Red army to receive 250 new types of weaponry in 2006, page 3

Since there are a lot of topics to counter claim and sine I don’t have much time I ll replying to all/most of your claims your in one post

Claim 1 Soviets wont have won without US Aid
Claim 2 WW2 wasn’t only a Russian achievement but a combined achievement

WW2 was my topic and I have read views of 10 historians regarding the great patriotic war 2 of them were communist 3 liberal 3 capitalist and the rest had their own views …all of them differed in opinion but not a single did support your opinion ie “”””””Soviets wont have won without US Aid”””””””””

Following are my arguments against your claim

1 Soviet Union Won not only due to US aid but mainly due to the reforms that were bought in the army: a war technology was improved and updated
B Operation Uranus was initiated
C giving full powers to the brilliant General Gorgi Zhukhov and loosening party control in the army

2 The US that USSR received was mainly Food and Raw material….not prepared goods …
3 These aids were given as “Lend-Lease aid” USSR returned them with full interest …
4 the Trucks that ur speaking of was given to soviet union during the End stages of the war (1945) when the USSR has already defeated Germany and was approaching towards Berlin ….so they played no role as far as protecting our country was involved

Needless to say that the WW2 wasn’t won by a single party be it the British or the US or The USSR each of them helped the other in various way …but ur claims like USSR wont have been to do it without US aid contradicts the view of most historians
To quote Prof Richard Overy

The impressive production of weapons was achieved by turning the whole of the remaining Soviet area into what Stalin called 'a single armed camp', focusing all efforts on military production and extorting maximum labor from a workforce whose only guarantee of food was to turn up at the factory and work the arduous 12-hour shifts. Without Lend-Lease aid, however, from the United States and Britain, both of whom supplied a high proportion of food and raw materials for the Soviet war effort, the high output of weapons would still not have been possible.
The chief explanation lies not in resources, which Germany was more generously supplied with than the Soviet Union, during the two central years of the war before American and British economic power was fully exerted. It lies instead in the remarkable reform of the Red Army and the Russian air force, undertaken slowly in 1942.

…….US and the Brits helped us so did we …….If you say without US help soviets have lost …then I ll say if the Soviets haven’t retaliated the then the Germans would have easily defeated the Brits and with the help of the Japs would have fu..ed the yanks

I agree that US aid helped us a lot but it wasn’t the main reason for our success ….. the main reason for which we won was the reforms that were introduced in the Red Army and the Soviet Industry after 1942

Moreover Stalin Himself thanked the US officially for their help.

With this I ll like to quote few lines by Prof Richard Overy :

Introduction
In his prison cell at Nuremberg, Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, wrote a brief memoir in the course of which he explored the reasons for Germany's defeat.
He picked out three factors that he thought were critical:
the unexpected 'power of resistance' of the Red Army; the vast supply of American armaments; and the success of Allied air power.
This last was Hitler's explanation too.

………………………………………………………….

Yet within a year Soviet factories were out-producing their richly-endowed German counterparts - the Red Army had embarked on a thorough transformation of the technical and organizational base of Soviet forces, and a stiffening of morale, from Stalin downwards, produced the first serious reverse for the German armed forces when Operation Uranus in November 1942 led to the encirclement of Stalingrad and the loss of the German Sixth Army.

The transformation in Soviet fighting power and morale has a number of explanations.

In the first place the Red Army learned a great deal from German practice and from their own mistakes.

The air and tank armies were reorganized to mimic the German Panzer divisions and air fleets; communication and intelligence were vastly improved (helped by a huge supply of American and British telephone equipment and cable); training for officers and men was designed to encourage greater initiative; and the technology available was hastily modernised to match German.

Two other changes proved vital . First, Soviet industry and workforce proved remarkable adaptable for a command economy long regarded as inherently inefficient and inflexible.
pre-war experience of economic planning and mobilisation helped the regime to run a war economy on an emergency basis, while the vast exodus of workers (an estimated 16 million) and factories (more than 2,500 major plants) from in front of the advancing Germans allowed the USSR to reconstruct its armaments economy in central and eastern Russia with great rapidity

The southern attack failed at Stalingrad. After weeks of chaotic retreats and easy German victories, the Red Army solidified its defense and against all the odds clung on to the battered city. In November 1942 Operation Uranus was launched by the Soviets, and the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad was encircled.
Some historians have seen this as the turning point of the war. But not until the Red Army had decisively defeated German forces in the more favourable summer weather of 1943 did the tide really turn.
The Battle of Kursk in July 1943 was one of the greatest set-piece battles in military history. The Red Army withstood a massive German assault, and then counter-attacked. For two years Soviet forces pushed the German army back into Germany, until in May 1945 Soviet forces accepted the surrender of the relic of Hitler's army in Berlin.
The second factor lay with politics. Until the summer of 1942 Stalin and the Party closely controlled the Red Army. Political commissars worked directly alongside senior officers and reported straight back to the Kremlin. Stalin came to realise that political control was a dead hand on the army and cut it back sharply in the autumn of 1942.

[edit on 23-6-2006 by prelude]