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

This book covers an extremely important topic, the contribution of lend-lease in keeping Russia in the war, which has been traditionally pooh-poohed, for reasons the book covers. In fact, lend-lease did accomplish the goal of letting the Russians and Germans bleed each other white while we mostly watched, a point lost on generations of "why didn't we just..." opinionators. The author shows this with recent Russian research as well as remarks from principals (e.g., Stalin) that didn't fit with the postwar party line.

As other reviewers have observed, Weeks spends a lot of time setting the stage for the arrival of lend-lease, covering such interesting topics as Stalin's pre-war agents in the US and US government, Stalin's cunning tactics with his Capitalist rivals/enemies/friends-in-need, US-Russian friendship during the American Civil War, the mutual affection/admiration between FDR and Stalin, and the fact that huge portions of Soviet industrialization in the 1930s was accomplished with Capitalist exports, investment, and industrial-technical support. The narration tends to bounce around a little bit, jumping forward to 1941 in detail, then backing off to set the stage some more, then back forward to 1941 and so on.

For me the book's problem is the extremely clumsy and error-riddled writing. It is full of way too many commas and fractured clauses, missing as well as extra prepositions, and the wrong words, like, "The availability of French bases after the fall of French," and "began on September 16, 1939, just two weeks after World War I started." The reader can figure those out, but some are more problematic, like, "escort of the convoy was taken over by a U.S. Navy group at the "Westomp," a designated point south of Argentina." If the reader doesn't know that he meant Argentia (Newfoundland) that would be a very misleading sentence. This makes for fatiguing reading, as the reader is always having to stop and figure out, "he didn't mean that, what did he really mean to say?" But it gets worse, into math errors such as, "nine months before Pearl Harbor--that is, at the time of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., June 22, 1941," (June 22 to December 7 is 5.5, not 9) and "Already by the end of 1941, just two months after the German invasion of June," (1941 ended in August?) and "Total Lend-Lease aid 1941-1945 was to amount to approximately $40.1 billion...The British share of this was $31 billion. The Soviet share of the total was over $12 billion," (31+12=53). So which numbers are wrong, or which point did he obscure by mentioning an incorrect duration or event? By the time you get to, "supplies would have to be shipped through enemy-infested waters whether in the Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian Oceans, all of which were patrolled by German U-Boats," and then goes on to explain that there were no German U-Boats in the Pacific (Duh!) you just want to throw the book across the room.

This is a hard book to recommend. It contains a lot of good information, especially contemporary background context, because this topic is so obscured by hardened Cold War attitudes on both sides. But it is a needlessly burdensome reading experience. It's like the chapters were originally written as separate self-contained articles that don't communicate with each other, and too often use contradictory data. You will have developed a worrisome skepticism about what you think he probably really intended to say, and you sure won't want to use any of his numbers. Instead you will have to hunt down the sources he used to find what the numbers really were, and at least this book is a starting point.

UPDATED: The tables at the back, which should be useful in their own right, are a problem. As an example, page 145. At the top in the section with aircraft types the values are all misplaced, like when you try to import a tab-delimited table into Word and the columns and rows all fly apart. But even when you try to re-align the numbers they don't work. And then directly beneath that section the same numbers are repeated across multiple columns which is simply not credible. While this book might whet your appetite to dig deeper into Lend-Lease facts, it won't give you much to start with besides a hunger for better information.

I am trying to use this book for research and find it very problematic. There are so many errors about historical facts not directly relevant to Lend Lease that I am really questioning the overall value of the material. Footnoting is also very poorly handled. The book gets two stars because once you get to Lend Lease it provides valuable tables and data (though I will double check them!).

It's hard to understand why a book published by a reputable imprint did not have an editor who corrected some of the obvious and embarrassing errors regarding historical events.

"Russia's Life-Saver", the paperback, sheds a little light upon the intrigues of Pre-World War 2 and the assistance America gave to Stalinist Russia during the War. The disconcerting aspects of this paperback edition, are the misspelled words, which might reflect negatively upon the publisher or editor. Overlooking the obvious errors, the information assisted with my research, especially the tables of information. Overall, valuable for historians of World War 2 and family members who served in the military and merchant marines dealing with the Lend-Lease program products to Russia.

Excellent account of the lend-lease effort to the Soviet Union. The book discusses a variety of subjects: ammunition, aircraft, industrial equipment, tanks, and so forth. There is considerable discussion on the influence of the aid on campaigns on the Eastern Front.

Weeks research substantiates that we built the USSR through Lend-Lease. This was not just materiel for the war, but factories, technology, blue prints - the doors were flung open to the Soviets by FDR. Read this in conjunction with "From Major Jordan's Diaries."

I did not like this book as much as the other reviewers. My principal criticism is that the book is supposedly about lend-lease aid to the USSR, and in 136 pages of text he does not really even START talking about lend-lease until page 110. I certainly expected a tighter focus than that! The rest of it is the backstory -- American foreign policy, Soviet foreign policy, Russian-American ties going back to the 1700s, American economic aid to Russia and the USSR before 1939, and so on. Not badly written as far as it goes, but in a book that is this short, he really needed to get to the point a lot faster.

When he does finally examine lend-lease, he principally discusses American aircraft deliveries to the USSR. These were important, but there was a lot more to it than that. There is really no discussion of the effect of American trucks and locomotives in providing mobility to the Red Army from 1943 to 1945. There is no discussion at all of the highly important role of lend-lease in enabling the Soviet attack on Japan in August 1945 (Operation Milepost). There is a final short chapter on Russian repayment of lend-lease aid -- I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath for that! The Russians no doubt think they paid their debt in blood.

The title might lead you to think that *British* lend-lease to the USSR would also be covered, but it is not. I did not downcheck the book any more for this, but it is an absence worth mentioning.

Finally, for all the talk about the use of newly released Russian sources, it was not clear to me that these added anything very compelling to the account.

In my view, the best book about lend-lease remains Hubert P. Van Tuyll's Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945. There is also a lot of good material in Walter Scott Dunn's The Soviet Economy and the Red Army, 1930-1945.