Quote:
Originally Posted by aspqrz
And you miss the point entirely.
The USSR was able to produce as much of pretty much anything it actually did produce because they didn't have to produce a lot of the stuff that the Allies provided to them. They could survive Butcher Stalin's squandering of their manpower and still field massive armies because they didn't have to have as many factory workers as they would have required without Lend Lease.
It is widely understood by specialists (and, afaict, never mentioned in non-specialist works) that Soviet Industry was wildly inefficient compared to Western Industry and that the fact that they were supplied by Lend Lease meant they could comb out far more now redundant workers than the Lend Lease supplies actually represented.
The fact that they produced a lot of stuff is ... nice ... but irrelevant.
And a lot of what they produced was, compared to allied stuff, crap ... they had to produce a lot of it because it wore out, broke down, or was unserviceable most of the time.
Allied Tanks, for example, were operational around 80% of the time. Russian Tanks? About 30-40%. So the Russians had to field twice as many tanks as an Allied Force to simply have the same number operational.
Russian tanks wore out faster, too. T-34s typically went into battle with extra Transmissions loaded on their back deck because they were so unreliable and the MTBF of a T-34 was around 100 hours, or 250 klicks, before it required a major rebuild ... and after another 100 hours or 250 klicks it was more often than not uneconomic to repair.
A lot of Russian equipment was like that ... so if they produced a lot of it, that is not an indicator of the actual value of the stuff, or even how much of it was usable or survived the war.
Phil
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So if I understand correctly you are saying that the USSR was only able to build so many tanks, artillery, munitions, aircraft etc in WW2 because Allied Lend Lease supplied them with everything else. Also unlike Britain for example the Soviets didn't have the specialised industrial expertise, machinery and tools to mass produce material that they would have needed to support themselves. Well if that is the case how come the Soviet Union was supplied with 10,982 millions dollars worth of Lend Lease and the British Empire was supplied with 31,387 million dollars worth of Lend Lease (3 times as much as the USSR)? Also can you compare the difference between the material that the United States supplied to the Soviet Union and the British Empire for comparison to support that statement?