American and Soviet pilots posed for the Bell P-39 Airacobra, delivered to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program. Photo: US Air Force Museum (Courtesy of)
On February 24, 1943, a Douglas C-47 Skytrain transport aircraft with serial number 42-32892 left a factory in Long Beach, California and was handed over to the United States Air Force.
On March 12, 1943, the aircraft was given to the Soviet Air Force in Fairbanks, Alaska, and received the registration USSR-N238. From there, he flew 5,650 kilometers to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, one of about 14,000 planes sent from the United States to the Soviet Union during World War II on a large-scale rental program.
This particular C-47 was sent to the Far North and spent the war on reconnaissance and meteorological missions over the Kara Sea. After the war, he was transferred to civil aviation, carrying passengers over the frozen tundra over the Arctic Circle. On April 23, 1947, she was forced to make an emergency landing with 36 people on board near the village of Volochanka on the Taimyr Peninsula.
On May 11, 1947, 27 people were rescued after spending nearly three weeks in a ship frozen by ships. The captain, two crew members and six passengers had left earlier in an unfortunate effort to get help. The body of Captain Maxim Tyurikov was found by local hunters about 120 kilometers from the shipwreck in 1953. The others were never found.
The plane spent 69 years in the tundra before the Russian Geographical Society’s expedition rescued it in 2016 and returned the wreckage to Krasnoyarsk.
“I knew his place was in a museum,” said Vyacheslav Filipov, a colonel in the Russian Air Force reserve who wrote in detail about the Siberian connection to the Land Leasing program. told RFE / RL at the time. “It wasn’t just scrap metal. This is our living history. This Douglas is the only Lend-Lease aircraft left in Russia. “
Approximately 25 million Soviet citizens died in the titanic conflict with Nazi Germany between June 1941 and May 1945. Overcoming huge defeats and colossal losses during the first 18 months of the war, the Red Army managed to reorganize and rebuild to form a jugnaut that marched all the way to Berlin. But the Soviet Union was never alone: months before the United States officially entered the war, it had already begun to provide massive military and economic aid to its Soviet ally through the loan program.
From the depths of the Cold War to the present day, many Soviet and Russian politicians have ignored or downplayed the impact of American aid to the Soviets, as well as the impact of the entire American-British war against the Nazis.
A Soviet report by Politburo member Nikolai Voznesensky in 1948 claimed that the United States, described as “the leader of the anti-democratic camp and a warrior of imperialist expansion around the world,” had contributed materials during the war that amounted to only 4.8 % of the Soviet Union’s own military production.
Map of shipments for rent from the United States to the USSR from 1941-45.
The brief history of the Great Patriotic War, also from 1948, acknowledges the shipments on lease, but concludes: “In general, this aid was not significant enough to have in any way a decisive influence in the course of the Great Patriotic War.”
Nikolai Ryzhkov, the last head of the Soviet government, wrote in 2015 that “it can be confidently argued that [Lend-Lease assistance] did not play a decisive role in the Great Victory. “
However, such assessments contradict the views of Soviet participants in the war. Most famously, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin toasted the leasing program during a conference in Tehran in November 1943 with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt.
“I want to tell you what, from a Russian point of view, the president and the United States did to win this war,” Stalin said. “The most important things in this war are the machines … The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we got through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war. “
Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.
“If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.” he writes in his memoirs. “One on one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not withstand its pressure and we would lose the war. Nobody talks about it officially, and I don’t think Stalin ever left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this opinion several times in conversations with me. “
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Leasing Act on March 11, 1941.
The Leasing Act was passed in March 1941 and authorized the United States to provide arms, supplies, and raw materials to strategically important countries struggling with Germany and Japan — primarily the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. In total, the United States has sent one billion (8 billion in cash in 2020) program materials, including .3 billion to the Soviet Union. In addition, much of the billion-dollar aid sent to the United Kingdom was also handed over to the Soviet Union by convoys across the Barents Sea to Murmansk.
Apparently, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction machinery, and 13,000 battle tanks.
The real significance of Lend-Lease for Soviet military efforts was that it covered the “sensitive points” of Soviet production – gasoline, explosives, aluminum, non-ferrous metals, radio communications, etc., says historian Boris Sokolov.
“In a hypothetical one-on-one battle between the USSR and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German navy and the diversion of more than a quarter of its ground forces in the battle against Britain and the United States, Stalin could defeat Hitler “, Sokolov wrote in an essay for the Russian RFE / RL service.
The British Matilda tanks were loaded on a ship for transport to the USSR as part of the Lend-Lease program.
According to Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than a third of all explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all aluminum used by the Soviet Union during the war and more than 80 percent of copper.
Lend-Lease also sends aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of that produced by the Soviet Union itself. Much of the American fuel is added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.
The Lend-Lease program also provides more than 35,000 radios and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all Red Army vehicles were provided by Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.
In addition, the Lend-Lease program supported the Soviet railway system, which played a key role in the movement and supply of troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and countless wagons to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease.
Monument in Fairbanks, Alaska, to American pilots who flew nearly 8,000 American planes to Alaska, and to Soviet pilots who flew them to Siberia as part of Lend-Lease.
“It should be remembered that during the First World War, the transport crisis in Russia in 1916-17, which contributed much to the February Revolution [which lead to the abdication of the tsar] was caused by a shortage in the production of railway rails, engines and freight cars, as industrial production was redirected to ammunition, “Sokolov wrote. “During World War II, only supplies imported by Lend-Lease prevented the paralysis of rail transport in the Soviet Union.”
The Lend-Lease program also sends tons of factory equipment and machine tools to the Soviet Union, including over 38,000 lathes and other metalworking tools. Such machines are of higher quality than those produced in the Soviet Union, which contribute significantly to stimulating Soviet industrial production.
U.S. aid also provided 4.5 million tons of food, 1.5 million blankets and 15 million pairs of boots.
“To really appreciate the significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet victory, you just have to imagine how the Soviet Union would have fought if there had been no help for Lend-Lease,” Sokolov wrote. “Without Lend-Lease, the Red Army would not have about a third of the ammunition, half of the planes, or half of its tanks. In addition, there would be a constant shortage of transport and fuel. Railways would stop periodically. And Soviet forces would be much less coordinated in the constant absence of radio equipment. And they would be forever hungry without American canned meat and fat. “
In 1963 KGB surveillance is being recorded Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov said: “People say that the allies did not help us. But there is no denying that the Americans sent us materials without which we could not form our reserves or continue the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Can we really adjust the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they say we had plenty of everything ourselves. “
This article originally appeared on Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. I follow @RFERL on Twitter.
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