Bullsh!t. They gained no ground and were pushed back. The result was a loss of lots of tanks including the new war winner… the Panther, used for the first time and I know more were lost to mechanical problems than enemy action, but just because they failed mechanically meant when captured they were captured in better condition than if they had made it into battle. The Battle of Kursk was a German attempt to pinch the Soviet forces in a pcoket and annihalate them. They did not achieve that. It was also supposed to restart blitzkrieg and momentum as the forces lost by the Soviets would leave the way open to Moscow. That didn’t happen either. The real result is that from then on the Germans retreated and never looked like they could win the war in the east again. Tactical victory my A$$.

Garry, please read my post. I was not talking about Kursk battle (a clear defeat for Germans since they didn’t achieve their goals, abeit provoking more losses to the Sovites compeared with thier own loses). I was talking about a specific episode–the famous tank battle at Prokhorovka, because a poster bring it into discution. The Panther was used indeed in the Kursk battle, as well as the Tiger, but not in that clash at Prokhorovka.

Most of the supplies from the brits were not that much use.

If the british tanks were not much of use, I doubt that those 3,300 Hurricanses and Spitfires weere “not that much use”

Most of the supplies from the US were too late. The extension of the lend lease program to the Soviets didn’t happen till about november of 41.

But when were these aircraft delivered? Most of those thousands of fighters destroyed on the ground were Polikarpovs. I-16s and I-15s. Their loss was a good thing as they would not have stood up well against Bf-109s. The LaGG-3 and Yak-1s were just being introduced and bore the brunt of the fighting. Those aircraft you list being sent to support the Soviets, the vast majority didn’t arrive till after 42, when their presence was not that important. You also list the total sent… not all of them arrived.

P 39s and Hurricanes were introduced in Oct ’41 at Moscow and Leningrad and the P 39 in May 1942.

The LaGG-3 and Yak-1s were just being introduced and bore the brunt of the fighting.

The US/UK suplied aircraft represented some 50% of the fighters used to defend Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 41-42. …

and again… all were paid for.

No!

Well DUH. If you are buying train locomotives from overseas WTF would you waste resources building more yourself?

They were for free

Yeah, again… buy thousands of Trucks from a foreign source and then building a whole lot yourself doesn’t make much sense.

Again, there were for free

Bought and paid for. I am sure the US made a huge profit while the Soviets fought WWII.

Do a google on Lend-lease

I’m flabbergasted by that comment. I don’t think the army Rommel had in tunisa was anywhere near the numbers of Von Paulus’ if you don’t count the italian troops, which had equipment that rendered them pretty much useless.

Nic

You can’t compare Stalingrad with N Africa, nevertheless the Aliies took 250,000 prisoners (half of the Germans). And about 1/3 of the Wermacht and 1/5 of the Luftwaffe was fighting US/UK in Italy, later in France and so on.

And they are both owe to foreigners.

No, no, no! You’re still confusing two types of debt, owed by different people to different people! That’s 75.3% of GOVERNMENT debt is owed to foreigners, & 24.7% to Russians. The foreign debt figure given by the CIA is TOTAL foreign debt, i.e. all liabilities of Russian residents, including the government, private citizens, & corporations, to foreigners. You keep mixing up private & government. You really are very confused!

If current government debt is 12.9% of GDP, & 75.3% is owed to foreigners, then government foreign debt is 9.7% of GDP ($71.8bn). If total foreign debt is 29.1% of GDP (what the CIA says – $215.3 bn & $740.7 bn), that means private foreign debt is 19.4% of GDP ($143.5bn). Got it now?

Nowhere on the CIA website – or anywhere else – does it say that 12.9% of GDP is the domestic debt of the Russian government. It says it’s the public debt, i.e. the totaldebt of the Russian government. You’ve chosen to interpret that as internal – I don’t know why.

My figure was wrong, but yours too! 🙂 According to th Russian Central bank, http://www.cbr.ru/eng/statistics/credit_statistics/print.asp?file=debt_an_e.htm the Govt. chunk of the Russian external debt is $ 158 bln. Also from the Novosti, we know that the domestic part of the Govt. debt is 24.7%, so the external part (those 154.4 bln) represent the remaining 75.3%. That means that the total govt. debt (internal+external) is $ 203 bln. This means 27 % of the Russian GDP (740 bl.)

While no one can deny the burden supported by Soviets in WW II (20,000,000 losess) there are some points:

Sure the U.S lend a helping hand by way of trucks and others. I remember the Maltilda tanks offered were all melted and used for the production of a more efficient T34 which really won the war.

Matilda was a British tank, not American. The Americans gave Shermans.

Think about the battle of KURSK the greatest ever fought tank battle in the history of warfare- 5000 tanks on each side,the best the Germans could muster

Kursk was a conventional action; during this battle there was an episode -battle of Prokhorovka- were some 200 tanks of the II SS Panzerkorps met some 500 tanks of the Soviet 5th Guard Tank Army. At the enfd of the day, though in numerical inferiority, the the German destroyed twice as many Soviet tank they lost. By the way, most of the German tank were not the mighty Tiger, but older P III an PIV; OTOH most of the Soviet tanks were older types too: T 70 (no longer produced by that time) and British-supplied Churchils. As in the case of Tigers, only a few T 34 were used in that battle. In the end the Germans won a tactical victory, but it neither side reached thier objectives, so this episode is considered a draw.

I haven’t seen any U.S fighters flown by the Russians.

In fact US gave some 14,000 planes (mostly fighters) to USSR. Though it represented only some 18 % of the total used by USSR in WWII, it is important when those were supplied: in a period where the Soviets had nothing else capable to face the Luftwaffe. Over a thousand fighters were destroyed on ground in June 22, the first day of German attack, and the remaining was a joke compared with the German Bf 109. Also the Soviets finished to relocate the aircraft factories and start the production of modern fighters (Yak 3, Yak 7,Yak 9, La 5, La7) only in the second half of 1942. Until then, the most of the fighters used by the Soviets, that were capable to face the Luftwaffe, were US supplied the P 39 and the P 40. US supplied some 5000 P39Airacobra, some 2400 P63Kincobra, some 2500 P 40. The UK delivereed to USSR some 3000 Hurricanes and 1300 Spitfire.

Russia used their own bombers and fighters explicitly.

In fact, although the Soviets produced some of the best ground atack aircraft (Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik, Ilyushin 10) most of the dedicated bombers were B 25 Mitchell, equally supplied by US.

Some data regarding the Lend-lease program:

A total of $50.1 billion worth of supplies were shipped. $31.4 billion went to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France (that is, Free France), and $1.6 billion to China. Reverse Lend Lease comprised services (like rent on air bases) that went to the U.S. It totalled $7.8 billion, of which $6.8 billion came from the Britain and the Commonwealth. Apart from that, there were no repayments of supplies that arrived before the termination date. (Supplies after that date were sold to Britain at a 75% discount, or $650 million, using long-term loans from the U.S.)

Much of the aid can be better understood when considering the economic distortions caused by the war. Most belligerent powers cut back on production of nonessentials severely, concentrating on producing weapons. This inevitably produced shortages of related products needed by the military or as part of the military/industrial economy.

For example, the USSR was highly dependent on trains, yet the desperate need to produce weapons meant that fewer than 20 new locomotives were produced in the USSR during the entire war. In this context, the supply of 1,981 US locomotives can be better understood. Likewise, the Soviet air force was almost completely dependent on US supplies of very high octane aviation fuel. Although most Red Army tank units were equipped with Soviet-built tanks, their logistical support was provided by hundreds of thousands of high-quality US-made trucks. Indeed by 1945 nearly two-thirds of the truck strength of the Red Army was US-built. Trucks such as the Dodge ¾ ton and Studebaker 2.5 ton, were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. US supplies of waterproof telephone cable, aluminium, and canned rations were also critical.

US deliveries to USSR
The list 1 below is the amount of war matériel shipped to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program from the beginning of it until September 30, 1945.

Aircraft 14,795
Tanks 7,056
Jeeps 51,503
Trucks 375,883
Motorcycles 35,170
Tractors 8,071
Guns 8,218
Machine guns 131,633
Explosives 345,735 tons
Building equipment valued $10,910,000
Railroad freight cars 11,155
Locomotives 1,981
Cargo ships 90
Submarine hunters 105
Torpedo boats 197
Ship engines 7,784
Food supplies 4,478,000 tons
Machines and equipment $1,078,965,000
Non-ferrous metals 802,000 tons
Petroleum products 2,670,000 tons
Chemicals 842,000 tons
Cotton 106,893,000 tons
Leather 49,860 tons
Tires 3,786,000
Army boots 15,417,000 pairs

Regardless of Soviet cold-war attempts to forget (or at least diminish) the importance of Lend-lease, the total impact of the Lend-Lease shipment for the Soviet war effort and entire national economy can only be characterized as both dramatic and of decisive importance. The outcome of the war on the East front might well have taken another path without Lend-lease.

Lend-lease aircraft amounted to 18% of all aircraft in the Soviet air forces, 20% of all bombers, and 16-23% of all fighters (numbers vary depending on calculation methods), and 29% of all naval aircraft. In some AF commands and fronts the proportion of Lend-Lease aircraft was even higher: of the 9.888 fighters delivered to the air defense (PVO) fighter units in 1941-45 6.953 (or over 70%!) were British or American. In the AF of the Karelian front lend-lease aircraft amounted to about two-thirds of all combat aircraft in 1942-43, practically all torpedo bombers of the naval air forces were A-20G Bostons in 1944-45 etc.

Some American aircraft types were simply irreplaceable and very highly appreciated on all levels during the war, e.g. P-39 Airacobra fighters, A-20 Boston and B-25 Mitchell bombers and C-47 transport aircraft.

The above are from a Russian site: http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/geust/aircraft_deliveries.htm

As a footnote: some people on this forum persist in saying that these US deliveries were payed in gold. False!

The biggest recipient of Lend-lease was UK with 31 billion USD (at the value of 1945!). In return, the Americans demanded the right to use some British naval bases. Also, all the material on the British soil in the moment the US terminated the Lend-lease program was sold to UK at 25cents/dollars, that’s a 75% discount. The sum was $650 million (or 2 % from the total !) and this with long-term loans from US. The last tranche will be payed in December 2006! (61 years after the end of WWII). I would call this quite generous…

The Soviets did pay in gold , but only for the materiel received until 1October 1941. That’s less than 1 %. All the rest was given for free, with the obligation that all the materiel not destroyed in action to be returned after the war. However large quantities of materiel weren’t returned.

Afraid not. The article you link to quite clearly says “state debt” (the total government debt) is forecast to fall to 12.4% of GDP by 2008, while “national domestic debt” is forecast to increase from 24.7% to 42.7%. Now, how can we reconcile these two statements? Easy – the latter figures refer to the percentage of the debt, not the percentage of GDP. The article is all about how the Russian government is paying off debts, reducing its total indebtedness, but within that reducing total, concentrating on paying off the foreign portion, so the domestic share will rise.

🙂 OK, so let’s follow your logic:
-24.7 is the percentage of the national domestic debt from the total debt;
-so it result that the foreign part of the debt is 75.3%;
– if the figure of CIA is correct, the 31 billion (foreign part) is 75.3%;
-so the total debt is somewhere 41% of the GDP…

Yeah Russia who sells oil for revenue is a 3rd world country,fine Great,they are more than happy with such contemptible accolades. Nigera,Venezuela,Iran,Iraq,Saudi Arabia,Kuwait,Angola and some others are all 3rd world countries. But I don’t think the U.S had ever paid $400 million to any of these countries to just gain cutting edge space technology knowledge in terms of teaching them how to really go about hanging it. I don’t think spies from the U.S always took it to lenghs to go about stealing their state-of-the-art technologies,just as the Russian spies tried to steal that of the U.S.
Don’t worry Russians would no sooner after learning the art of market economy,trade and commerce would also start to make fridges,VCRs,radios,building materials,textiles,soft drinks,electronic gadgets,pharmaceutical products and what nots to start making money just like the U.S has been doing over 200 years ago.
They are young in this aspect. The CIA has no credibility, they can even make the difference between AK-47 and nuclear device in Iraq. I don’t think a country, a 3rd world by our earthly rank even though God created a single world without any classification can dare hold the “mightiest of all mighty nation on mother earth” at bay for over 60years, avoiding a scary conflict with that 3rd world country. Get the paradox and logic, heh?

Cool down E. Didn’t say Russia is a 3rd world country. If you red you’ll see that I’ve said that Russian exports are like those of 3rd world country. Satisfied? :p