• ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
    28·
    2 years ago

    Uhhh, Tula I think. Plus Izhevsk, Kalashnikov, and Degtyaryov. Yeah, the Soviet Union was pretty good on guns. At least they could get the lend lease correct and say “radios” or “heavy logistics equipment”.

    Also I love how they pulled 600 billion out of their ass. The US send 11 billion dollars worth of equipment to the Soviets… in comparison they sent 35 billion to the British.

    • Magos_Galactose@lemmygrad.ml
      12·
      2 years ago

      And that’s just guns. There’s also the Kharkov Diesel Factories, Leningrad Kirov Plants, Stalingrad Tractor Factory, etc. I could tried to list them all, but they are like thousands of them, to the point most people tend to refer to the entire district of factories rather than individual factory when talk about wartime soviet production.

  • Munrock ☭@lemmygrad.ml
    25·
    2 years ago

    Point out to Americans that they have a massively overinflated sense of their contribution to the war against Nazis, and they respond by citing lend-lease… the importance of which is also massively overinflated.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
    20·
    2 years ago

    My first guess is that this is referring to the Soviet firearms of German origin. I’ll admit, at present I have no statistics on hand for how many Soviet weapons in WWII were of German origin, but considering that the Soviets were already producing millions of their own firearms, such as the Mosin–Nagant, the PPSh-41, the Tokarev TT-33, the Tokarev SVT-40, and others, I really doubt that the percentage was overwhelming. In any case, military history is filled with ‘ironies’ like these where one side acquires the enemy’s weapons and deploys those weapons against them: Finland, for example, deployed quite a few Mosin–Nagants for its conflicts, and I’m sure that its allies sometimes did so, too. It really isn’t that remarkable.

    As for the Lend‐Lease dead horse that antisocialists love beating:

    From 1941 to 1945, total lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union accounted for only 5% of the Soviet GDP in total. And it is a salient point that over 80% of the aid was received after June 1942, when the tide of the war had already turned against the [anticommunists] on the Eastern Front. The Soviets had already won the critical battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. [Fascism] was already losing the war when Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union had any significant effect, and that effect was minuscule compared with Soviet production at the time. By the time the first Sherman laid its tracks on Soviet soil, the writing was already very much on the wall for the Third Reich.

    Although Stalin, Khrushchev, and other Soviet politicians were very complimentary about the Lend-Lease program helping them win the war, the statistics tell a very different story. The noted historian David M. Glantz points out in this regard,

    “Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates….”

    He further states that without Lend-Lease, the Soviets still would have won, but the war would have taken 12 to 18 months longer.

    (Source.)