Brent Cooper
Trial and appellate counsel for Cooper & Scully (1993–present)Tue

I know Americans often glorify their hand in WWII. How much did we
really help?

Khrushchev and Zhukov after WWII

One can look at several indicia such as casualties, war materiel
supplied, battles won. However, in my opinion the opinions of the other
Allied leaders is telling. They were there. They knew the impact the US had.

According to the Russian historian Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Lend-Lease
had a crucial role in winning the war:

On the whole the following conclusion can be drawn: that 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. The Soviet authorities were well aware
of this dependency on Lend-Lease. Thus, Stalin told Harry Hopkins [FDR's
emissary to Moscow in July 1941] that the U.S.S.R. could not match
Germany's might as an occupier of Europe and its resources.

Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and
intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed
directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs:

I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on
whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi
Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and
Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and
repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves.
He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would
not have won the war. 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. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don't
think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state
here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these
were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding
a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of
relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and
present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had
traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his
remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.

Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conferenceduring 1943, acknowledged
publicly the importance of American efforts during a dinner at the
conference: "Without American machines the United Nations could never
have won the war."

In a confidential interview with the wartime correspondent Konstantin
Simonov, the Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov is quoted as saying:

Today [1963] some say the Allies didn't really help us ... But listen,
one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without
which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able
to continue the war.

Churchill was even more effusive. In Churchill’s speech at the Mansion
House in London on November 10, 1941, he states, “The Lease-Lend Bill
must be regarded without question as the most unsordid act in the whole
of recorded history.” Churchill used this quote again when speaking in
the House of Commons after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death, when he
remarked, “At about that same time he devised the extraordinary measure
of assistance called Lend-Lease, which will stand forth as the most
unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country in all history.”

So did the Americans play a substantial role In WWII? According to
Stalin, Zhukov, Khrushchev and Churchill they did. Not only substantial,
but indispensable.

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63 comments from
Edgar D. McDonald II
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On 29/01/2022 14:19, a425couple wrote:>
> So did the Americans play a substantial role In WWII? According to
> Stalin, Zhukov, Khrushchev and Churchill they did. Not only substantial,
> but indispensable.

Clearly they did, and I doubt too many reasonable people dispute it.
Lend-lease played a part, although in reality the Artic convoys were not
the be all and end all to Germany losing the war.

I would say the ability of the Allies to launch D-Day in June 1944 and
attack the German forces from the West was the biggest contribution that
the US provided. Could Britain - and her Commonwealth allies - have
mounted that invasion of continental Europe in 1944 with enough
firepower to force the Germans back without the involvement of US
forces? I doubt it very much. So the answer to the question is, yes the
US did play a substantial role.