Lend-Lease and the Victories of the
Red Army

Leo Thomas Crowley (1889 – 1972) was a senior administrator for FDR as the head of the Foreign Economic Administration, and in this Newsweek editorial it recalls a time late in the war when he let-loose some steam having felt that the British and Americans were not getting enough credit for building up the strength of Stalin’s military:

“As Crowley reported, we have sent the Russians hundreds of thousands of motor vehicles, more than 12,000 planes, many thousands of tanks and self-propelled guns, thousands of railroad cars, more than a thousand locomotives, [and] miles of track… We have sent them 11,000,000 pairs of army boots, hundreds of millions of yards of cloth, thousands of machine tools, and many thousand tons of raw and semi-finished materials.”

Nikita Khrushchev writing years later in his 1964 memoirs remarked:

“If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.”