 151 Wing left in November their mission complete.[35] The convoy was the first of many convoys to Murmansk and Archangelsk in what became known as the Arctic convoys, the returning ships carried the gold that the USSR was using to pay the US. Between June 1941 and May 1945 3,000+ Hurricanes were delivered to the USSR along with 4,000+ other aircraft, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 2,560 bren carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines and 15 million pairs of boots in total 4 million tonnes of war materials including food and medical supplies were delivered. The munitions totaled £308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled £120m in 1946 index. Naval assets supplied included a battleship, 9 destroyers, 4 submarines, 5 mine sweepers, 9 trawler minesweepers, over 600 radar and sonar sets, 41 anti submarine batteries, several hundred naval guns and rocket batteries.
Significant numbers of British Churchill and Matilda tanks along with US M3 Lee were shipped to the USSR after becoming obsolete on the African Front. The Churchills, supplied by the arctic convoys, saw action in the siege of St Petersburg and the battle of Kursk.[36][37] while tanks shipped by the Persian route supplied the Caucasian Front. With the USSR giving priority to the defence of Moscow for domestically produced tanks this resulted in 40% of tanks in service on the Caucasian Front being Lend-Lease models.[38]
British LL was extremely helpful to the Battle of Moscow in 1941, but if you're supposing that still happens, but all of that gets cut come 1942 things are still very bad for the USSR.

If they are lucky they end up in East Poland in 1945, but with 10s of millions more dead due to the famine from 1943 on and with the far more difficult fight to push the Germans back without 70% of their OTL trucks (2/3rds Allied made, the rest captured from the Germans in the swift Soviet advance) to enable Soviet Deep Battle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II#GDP
In terms of GDP even with LL Soviet GDP in 1942 had fallen to nearly half that of Germany's alone. Without LL it would be less and never recover, as after 1942 LL really kicked into high gear.
 
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LL, over everything else is what saved the SU from collapse and it's due to the points you mentioned.

By Oct of 1941, the production capacity of the USSR was cut by at least 1/3.

Sure, factories that made tanks and small arms were dismantled and reconstructed behind the Urals but factories couldn't grow grain, millet, etc.

And starving Red army soldiers couldn't fight, no matter how pissed they were at Nazi occupation policies.

Once the Urkaine was lost, no LL (American Spam) meant a significant handicap in feeding it's humongous manpower pool.

Hunger is caused the collapse of Russia in WW1 and absolutely could have done it again in WW2 with no LL
 
It's difficult to say exactly what would have happened, there being advocates on both sides (those who say it was preventing collapse and those who say it wasn't hugely important) bandying facts about. One thing that can be said mostly safely is that even without it, Germany probably can't win, the task is simply too big.
 
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It's difficult to say exactly what would have happened, there being advocates on both sides (those who say it was preventing collapse and those who say it wasn't hugely important) bandying facts about. One thing that can be said mostly safely is that even without it, Germany probably can't win, the task is simply too big.

I would qualify that with "Germany can't win the war which Hitler and most of the OKW thought it could"; there were at least as many generals agreeing that the war would be one of eliminating the Soviets forever from the continent as there were dissidents. A negotiated peace might have been possible but isn't in line with the recklessness that fuelled Barbarossa in the first place.
 
For one thing from 1943 on there would be massive famine.

Not really. The harvest of '43 was only marginally worse then the harvest of '42 and the Soviets were able to keep going through the winter of '42-'43 largely fine. We would likely still see people starve to death, but not on famine levels.

More consequently for the Western Allies is the fact that the Soviet ops on the East are going to leave a lot more German forces to oppose them.

British LL was extremely helpful to the Battle of Moscow in 1941,
I have not seen a single modern military historian ever say that.

In any case, another consequence of this will be extra Americans and British dying because German forces which were killed by the Soviets are now free to fight them. This fact makes not sending the Soviets LL politically impossible.
 
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Deleted member 1487

Not really. The harvest of '43 was only marginally worse then the harvest of '42 and the Soviets were able to keep going through the winter of '42-'43 largely fine. We would likely still see people starve to death, but not on famine levels.
Got source to back that up? They lost significant farm lands in 1942 that were left to a large degree fallow in 1943 like the Kuban. Plus there were millions more people evacuated into the interior which put an even bigger burden a diminishing food supplies.

More consequently for the Western Allies is the fact that the Soviet ops on the East are going to leave a lot more German forces to oppose them.

I have not seen a single modern military historian ever say that.
I don't actually think the Germans could afford to strip men out of the East even without LL, they need the food and minerals there and even without the abilities afforded by LL the Soviets are still going to at very least have a numerical advantage. Before 1944 the Wallies did require major ground forces above what was there historically and as it was the LW was mostly in the West by early 1943. So the force dispositions probably stay the same until Normandy and maybe until Falaise. After that the East gets stripped down.


In any case, another consequence of this will be extra Americans and British dying because German forces which were killed by the Soviets are now free to fight them. This fact makes not sending the Soviets LL politically impossible.
I really don't think that is a factor until after Normandy for the reasons above. Until then though I think there might be a reasonable fear of Stalin negotiating a peace deal once he grinds to a stop line and then as revenge forcing the Wallies to beat the Germans while he rushes their eastern front once they start collapsing.
 
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