Did the Soviet Union win WW2 alone?

The official Russian narrative appears to be that the Soviet Union won the Second World War alone, or did the vast majority of the fighting. But is this really the case?

This video is discussing events or concepts that are academic, educational and historical in nature. This video is for informational purposes and was created so we may better understand the past and learn from the mistakes others have made.

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📚 BIBLIOGRAPHY / SOURCES 📚

Articles from the video

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ABOUT TIK 📝

History isn’t as boring as some people think, and my goal is to get people talking about it. I also want to dispel the myths and distortions that ruin our perception of the past by asking a simple question - “But is this really the case?”. I have a 2:1 Degree in History and a passion for early 20th Century conflicts (mainly WW2). I’m therefore approaching this like I would an academic essay. Lots of sources, quotes, references and so on. Only the truth will do.

[kleinweichkleinweich]

Germanys contribution to winning the war is massively underrated

[snapmalloy]

In the U.S. library of Congress you can find the Lend Lease numbers and it shocked me at its enormity.
Absolutely shocked me.
2, 500 locomotives cannot be overlooked...Nor can 2.5 million tons of fuel and oil. The numbers go on and on

[laurentboitouzet]

I am not always a great fan of Patton but this quote seems appropriate : “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”

[catthomas]

I'd just say the Soviets gave the most brutal fight against the Germans and kept a consistent pressure on the Germans unlike other states due to the land fight on the giant boarder. A huge role to be sure, but not singlehandedly.

[TheGhostofCarlSchmitt]

"As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization." -Yuri Bezmenov

[PassionateSpirit]

Simply no. One of Stalin's main men Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs stated that Stalin told him personally several times in private conversation and to others that they couldn't have defeated Germany one on one without the help of America through the lend-lease program, and Nikita Khrushchev agreed.

[JuleyC]

I had a neighbour in Ottawa who was a Soviet veteran, he said "For me the best day of the war was when the second front stopped being the cans of meat from America to being an actual thing, that was for me on June 9th 1944. I knew that day after having driven my American Tuck and worn my American boots, that now the Hitlerite's were facing the world and together we would crush them. Because I knew that the others had the time to learn to fight well and they had the guns and trucks needed to do the job." It is just the perspective of one man but it has always spoken to me that the soldiers on the ground were far more aware of the truth than perhaps the politicians ever wanted them to be.

[jackson]

I'm surprised you didn't mention the quotes from Stalin, Zhukov, and Khruschev all saying that the USSR wouldn't have won without the rest of the Allies, primarily the US and its lend-lease

[TheWareek]

I am an Australian and I think we all study our own little part of the war. There was so much going on around the world that it is very hard to take it all in.

[thearisen]

As I recall about 70% of Soviet aviation fuel was from the US. Just imagine if the Soviet airforce couldn't fly?

[JamesLewis]

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." - General George S. Patton, 1944

[slawawacker]

Everyone talks about how much the West helped Russia in the Second World War. Nobody talks about how much help Germany got from abroad.
Almost all of Europe supplied Germany with raw materials, weapons, food and fuel. Millions of European soldiers fought alongside Germany. In 1943, every third soldier who fought for Germany was a foreigner.
There were also millions of forced laborers who had to work for Germany.

[TheAtlasReview]

People often overlook Britain's strategic power at the time. While the flashier acts of battle would come later, Britain's main influence was the total shutdown of Germany's access to oil, and its role as an enemy-in-being that tied down millions of German soldiers and tens of millions of tons of German materiel on the Atlantic coasts. All of this at a time when its strongest ally - arguably the 2nd most powerful military in the world - had just been knocked out of the war and it seemed that the British Empire would face a nearly-total fascist domination of Europe and Asia alone (well, as "alone" as a whole Empire can be).
- tying down vast German forces
- starving their production and industry
- shutting down fleets and sea trade
- taking over their entire spy network
- defeating the luftwaffe
- decyphering their strategies
- sacrificing to the Americans the monopoly on technologies that would redefine warfare
-And acting as the only viable staging-point for a western front...
I think its safe to say that the Americans and the Soviets could not have won the war without Britain. Certainly not a *total* victory.

[youtubeuser]

Hi, I would like to share a story which I regard as very important in the context of allied victory in the Second World War which is not known enough.

It's about explosives shipments to the USSR under the lend lease program.
The context is that the only impact explosive, as opposed to propulsion explosives, used during the war (99.6% of the total according to a figure I saw) was TNT, of which an ingredient was toluene. There were two sources to obtain toluene, coal and oil. Most nations used mainly coal to obtain it (so it really wasn't a problem for Germany), but the USSR insisted on using oil as well, around 40% of toluene or so (maybe 10% more or less) before the war came from oil.

The USSR found itself immediately in massive problems regarding explosives because about ⅔ of their coal was extracted from the Donbas and oil production fell from 31 milion tonnes in 1940 to 16 or so after the sabotage of their own fields in 1942.

As such one of the first requests of the USSR to the allies was to send explosives, which they sent as a final product as TNT or they sent toluene which was used to manufacture it.

These shipments, contrary to many others, came immediately to the USSR making a very important numerical difference since the beginning: in 1942 34% of the TNT used by the USSR was either sent directly or manufactured from allied shipments, this proportion grew to 65% in 1944. The proportion for the whole war is around 54%.

As such 54% of the whole artilley or tanks shells, bombs etc. used against the germans was directly due to allied shipments and the soviets could not have produced these explosives themselves.

Regarding propelling explosives, the ones used to propell shells and bullets, the most used were white smokeless powders.
I have less accurate data in this regard but the allies still proved massively important: in 1944 30% of artillery propellant explosives used by the USSR were given by the allies and in 1943 100% of the glycerin used by the soviets to produce these explosives was given by the allies.
Maybe around ⅔ of materials to produce these explosives was given by the allies in the duration of the whole war but I can't guarantee this data as opposed to the others.
Also the soviets, differently from TNT, could have produced inferior versions of these chemicals themselves, so the allied aid proved less decisive here

Most estimates assest that 60% of all casualties during this war were due to artillery, and given that all artillery shells only used TNT, and that the soviets could not produce enough of it, this really proves that lend lease was decisive from the start for soviet victory in the eastern front.

Zhukov after the war commented that "we didn't have explosives, gunpowder, we didn't have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives"

Sources:

1 Развитие производства взрывчатых веществ в СССР в 30-е гг. Хх В. И поставки по ленд-лизу в годы Великой Отечественной войны

2 Роль ленд-лиза в истории Великой Отечественной войны/Алексей Исаев (here on youtube)

edit: another interesting fact about this is that even if the USSR during the course of the war produced roughly 7 times more artillery pieces than the Germans did (Source: wiki Military Production During WW2), until the end of 1944 the Germans were actually firing more artillery shell mass on the soviets. This should also reduce the narrative of the "enormous industrial production of the Soviet Union", an artillery piece is not a weapon, it's a delivery system, the shell is the actual weapon, same with the bullets. In those regards the Soviets were seriously lacking

Thanks

[rijkemans]

The massive import of logistic vehicles (lend-lease) also meant that factories otherwise needed to construct those vehicles could now produce tanks, I think part of the reason why the Soviets managed to produce so many T-34's. Regardless, I'm grateful Overlord did occur. At the very least the second front saved my country from becoming a puppet state to the Soviets.

[mark]

Marshal Zhukov said that without Lend-Lease the Soviets could not have gathered enough reinforcements to continue the war against Germany. That is how close they came to loosing the war.

[edlawrence]

Back in 2009 I went to Moscow for business. For one week I trained computer security people at a bank. While I got along fine with my students, their manager and I did not get along. On Friday, he surprised me by inviting me to lunch. While we drank beer and ate pizza, he shared his view of Americans (not very positive, yet not insulting), and then brought up the great Patriotic War. He asserted Americans did not appreciate the Russian efforts during the war.

I acknowledged his view and started talking about Kursk. His jaw dropped. “You know about Kursk!?” For the first time all week, he smiled.
I guess we achieved deténte.

[SuperOdyss]

My father, an air force man in WW2, said without the allies bombing Germany night and day the Russians would have faced much more air support for the Germans.

[saxtonhalegaming]

Since when did we start using military losses as a method of who fought the best or hardest?

[robinchiang]

China's casualties (military and civilian) are estimated to be about 13-50 million (1937-45). No one argues they won WW2 alone.