Looking at Wikipedia’s numbers maybe 7% of Soviet Army airplanes were from Land-Lease program. They were producing over 40k aircraft per year late in the war while they only got 11k planes from the US during the whole war, total.
You amaze me.
Why did the USA and Great Britain bother to send them any?
Hmm, the Lend-Lease article has different numbers than the article about Soviet Air Force:
“Likewise, the Soviet air force received 18,700 aircraft, which amounted to about 14% of Soviet wartime aircraft production (19% for military aircraft).”
Whichever numbers are correct they still produced plenty of their own planes: various Yaks, Il-2s, Pe-2s, La-5s and Il-4s etc.
I think such a war would likely see the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons. The which would be a decidedly one-sided affairs for some years. Also, I think the U.S. forces in the pacific would likely invade eastern Siberia, making for a two- front war.
From what I understand the vast majority of those were the Bell Cobra series of aircraft which the Soviets loved, it was the acemaker for their top pilots.
B29s would’ve played a bigger role in a hypothetical late 1945 conflict, and they would’ve been in range of most of the Urals. Furthermore, Russia didn’t really have any suitable high altitude interceptors that could seriously challenge B29s. They could’ve gone in unescorted with fairly minimal losses. What’s going to go up there and challenge B29 fleets like a ME109K or a FW190D would? The LA-5? Yak-9s? The Russian air force was built around low level operations and ground attack aircraft, not high level interceptors.
That said, the general strategic bombing campaign of industry against Germany was not terribly effective. It might be more so against the USSR, since their production facilities weren’t hardened and distributed in the same manner that Germany was forced to, because they were protected by distance. So it’s possible a bombing campaign would’ve been more effective.
But even so, the impact of even a very successful strategic bombing campaign - even with a limited number of atomic weapons - would likely be less of a shock to Russian industry than the stop of lend-lease. So many industries would’ve ground down to a halt upon cessation of that incoming supply. People tend to only think of Lend Lease in terms of tanks, planes, and trucks - but possibly more important were vital materials and tools to keep industry going. Raw materials, things like ball bearings and nuts and bolts, machine tools, thousands of locomotives and material to build/repair rail tracks, clothing and non-perishable foods, countless supplies of hundreds of vital sorts of things kept Russian industry up and going. The sudden stopping of that supply would be more devastating than any strategic air campaign.
I couldn’t find numbers of active aircraft from 1945 with a quick google search, so I don’t know what the number of combat-ready aircraft available would be. But for comparison sake, the UK alone almost matched Russian production of aircraft during the war, and the US was more than double the UK’s. And the western allies achieved a much greater degree of air supremacy on their front, leading to very few losses to aircraft in the last year of the war. Germany was still able to field local superiority against the Soviet air force until the last few months of the war, and the main limitation was fuel rather than overwhelming Soviet airpower. Soviet Aircraft production during the war was a third of what the western allies managed, and the Germans destroyed a much greater fraction of what they were able to field than they did against the western allies.
Maybe my prediction of air supremacy within a month might be a tad optimistic, although I’m not so sure (air superiority tends to empower itself, as it gives the ability to kill enemy aircraft on the ground), but they would’ve without a doubt had local air superiority whenever they wanted it.
You may be right about this. I’m going from 15 year old memories of some books I read - I may be making a mistake about Shermans issued to the guards units specifically. But Russian tankers generally did prefer to have Shermans when possible - they were, at worst, similar in battlefield performance, but much better in terms of crew comfort and reliability.
I dug up an old post of mine that breaks down the myth that Shermans were poor tanks, especially the late war ones that would be the main force of a late 1945 war.
The T-34 got its reputation in 1941, when it was genuinely probably the best medium tank on the battlefield. But the Germans spent the next years designing weapons able to kill T-34s. When the Sherman finally saw action in Europe in 1944, Germany was fielding an assortment of weapons designed to kill a T-34, most of which could also kill 1944-era Shermans. Long gunned PZ4s, Stug 3s, Panthers, Tigers, but also PAK 38s, panzerschecks, panzerfausts, etc. And they had to fight on country that was mostly unfriendly to tanks. And people have the wrong idea of what tanks mostly did - tank vs tank encounters were relatively rare. Most of the threats tanks were meant to handle and would commonly encounter, the Sherman was well suited for. And they are unfairly characterized as “Ronsons” or “Tommycookers” because of some early design flaws that were corrected, at which point they were less likely to burn or suffer catastrophic explosions than other tanks.
The Sherman is generally a superior tank on the battlefield, and a vastly superior tank in the operational sense, than the T-34.
Romania probably could’ve overrun the Kwangtun Army. Japanese military prowess was vastly inferior to western armies at the time. Only by burrowing into islands and needing to be dug out did they pose any hinderance to the US forces in the Pacific.
I’m not trying to underplay Russian military prowess. I’m actually usually the guy in these arguments that tries to destroy the myths of the inferior Red Army and the glorious Wermacht full of supermen who outfought them but were swarmed by endless numbers. In fact, the entirety of Soviet performance in WW2 might’ve been the greatest struggle and greatest achievement by any nation-state in history. The amount they suffered, and what they endured, and the sacrifice they made, while never wavering, while reforging themselves into the army that out-fight and outright crushed the Wermacht was an amazing achievement and cannot be understated.
But because of those sacrifices, because of that incredible hardship, they were spent by the war’s end. The push for Berlin was borderline reckless and spent countless lives because of their desire to end the war as quickly as possible, because they couldn’t maintain their incredible effort.
The USSR was as spent as a victorious nation could be. They were in no shape for a continued war.
But on the other hand, the US was as strong as it has ever been. Its economy was on full war footing. It was completely untouched by enemy action. It had an incredible logistical system that has never been rivalled in history. Its manpower reserves were almost unscathed. Russia had lost an entire generation, but the US had lost only about 400k men. The US was as prepared for a fight in 1945 as any country ever has been - the USSR was exhausted and desperately needed it to come to an end.
I’m not downplaying the competence of the Red army when I say the US would’ve rolled through them. I’m highlighting their incredible sacrifice. They gave their absolute all - possibly more than any others in all of history - and simply didn’t have enough left to seriously fight such a relatively unscathed, powerful enemy.
The sheer output of US industry at the end of the war combined with a massive navy meant that the USSR would have been on the receiving end of a tremendously destructive bombing campaign that over time would have left the Soviets starved. The supply lines as long as they are would have been impossible to defend. How do you feed and fuel millions when bridges, roads, rails are constantly bombed? How do you get oil when the oil wells are bombed? Cities? Bombed. It would have been hell on earth.
And the US homeland would be completely unscathed with a larger amount of manpower.