Americans bragging about lend-lease always strikes me as rather funny, because you're basically taking pride in the fact that FDR was a naïve idiot with a communist-compromised administration who gave away hundreds of billions worth of equipment for free.
In real time, American officialdom and army leadership was actually extraordinarily upset about FDR's profligate generosity, when he started shipping off American readiness stocks while they were trying to prepare for war.
"America rules, look at how easily the Soviets tricked FDR into giving them a hundred billion dollars worth of gear."
Wait. This seems familiar.
Wait. This seems familiar.
Lend Lease in my view should basically be considered a victory of Soviet statecraft and diplomacy. Stalin played Harry Hopkins and then FDR for fools and basically got everything he asked for. War is about mobilizing resources, and Stalin tapped a gold vein.
Apparently lots of people are under the impression that the USSR repaid the full lend-lease. They did not. Over $11 billion worth of aid was transferred to the USSR (more than a trillion in today's dollars), which was written down to $1.3 billion. (1)
Of that $1.3 billion, the Soviets offered a repayment of a mere 240 million in 1951. The offer went unresolved until 1971 deal which saw the USSR pay $720 million (6% of the total value) in a package that included a new grain deal.
So no, the USSR did not pay it back. The United States got fleeced, and now people have to adopt elaborate copes to pretend that they were not. This is all well documented in McMeekin's latest book.
The broader point with this is that arguing over who gets credit for “winning” WW2 is really dumb, because the combatants weren’t trying for a binary “win/lose” outcome but to maximize their power in the post war period. Britain lost WW2 by any reasonable standard.
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