#29 - JRL 9145 - JRL Home
From: "Albert L. Weeks" <AWeeks11@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: 9143-Johnson's Russia List/WW2
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005

In response to Prof. Service's comment--about alleged disproportionate "playing up" of what we in the West did for the victory over the Axis in 1945 versus what the Soviets did (JRL #9143): I am a World War II veteran, who in 1944-45 fully realized that the Soviet victories on the Eastern Front were crucial in the defeat of the Nazi war machine.

Yet as a postwar Russian specialist, I am also aware of this statement made by Marshal Georgi Zhukov to Soviet writer and war correspondent, Konstantin Simonov (in an interview in 1963). Zhukov: "Some say today that the Allies didn't really help us [with Lend-Lease]...But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us materiel without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war...We did not have enough munitions, [and] how would we have been able to turn out all those tanks without the rolled steel sent to us by the Americans? To believe what they say [in the USSR] today, you'd think we had had all this in abundance."

Albert L. Weeks
Author, Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the USSR in World War