Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II

(Paperback)

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"The United States is a country of machines. Without the use of these machines through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war." Josef Stalin (1943), quoted in W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, Random House, N.Y., 1975, p. 277

The United States shipped more than $12 billion in Lend-Lease aid to Stalin's Russia during World War II. Materials lent, beginning in late 1941 before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, included airplanes and tanks, locomotives and rails, construction materials, entire military production assembly lines, food and clothing, aviation fuel, and much else. Lend-Lease is now recognized by post-Soviet Russian historians as essential to the Soviet war effort. Wielding many facts and statistics never before published in the U.S., author Albert L. Weeks keenly analyzes the diplomatic rationale for and results of this assistance. Russia's Life-Saver is a brilliant contribution to the study of U.S.-Soviet relations and its role in World War II.

Reviews

Russias Life-Saver lifts the curtain on exactly how crucial U.S. Lend-Lease aid was to the USSR's eventual success against Germany in World War II. Until now, all we in the West could really do was guess. We of course knew what we had lent (the numerator) but we didn't know what the secretive Soviets needed (the denominator). Using new evidence from previously-closed Russian archives and new research by native Russian historians, and offering gripping conclusions, Dr. Weeks sets the record straight about this truly pivotal period of twentieth-century history. -- Kenneth MacWilliams, U.S. private investor in Russia since 1991; former Wall Street executive

Author Bio

Albert L. Weeks has been an expert on Soviet Russia for more than fifty years. Weeks has served as a journalist, policy analyst, and professor and is credited with coining the name Sputnik while working for Newsweek in 1957. His books include Stalin's Other War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).