West’s WWII Military Assistance to Soviet Union – 5 Things to Know
Western arms deliveries to Moscow between 1941-45 were small in scale, didn’t help much, and a lot of it was obsolete, cast-off equipment the US and British armies didn’t want – that’s how the current Kremlin’s party line about Western WWII assistance goes.
The reality was pretty different from the Russian Federation’s 2025 officially sanctioned narrative.
Here are five things you should know.
1. Western and many Russian historians, as well as top Soviet officials at the time, all say Western assistance was critical to preventing Soviet defeat by Nazi Germany.
Academic, peer-reviewed research from the 1990s up to the present day agrees that foreign assistance mostly delivered by the US Lend Lease program made a giant and decisive contribution to the Soviet War effort.
The US military historian David Glantz, a leading Western Red Army scholar, has estimated that had the West not helped the Soviet Union it still would have won, but the war would have lasted 18-24 months longer, 1.5-2 million more Soviet citizens would have died, and the USSR would have been completely exhausted and unable to defend itself after.
Russian historian Boris Sokolov in a 2007 review of Western assistance to the Soviet Union wrote: “Without these Western shipments under Lend-Lease the Soviet Union not only would not have been able to win the Great Patriotic War, it would not have been able even to oppose the German invaders, since it could not itself produce sufficient quantities of arms and military equipment or adequate supplies of fuel and ammunition.”
Even Josef Stalin, authoritarian leader of the Soviet Union during the war, said at the 1943 Tehran conference “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.”
Nikita Khrushchev, a top member of the Soviet leadership during the war, wrote in his memoirs “Britain and the United States did everything they could to provide us with material aid of all kinds, above all military aid… If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany’s pressure, and we would have lost the war.”
Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the senior Red Army general, was recorded by the KGB in 1963 as stating: “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?”
2. Emergency assistance from the UK in late 1941-early ‘42 enabled the Red Army’s first successful counteroffensive, and helped prevent German destruction of the Soviet forces defending Moscow.
The Soviet Union started the war with more than 20,000 tanks but German blitzkrieg tactics and poor Soviet generalship wiped practically all those tanks from the Red Army’s balance sheet by October 1941. The German Luftwaffe, similarly, destroyed almost the entire Red Air Force on the ground.
To assist this sudden critical shortage of tanks and combat aircraft, Britain sent emergency deliveries to the Soviet Union between October 1941 and February 1942 that partially filled that equipment gap.
By the time of the Battle of Moscow, about one in three tanks in the Red Army came from the UK, and about 40% of functional Soviet fighter aircraft along the fighting front were British made. There were similar deliveries of artillery pieces and ammunition.
The UK sent the weaponry at a time that Commonwealth troops in North Africa faced severe equipment shortages and military disaster overwhelmed British forces in the Far East.
Had those British weapons not reached Soviet troops defending Moscow in time, it is at least possible that the Wehrmacht would have captured the Russian capital sometime in late 1941 – capturing the most important transportation, administrative and industrial hub in the entire Soviet Union.
It is difficult to see how the Red Army could have successfully counter-attacked during the Battle of Moscow, which began in December 1941, without that critical British assistance.
3. Researchers say Western assistance to the Soviet Union amounted to around 15% of the entire Soviet war effort. But in several important equipment and material categories that figure was a lot higher.
Over the course of the war, about 30% of all Soviet fighter planes were foreign-made, mostly by the US but some by Britain. Famously, fighter pilot Aleksandr Pokryshkin, the Soviet ace-of-aces with 64 kills, flew a US-made P-39 Airacobra fighter plane by choice.
The Soviet Union produced little in the way of military communications equipment during the war, and in 1941, the Red Army was incapable of conducting large-scale, fast-paced offensives because it had no radios and far too few of the telephones needed to coordinate such operations. The West delivered 35,000 radio stations, 380,000 field telephones and 956,000 miles of telephone cable, which enabled the Red Army to conduct the largest-scale mechanized offensives in history by the end of the war.
More than half (56%) of all the railroad lines laid down by the Soviet Union during World War Two, were forged in the US.
Close to two-thirds (60%) of aluminum supplies – a critical material in aircraft and military engine production – used in Soviet factories during the war, was imported.
Almost all (82%) of the copper used by Soviet industry primarily in munitions production, was mined and processed outside the Soviet Union and imported.
4. Several areas of Western assistance were so critical to the Soviet war effort, it is difficult to imagine the Red Army fighting effectively without it.
Locomotives and logistics – During the war the US handed over 1,911 locomotives compared with Soviet production from 1942-45 of 92 locomotives. Without made-in-the-USA locomotives Soviet railroads and most of its industry would have ground to a halt.
Trucks and mechanized operations – During the war the US sent the Soviet Union about a half million wheeled vehicles of all types including 360,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, and 32,000 motorcycles. These vehicles were by most standards the highest quality vehicles of their type produced anywhere.
Roughly every second wheeled vehicle operated by the Red Army was foreign built and, by the end of the war, it was two out of every three vehicles. Trucks are the key to supplying fast-moving armored units and hauling infantry and artillery to keep up with them. Without imported vehicles, particularly the Studebaker truck, the Red Army’s tank offensives that overran Germany and broke the back of the Wehrmacht would have advanced at the pace of a foot soldier.
Aviation fuel and fighter planes – About half of all aviation fuel and particularly two-thirds of high-grade aviation fuel was manufactured outside the Soviet Union. All of the highest-grade aviation fuel (100 octane) needed by the best fighters, was imported. High performance fighters are used for air superiority and to hunt down enemy planes. Without foreign assistance, somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of Red Army fighter missions during the war probably could never have been flown.
Explosives – Slightly more than half (53%) of all explosives used in artillery shells, rifle and machine gun cartridges, rockets and bombs was foreign-manufactured – about 300,000 tons from the US and 22,000 tons by the Commonwealth. Had that mass of imported explosives not been available, the battlefield firepower of every Soviet air, land, and sea launched weapon fielded during the war, would have been about half of what was needed and used.
5. Russia paid for Western Aid to the Soviet Union, but it took 63 years and only then to the US
Overall, the US sent the Soviet Union $11.3 billion (equivalent to $180 billion in today’s rates) in Lend Lease assistance. Installment repayment for the assistance stalled during the Cold War, restarted in 1971, and was paid intermittently until the break-up of the Soviet Union. Finally, the US agreed to accept $733 million and to write off the remaining Kremlin debt in 2006.
Commonwealth assistance to the Soviet Union was in the form of a grant to a wartime ally and Moscow did not compensate London for it.
BONUS NOTE: Another weakness of the modern Russian Federation argument that the Soviet Union is the main victim of Nazi aggression, is Soviet complicity with the Reich in European aggression, prior to Germany’s invasion, for almost two years.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, officially the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with a secret protocol establishing Soviet and German spheres of influence across Eastern Europe.
The pact was signed in Moscow on Aug. 23, 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
A week later Hitler invaded Poland and allowed the Soviet Union to annex the eastern half of the country.
That same year the Soviet Union, supported by German arms shipments, invaded Finland. After a disastrously unsuccessful war, the Soviet Union annexed 10% of Finland.
In 1940, Red Army troops occupied Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – all independent states at the time – and installed puppet regimes.
That same year Red Army troops invaded and annexed the Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and several islands in the Danube delta.
Modern Russian historians usually say Soviet aggression against Poland, Finland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, along with military alliance with the Third Reich, was a clever strategy that forestalled the German invasion of the Soviet Union and demonstrated the strength of the Red Army.
Most independent historians see Soviet aggression against its neighbors in the 1939-40 period as a partial trigger for Germany’s subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union, because Kremlin greed for new territories destroyed buffer states between it and Germany. At the same time, Soviet forces were scattered across East Europe.
In Finland the Red Army was gutted with losses and shown to be incompetently led. Those historians say this all led to Germany’s conclusion that the Soviet Union was over-extended, and the Red Army would be an easy target.
In the early days of the German invasion, Western democracies were hesitant to assist the Soviet Union at all – which they accounted as almost as big an aggressor as Germany.
Two countries – Romania and Finland – subsequently helped Germany attack in 1941, primarily to recover territory taken from them by the Red Army in 1939 and/or 1940.
Havlat, Denis – Western aid for the Soviet Union during World War II, Master’s Thesis, University of Vienna, 2015
Hill, Alexander – British Lend-Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941–June 1942. (Peer-reviewed journal). The Journal of Military History: Vol. 71, issue 3, 2007.Munting, Roger – Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort, 1984, Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 19, Issue 3, 1984
Sokolov, Boris
– “Правда о Великой Отечественной войне (сборник статей)” – St. Petersburg, 2007
– The role of Lend Lease in Soviet Military Efforts, 1941-45, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 1994, Volume 7, Issue 3
Source: Stefan Korshak