Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

I had an argument with family members yesterday on these quotes from Stalin and his agents, on the impact of U.S. industrial output on Russia's effort.

'"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in 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 received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."...

'"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," [Nikita Khrushchev] wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."...

'In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."'

The counter-argument was that this was propaganda, but I don't accept that.

https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc...

> The counter-argument was that this was propaganda, but I don't accept that.

Research seems to indicate that over one-third of the tanks used by the Russians in defence around Moscow during Barbarossa (in Dec 1941) were British:

* https://www.historynet.com/did-russia-really-go-it-alone-how...

* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1351804060069781...

* https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1344630636296818690 (via)

More from the 2013 Kursk presentation at the [US] National WWII Museum:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ

I've heard the expression: Word War Two [in Europe] was won by British intelligence, Russian blood, and American steel.

> Research seems to indicate that over one-third of the tanks used by the Russians in defence around Moscow during Barbarossa (in Dec 1941) were British:

I didn't know this, but I don't find it astonishing. This was when Russia was losing and the defense of Moscow was pretty desperate. It's likely a lot of those British tanks were lost during that battle (as noted, they weren't very good) and replaced with T-34s.

It's worth noting that most of the recorded losses of tanks by the Germans were in battles against T-34s.

> It's worth noting that most of the recorded losses of tanks by the Germans were in battles against T-34s.

Russia had to first survive long enough to get things turned around so they could take the offensive.

On the T-34s:

> To the Deputy People's Commissar of Medium Machinebuilding, comrade Goreglyad 8a Ryazanskaya St.

> In response to your letter #16/2291 on March 18th, 1941

> The GABTU considers it necessary to deliver the V-2-34 engine together with the main clutch for the following reasons:

> The warranty period of the main clutch is seldom higher than the lifespan of the engine: the engine's guaranteed lifespan is 150 hours, the tank travels 2000-2250 km in this time. The existing main clutch needs replacing after this time.

> The existing design of the main clutch on factory #183 T-34 tanks requires the following changes to be compatible with diesel engines received from factory #75:

[…]

* https://www.tankarchives.ca/2020/12/weakest-link.html

* https://twitter.com/Tank_Archives/status/1344342553911582722 (see thread on Kursk)

When the average lifespan in battle was ~14 hours, the stated 150 hours sounds pretty good.

Worth noting that (again) logistics are the important factor. Tanks might survive 14 hours in battle, but spend much longer getting there (and there weren't often tank transports available outside railways).

British intelligence, Bletchley Park aside, was amazingly ham-handed and ineffective, by accounts of those involved. (See Leo Marks, "Between Silk and Cyanide".)

The US, incidentally, was able to decrypt Enigma traffic independently of Bletchley using ordinary cryptanalysis.

The US seems to have used its own equipment, but used British cryptanalysis:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Am...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe#US_Navy_Bombe

Do you have sources that indicate otherwise?

I rely on a biography of the Friedmans.

No mistake, they had full access to the Polish analysis and bombe design.

These were not used in the most critical battle of the war, that unquestionably resulted in a massive battlefield victory that changed the course of world war 2 - Midway.

Japanese codes were transparent before and throughout the war. They were not Enigma codes.

It was well known exactly when the Japanese planned to start the Pacific War, though intercepts did not say where. Many in the Navy were sure it would be at Pearl Harbor. Notably, the militarily useless battleships were there, but not the aircraft carriers.

And all the mathematical breakthroughs needed to crack Enigma and make it tractable to the primitive computers of the day were made by the Poles anyway, which was conveniently airbrushed from history.

I was not aware - could you explain further?

Poles smuggled out a complete first-model Enigma machine, performed the cryptanalysis that revealed its core weakness, and also created the first of the "bombe" machines used for most of the decryptions.

Bletchley Park acted as central clearinghouse for intercepted ciphertexts, distributing decryptions with elaborate care to keep the Germans from knowing Enigma had been cracked. Late in the war, they built an electronic gadget called Colossus to decrypt traffic from a much more difficult version of Enigma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Po...

The article that I cited also makes mention of this, along with a photo of British "Matilda" tanks being loaded for shipment.

"In addition, much of the $31 billion worth of aid sent to the United Kingdom was also passed on to the Soviet Union via convoys through the Barents Sea to Murmansk."

There are two factors that I think cloud the story somewhat.

The first is there's a time aspect to it. In 1941, after Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets shut down their factories and shipped them east, which meant there was about a 6 month period where production was more or less nonexistent. This is a critical juncture where resupply and refit essentially has to rely on Lend-Lease.

The other factor is that Lend-Lease to the USSR was primarily not about the big headline weapons: Soviets were mostly using Soviet-designed and Soviet-built weapons to fight and win the war. Rather, it was about providing the equipment that keeps the infrastructure ticking over. The US wasn't building the tanks for the USSR as much as it was building the things that built the tanks.

Likewise, most westerners know that the war was mostly between Germany and Soviet Union. The other theatres were conparitively small.

Americans may have given their steel, but Soviets gave their blood.

The Soviets enabled the Third Reich by providing facilities to build and train an air force sand a tank corps when Germany was treaty bound not to have one.

Additionally, they were happy to partition Poland following the Nazi invasion.

Stalin was a criminal and reaped what he sowed.

That's some revision of history. The Soviets didn't "enable" the Third Reich, since they knew well enough war with Nazi Germany was inevitable in the long run. Why they cooperated with each other is complex, and all powers back then engaged in some questionable strategies that, in hindsight, backfired. Poland is more complicated than a "partition".

It's an inconvenient truth, now, to remember the Soviets did most of the fighting against Nazi Germany.

It does not change the fact that the USSR and Nazi Germany were allies in 1939 and through 1940. They cooperated in Poland, signed a treaty to partition eastern Europe and were clearly considered as such when Britain and France were planning their intervention in Finland and bombing the oil fields in Azerbaijan.

Yes it was short term alliance of convenience and both sides didn’t really trust each other but it does not change the fact that without material, political and military support from the USSR Germany’s position early in the war would have been much weaker.

What is your opinion on Munich Agreement then?

> It does not change the fact that the USSR and Nazi Germany were allies in 1939 and through 1940

That's in my opinion simplistic. They weren't "allies" in the standard sense of the word; they were outmaneuvering each other and gearing for war, which both parties understood was happening eventually. Remember they already had had their bitter proxy war in the Spanish Civil War, where Soviets and Germans had already killed each other. Yes, they cooperated with materiel and military tech; they also had to compromise geopolitically. The situation of both countries more or less required this. And yes -- with hindsight -- this backfired on the Soviets catastrophically.

But consider this: in the UK and US, businesses and politicians were at times sympathetic with Nazi Germany, at least before the outbreak of the global war, after which maintaining open sympathies for Germany would have been traitorous. But only the USSR was under actual territorial danger from Nazi Germany, so the compromises to be made were different. The USSR also had in its recent history a civil war where the Western Powers had intervened against them, so they were very wary of who to trust, "surrounded by enemies" so to speak.

From Wikipedia:

> The establishment of the [Molotov-Ribbentrop] treaty was preceded by Soviet efforts to form a tripartite alliance with Britain and France. Fearing encirclement by hostile powers, the Soviet Union began negotiations with Germany on 22 August, one day after talks broke down with Britain and France, and the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was signed the next day.

How many people, when claiming Nazi Germany and the USSR were "allies", know that the USSR first tried to form an anti-German pact with Britain and France? And were refused! Not many, I suspect.

> [Germany and the USSR] cooperated in Poland, signed a treaty to partition eastern Europe

Again, consider that at the time, the UK thought having colonies was acceptable. Churchill, lionized in the West, was a staunch supporter of the British Empire. So yes, it's bad that the USSR tried to partition Eastern Europe (unlike the UK, they were in full paranoid mode, trying to create buffer zones to protect their homeland), but remember some Western powers like the UK and France also believed in partitioning the world according to their needs. Empires were more acceptable back then, it wasn't just the USSR.

It is essential not to confuse Soviet armed forces with Stalin himself. The former had to fight, with a great handicap, under the latter. People of the countries occupied first by one power and then the other suffered most.

I think it's more or less understood today that while lend-lease was a big deal, Hitler had no real way of winning the war against the Soviet Union. It was logistically impossible. Even taking Moscow wouldn't have helped.

Nazi Germany sealed its fate with Barbarossa. And it made it even worse by making it a war of extermination (unlike in other theaters of the war), a fight so barbaric and racially charged it forced a desperate defense on the Soviets, because surrender truly wasn't possible; and for the same reason, they ensured the revenge would be terrible.

> Even taking Moscow wouldn't have helped.

I don't think that's widely accepted. There's a reasonable argument that Moscow formed such a communication and transport hub that losing it would have been a significant blow. If Moscow fell it seems likely Russia would have been cut off completely from the West and had to rely on Western aid over the Pacific to the East and then via undeveloped transport networks to new industrial bases. Unclear if this would have worked.

Also worth noting that the loss of Moscow would have meant the loss of the manpower that was there defending it.

I don't mean it wouldn't have been a huge loss. I mean that in a war of total extermination, the stakes are different. Remember that surrender wasn't an option. And in any case, Nazi Germany played their hands pretty badly with Moscow, too.

The historical consensus is that Germany had no way of ending the war on their own terms even without the aid. The impacts of Lend-Lease materialized mostly after 1942/Stalingrad.

You might want to look into the history of Radio Free Europe and the sources they link to.

I do read elsewhere that the participation of U.S. industrialists in the years before the war had profound impact on Soviet industrialization.

"The Communist party translated and published [Fredrick W.] Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, and high authorities brought over Walter Polakov, an American follower of Henry L. Gantt, one of Taylor’s most fervent disciples, to provide a liaison with American scientific-management experts and to prepare production charts for the entire First Five-Year Plan...

"By 1928, when the Soviets inaugurated the First Five-Year Plan, Henry Ford had become an even greater hero to the Soviets than Frederick Taylor. An emotional cult grew up around Ford’s methods and even his person. By 1925 his autobiography, My Life and Work, had had four printings in the Soviet Union, and one American in Russia reported that plant managers were studying Ford with as much enthusiasm as they had had for Lenin."

https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-so...

Funny thing, I watched a video about Russian command style yesterday. They are still trying to do scientific management in the army, which works horribly in the uncertainties of war, especially when lies flow up the chain of command.

The key fact about US involvement is that most of it did not arrive until the Axis had been driven far back from its initial takings.

Actually occupying territory was crucial, and as the Germans were driven back, transportation to the front got harder even as the Germans' transport task shrank.

A great waste in the war was ineffective strategic ("Norden") bombing, using up untold bombers, crews, and ordinance. Another was expending skilled ex-pat pilots on direct combat while rotating experienced own pilots back to training.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com