Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union at Kursk

The American share

Lend-Lease was the program, authorized by Congress in March 1941, under which the United States supplied war materials to its allies without immediate payment. It was extended to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1941 under a series of annual “protocols” that set what was to be delivered. The second protocol ran from July 1942 to June 1943, the months in which the Kursk salient took shape; the third was signed in October 1943, after the battle (Chapter 1).

In 1942 the aid had been slow and uncertain. The Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel suffered terrible losses, and the routes through Iran and across the Pacific were still being built. In 1943 it began to arrive in quantity. By the figures compiled by Hubert van Tuyll, Allied shipments to the USSR rose from about 2.45 million tons in 1942 to about 4.79 million tons in 1943. Of the 17.5 million tons the United States shipped in the whole war, 27.4 percent went in 1943 and 35.5 percent, the peak, in 1944. Much of the 1943 tonnage arrived after the battle (Chapter 2).

Geography made the program an American logistics campaign in its own right. Most American aid went across the Pacific to Vladivostok in Soviet-flagged ships, which Japan, at peace with the Soviet Union, let pass. A second stream came through the Persian Corridor, where soldiers of the U.S. Army’s Persian Gulf Command, about 30,000 of them at the peak, ran the railway north from the Gulf to the Caspian and, with General Motors, assembled trucks at plants in Andimeshk and Khorramshahr to be driven north to the Soviet border. The Arctic convoys, the shortest route, were suspended in the spring and summer of 1943; the chapters give the demands of the Atlantic, the danger from German surface ships in Norway and the long Arctic daylight as reasons. Aircraft came by a fourth route, the Alaska–Siberia ferry, on which American pilots flew them from Great Falls, Montana, to Fairbanks, Alaska, and Soviet pilots took them on across Siberia by way of Krasnoyarsk (Chapter 7; Chapter 5).

M3s against the Panthers, 5 July

Most of the tanks on the salient were Soviet T-34s and T-70s, but some were American. The Red Army received the M3 medium, called the “General Lee” in Soviet records as it was by the British, and the M3 light tank from 1942, many of them by the Arctic convoys or through Iran; some were lost at sea. Over the whole war the United States sent about 7,000 tanks, 1,386 of them M3 mediums. In Soviet service they went mostly to separate tank regiments and brigades that supported rifle armies, which is how they came to stand in the first line of the 6th Guards Army in July 1943, beside British Valentines and Churchills in other units (Zaloga; Chapter 4).

On 5 July the 245th Tank Regiment, with M3 medium and light tanks, met the newly arrived Panthers of Panzer-Regiment 39 in the opening fight of the XLVIII Panzer Corps’ attack near Cherkasskoye, where the 67th Guards Rifle Division held the village until the evening. Soviet reports admitted losing up to 17 tanks; German reports claimed 28 (Tank Archives). The fight was lopsided. It was also one of the very few direct encounters between American-built tanks and the Panther before American crews met it themselves in Italy and Normandy.

The Red Army did not like the M3. Its tall, riveted hull was easy to see and to hit, and its 75 mm main gun sat in a hull sponson with limited traverse, so the whole tank had to turn to aim it; a 37 mm gun rode in a small turret above. By Zaloga’s account Soviet crews called it the “grave for seven brothers,” for its crew of seven. Against the Panther’s long 75 mm gun it was badly outmatched. On the northern face a few separate tank regiments also used M3s, and over the war Lend-Lease tanks came to about 8 percent of Soviet production (Chapter 3; Chapter 2). The tanks were the most visible American contribution at Kursk. They were not the most important one.

Airacobras and Bostons

Two American aircraft types served the Soviet air forces in numbers: the Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter and the Douglas A-20 Boston light bomber. The Soviet Union received 4,719 P-39s by one count and 4,773 by another, more than a third of all the American and British fighters in its air force, and 3,414 A-20s, of which 2,771 went to the air force (Gordon and Donald, as cited in Chapter 5). The Airacobra, unloved by the U.S. Army Air Forces, found its best use in Soviet hands as a low- and medium-altitude fighter. Soviet pilots removed its wing guns to improve its roll and called it “Kobrushka,” the little cobra; Aleksandr Pokryshkin scored 47 of his 59 victories in it, more than any other Allied pilot in an American fighter.

The Airacobra is often said to have fought at Kursk with the 2nd Air Army. The sources this collection relies on do not show it. In the spring and summer of 1943 the Soviet P-39 regiments were concentrated over the Kuban bridgehead and in the air defense forces, and the fighter corps over the salient flew Soviet Yaks and La-5s. American aircraft did fight at Kursk in the 2nd Air Army’s 208th Night Bomber Aviation Division, which flew A-20B Bostons alongside Soviet types. Less visibly, American aluminum, high-octane aviation fuel and additives, machine tools and radios went into the Soviet aircraft that did the fighting; how much is still debated (van Tuyll; Weeks).

Studebakers on the road west

The defensive battle in July was fought from prepared positions supplied by rail. The counteroffensives that followed, Kutuzov against Orel from 12 July and Rumyantsev against Belgorod and Kharkov from 3 August, were different. The armies had to move 100 km or more beyond their railheads, across ground where the Germans had wrecked the railways and bridges as they left. Ammunition, fuel, food and the infantry that followed the tank armies moved by road, and an increasing share of the vehicles on those roads had come from the United States (Glantz and House; van Tuyll; Chapter 7).

Over the whole war the Soviet Union received 427,284 trucks and jeeps from the United States by Albert Weeks’s count, among them about 150,000 Studebaker US6 2½-ton trucks. The Studebaker, tested by the Red Army from July 1942 to May 1943, became its favorite heavy truck, the standard prime mover for its artillery and the carrier of the BM-13 Katyusha rocket launcher. The numbers should be stated carefully. By most estimates only a minority of the Red Army’s trucks in mid-1943 were American, though the share was already large in the tank and mechanized units that led the advances; it rose to roughly a third of all Soviet motor transport by 1945 (Chapter 2; Chapter 7).

Rail equipment followed the same curve. The United States sent 1,911 steam and 66 diesel locomotives and 11,225 railway cars, at a time when Soviet industry built only 92 locomotives of its own between 1942 and 1945, but most of them arrived in 1944 and 1945. Field telephones and wire, explosives and food were arriving by the summer of 1943. Soviet soldiers came to know American canned pork, which they called “second front” in sarcasm at the delay of the Allied landing in France. Lend-Lease food came to about 4.5 million tons over the war by Weeks’s count; a recent study based on Soviet archives argues that it was less than 1 percent of the food available in the country and that most of it arrived after Kursk (Suadicani, as cited in Chapter 2). Zhukov, in a conversation recorded by the KGB in 1963, said that the Americans had helped above all with explosives and gunpowder.

What it did and did not do

Two opposite claims still circulate: that the Russians won at Kursk with American equipment, and, in the Soviet version, that Lend-Lease was a few percent of Soviet output and hardly mattered. Neither is right. The tanks, guns and aircraft that stopped Citadel were overwhelmingly Soviet-built, and the Kursk fortress was dug with Soviet spades. But Soviet production in 1943 depended on imported aluminum, machine tools, explosives and fuel, and the Red Army’s ability to supply and move its forces depended more and more on American trucks, locomotives, railcars and rails (Chapter 9).

Khrushchev later recalled Stalin saying privately that without American help the Soviet Union could not have won. David Glantz, a retired U.S. Army colonel and the leading American historian of the Eastern Front, judges that Lend-Lease did not decide the battles of 1941–42, which were settled before most of it arrived, but that without it the Red Army might have needed 12 to 18 months longer to defeat Germany (Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed). At Kursk the American contribution was real but modest in the defense and considerably greater in the offensives that followed it. Lend-Lease made the road from Kursk to Berlin faster and cheaper. It did not win the battle in July 1943.

Americans at home learned little about the battle at the time. Newspapers in July 1943 printed Soviet communiqués with their inflated claims, and the landing in Sicily filled the front pages. The workers who canned pork in Cincinnati and built trucks in South Bend had a share in the summer of 1943 that few of them could have placed on a map.

The insignia, rendered

Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The program had no shoulder insignia of its own. The drawings borrow the white star of American national markings, which Lend-Lease vehicles and aircraft did not keep in Soviet service.

Timeline

1. March 1941Congress passes the Lend-Lease Act.
2. Autumn 1941Lend-Lease is extended to the Soviet Union under the first protocol.
3. July 1942The second protocol begins; the Red Army starts trials of the Studebaker US6, which run to May 1943.
4. Spring–summer 1943The Arctic convoys are suspended; supplies come by the Persian Corridor and the Pacific.
5. May 1943Pilots of the 21st Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment collect P-39s at Krasnoyarsk on the Alaska–Siberia route.
6. June 1943The Kroger plant in Cincinnati packs canned pork for the USSR.
7. 5 July 1943M3 tanks of the 245th Tank Regiment meet the Panthers near Cherkasskoye; Soviet reports admit up to 17 lost.
8. 12 July–23 August 1943In the Kutuzov and Rumyantsev offensives, trucks carry the Red Army’s supplies beyond its railheads.
9. October 1943The third protocol is signed.
10. 1944The peak year: 35.5 percent of all American wartime tonnage to the USSR.

Where the American equipment served

Read the full story

• Chapter 1: After Stalingrad: Kharkov, the Salient and the Decision for Citadel
• Chapter 2: The Soviet Fortress: Minefields, Strongpoints and the Waiting Armies
• Chapter 4: The Southern Face: Panthers, the SS and the Road to Oboyan
• Chapter 5: The Air War over Kursk
• Chapter 7: Citadel Called Off: Kutuzov, Rumyantsev and the Liberation of Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov
• Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory of Kursk
• The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas

By the numbers

Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union by the numbers

4.79 Mtons of Allied aid shipped to the USSR in 1943, nearly double 1942; much of it arrived after Kursk

427,284trucks and jeeps from the United States over the war, about 150,000 of them Studebakers

1,911American steam locomotives, when Soviet plants built only 92 in 1942–45

~30,000soldiers of the U.S. Persian Gulf Command at the peak, running the railway to the Caspian

≤17M3 tanks of the 245th Tank Regiment admitted lost against the Panthers on 5 July 1943

~$11 bnin goods sent by the United States to the USSR in the whole war

The flow arrives, 1942–1943

Allied shipments to the Soviet Union, millions of tons

1942

2.45 M t

1943

4.79 M t

Source: Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear (1989), as given in this collection’s Chapter 2

Selected American deliveries to the USSR, 1941–45

Units delivered over the whole war (P-39 counts differ between sources, 4,719 to 4,773)

Tanks, all types (about)

~7,000

Bell P-39 Airacobra fighters

4,719–4,773

Douglas A-20 Boston bombers

3,414

Locomotives, steam and diesel

1,977

M3 medium tanks

1,386

Source: Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver (2004); Steven J. Zaloga; Gordon and Donald, as cited in this collection’s Chapter 5

In pictures

More photographs

In the art of World War II

Insignia, posters and art

Trans-Iranian RailroadUnloading Liberty ShipsArms for Russia — A Great Convoy Sails into MurmanskRush Aid to RussiaPokryshkin’s aces and a Lend-Lease AiracobraWe Must Be the Great Arsenal of Democracy

Explore the Art of World War II →

Sources

• Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (New York: Greenwood, 1989).
• Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004).
• T. H. Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1952).
• David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), and When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995; rev. ed. 2015).
• Steven J. Zaloga, Osprey studies of Lend-Lease armor and Panther vs T-34: Ukraine 1943 (2007); Tank Archives (Peter Samsonov), “Panthers at Kursk” (2014).
• Wikipedia, “Lend-Lease” (U.S. shipments by year; Suadicani on food), “Studebaker US6”, “Bell P-39 Airacobra” (citing Morgan, Drabkin, Donald and Bergström) and “Douglas A-20 Havoc” (citing Gordon).
• Photographs: U.S. Office of War Information (Library of Congress); Soviet wartime photographs from TASS, RGAKFD, the Russian Ministry of Defence and the State Catalogue of the Museum Fund of Russia; all via Wikimedia Commons.