The scale of the food problem can be seen from the fact that, in 1942, only fifty-eight per cent of the pre-war area under cultivation was in Soviet hands; the rest had been occupied by the Germans. With the recovery of the Northern Caucasus and other areas, the
proportion was sixty-three per cent in 1943; but the number of cattle was sixty-two per cent of the low pre-war total; that of horses, thirty-seven per cent; that of pigs, twenty per cent. The production of artificial fertilisers was down to very little, and there was often no petrol for the remaining tractors. It is one of the wonders of Russian character plus Russian organisation that a still worse food shortage should have been avoided. Although food supplies continued to be very poor in the cities, especially for "dependents" with their miserable rations, the fact remains that the Army was reasonably well fed,
especially from 1943 onwards, and so too were most of the skilled industrial workers.
It is quite obvious that lend-lease supplies played an important part in improving the Army's diet, especially from the beginning of 1943. Of very great importance to the Red Army, too, were the growing numbers of Studebakers, Dodges and Willys jeeps—
commonly known in the Red Army as villises—which so greatly increased its mobility.
They were still not in great evidence at the time of Stalingrad, but, as I know from my own experience, they became an integral part of the Russian military landscape after about March 1943. These lorries and jeeps certainly contributed to the "new look" and to the tremendous and constantly-growing fighting power of the Red Army after Stalingrad.
This question of American, British and Canadian help to the Soviet Union had both
political and psychological aspects.
In 1942, Allied aid was certainly not taken very seriously; in 1941-2, American
shipments still amounted to only 1.2 m. tons and British shipments to 532,000 tons. Some of the heavy equipment sent that year (Hurricanes, Matilda tanks, etc.) was
unsatisfactory. In 1943 British shipments remained stable but American shipments were enormously stepped up, rising to 4.1 m. tons (and over 6 m. tons if one includes the first four months of 1944). This included over 2 m. tons of food. Besides this, the U.S.A. sent the Soviet Union between 22 June 1941 and 30 April 1944:
6,430 planes
3,734 tanks
10 minesweepers
12 gunboats
82 smaller craft
210,000 automobiles
3,000 anti-aircraft guns
1,111 oerlikons
23 m. yards of army cloth
2 m. tyres
476,000 tons of high octane petrol
99,000 tons of aluminium and duraluminium
184,000 tons of copper and copper products
42,000 tons of zinc
6,500 tons of nickel
1.2 m. tons of steel and steel products
20,000 machine-tools
17,000 motor-cycles
991 m. cartridges
22 m. shells
88,000 tons of gunpowder
130,000 tons of TNT
1.2 m. km. of telephone wire
245,000 field telephones
5.5 m. pairs of army boots
Other industrial equipment: $257 m. worth (including oil refinery equipment, electrical equipment, excavators, cranes, locomotives, et cetera)
Between June 22, 1941, and April 30, 1944, Britain dispatched 1,150,000 tons, of which 1,041,000 tons arrived. This included:
5,800 planes
33,000 tons of copper
4,292 tanks
12 minesweepers
103,000 tons of rubber
35,000 tons of aluminium
29,000 tons of tin
48,000 tons of lead
93,000 tons of jute
besides relatively small quantities of other raw materials, explosives, shells and other army equipment, as well as over 6,000 machine tools and £14 m. worth of other industrial equipment. The total value of Canadian deliveries for the same period was about 355 m.
dollars, and included 1,188 tanks, 842 armoured cars, nearly a million shells, 36,000 tons of aluminium and 208,000 tons of wheat and flour, besides a number of smaller items.
[Commissariat for Foreign Trade Statement published in Pravda in June, 1944, a few days after the Normandy Landing.]
By the end of the war the figures were higher still. According to General Deane, over fifteen million tons were shipped to Russia between October 1941 and the end of the war.
In his view the most important items were:
1) 427,000 trucks, 13,000 "combat vehicles", over 2,000 Ordnance vehicles and 35,000
motor-cycles;
2) Petroleum products (2,670,000 tons);
3) Food (4,478,000 tons), including flour. "Assuming that the Red Army had an average strength of 12 m. men, this meant a half pound of fairly concentrated food for each per day";
4) Railways equipment.
Altogether, he says, including a vast number of other items (medical supplies, clothing, boots, et cetera), "our supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.
They may not have won the war, but they must have been comforting to the Russians."
[ John R. Deane. The Strange Alliance (London 1947), pp. 93-95.]
These figures are, in their own way, highly impressive; for instance those showing that a high proportion of the boots and clothing-material of the Red Army was American-made, and that America and Britain also delivered important quantities of strategic raw
materials, aviation petrol, and much else. The planes and tanks, though of uneven value, were not to be sneezed at either. But they still constituted a relatively small proportion of all the planes and tanks used by the Red Army. According to Stalin's election speech in 1946, the Soviet Union produced about 100,000 tanks, 120,000 planes, 360,000 guns,
over 1.2 m. machine-guns, 6 m. tommyguns, 9 m. rifles, 300,000 mortars, some 700 m.
shells, some 20 billion cartridges, etc., during the last three years of the war.
Assuming that Stalin's figures are correct, they would suggest that the Allied heavy equipment (tanks and planes) amounted to between ten and fifteen per cent of the total.
N. Voznesensky, the head of the Gosplan, argues in his book, The War Economy of the Soviet Union, published in 1948, that the Allied deliveries in 1941, 1942 and 1943
amounted to only four per cent of the Soviet Union's total production. This purely
quantitative statement was misleading, since 1941 could not be considered a "lend-lease"
year at all, and 1944, a peak year in allied deliveries, was omitted altogether.
From my personal observation I can say that, from 1943 on, the Red Army
unquestionably appreciated the help from the West— whether in the form of Airocobras, Kittyhawks, Dodges, jeeps, spam, army boots, or medicines. The motor vehicles were
particularly admired and valued. And the fact remains that the Allied raw materials
enormously helped the Soviet war industries. But this still does not dispose of the
profound emotional problem created by the simple fact that the Russians were losing
millions of men, while the British and Americans were losing much fewer people.
[ An important exception were the Russian airmen who warmly appreciated the Allied
bombings of Germany, and the fact that many German fighter planes were immobilised
in Germany.]
It was partly because of this feeling in the country that the Soviet Government liked to say as little as possible about Western deliveries; nor did it probably particularly like to advertise its dependence on the capitalist West for certain forms of equipment. This attitude was, understandably, resented in the West, and the first major incident over Russian "ingratitude" occurred in March 1943 when the US Ambassador, Admiral Standley, complained at a press conference of the "ungracious" Soviet attitude to both private Aid-to-Russia donations and American help generally.