Stalin's War: Book Review

A guest post by zinjanthropus

Reading Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin was an important moment in my life, as I think it was for many people of the Dissident Right. The feeling of growing gloom as you turn the pages and discover that something you already knew was really bad, was somehow even worse than you thought lingers long afterwards. McMeekin provides a detailed and data-heavy confirmation of the Moldbuggian account of WW2, which, if you choose to accept it as your narrative, firmly sunders you from mainstream politics, and, really, mainstream ethics entirely. More recently, I and many others have often pointed to this work as an example of responsible and rigorous WW2 revisionism in contrast to the incompetent, turdheaded Nazi apologetics promoted by various bad actors and dopamine addicts.

In one such conversation, NonZionism subscriber zinjanthropus mentioned that he thought McMeekin’s book is seriously misleading, most notably with regard to Lend Lease, and I invited him to write an article making the case. Please weigh in in the comments.

If other elite NonZionism subscribers have domain knowledge about revisionist 20th century history or anything relevant to the blog’s themes, and wish to get Jewed for free content share it with a growing audience of genius-tier readers, then hit me up with a DM.

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Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War has been a huge hit with the dissident right, feeding their argument that World War II was “The Bad War” in which the United States foolishly helped spread Communism across Europe and Asia and Britain lost her empire. A central element of the book is a blistering indictment of Lend-Lease as a giant giveaway through which the Americans turned a faltering Soviet military machine into a juggernaut.

McMeekin’s discussion of Lend-Lease is founded on (i) a big lie and (ii) a whopping omission. The big lie is that, while the Soviets were given aid for free, the Americans forced the British to pay for everything they received. In reality, for both the British and the Soviets (and everyone else who received Lend-Lease), the great bulk of the aid provided was never paid back, and was not expected to be paid back. The whopping omission is that, while the Soviets received some $11 billion in aid, the British received (depending on whether you take their own contributions into account) two or three times as much.

Stalin’s War misleads on Lend-Lease in other ways. McMeekin bombards the reader with the minutiae of aid, from gold braid and Spam to steel and aluminum. What he leaves out is context - the denominator, so to speak. How do the equipment, supplies, and food given to Stalin compare to what was given to others? How does it compare with total American and British production? How does it compare with what the Soviets were able to produce for themselves?

The Big Picture

The Movement of Aid

The Lend-Lease bill, H.R. 1776, was signed into law on March 11, 1941. Between then and the end of the war, the United States disbursed about $50 billion in Lend-Lease assistance (about $920 billion in current dollars). The British were by far the largest recipients – $31.4 billion. The Soviets were a distant second – $11.3 billion. Although some 34 nations received Lend-Lease aid, the bulk of the remainder was given either to France ($3.2 billion) or China ($1.6 billion). As noted, those figures do not provide the complete picture. The British provided billions in aid back to the Americans, not just in the form of weapons but also bases, food, and medical supplies. American forces fighting in the Pacific were fed largely from Australia and New Zealand. Total British Empire aid to the Americans has been valued at $8 billion. But if that figure is subtracted from American aid to Britain, and British aid to the Soviets is taken into account, the British still received twice as much from the Americans as the Soviets received from the Americans and British put together.

Production and Distribution

The British and Americans provided the Soviets with about 13,000 tanks and 18,000 planes during the war. These are significant totals, but a comparison with national production figures puts them in their proper place. The Soviet T-34 was the most produced tank of the war, over 80,000 of all types, and the Il-2 Sturmovik was the most produced military plane in history, some 36,000 of all types. In all the Soviets built about 120,000 tanks and SPGs and 136,000 military aircraft during the war. Of course these production figures owe a lot to Lend-Lease industrial inputs; on the other hand, Soviet productivity was truly amazing given how much of the country the Germans occupied for much of the war. Imagine the hit U.S. production would have taken if the entire east of the country, from New York to Detroit, had been conquered by foreign invaders. In any case, production by the Anglo-Americans was even greater. During the war the British and Americans produced in aggregate over 450,000 planes of all types, and some 150,000 tanks.

To be sure, especially in the early years of the war with Germany, Soviet losses of men and equipment were extraordinarily heavy, and American and British supply made an important difference. The WW2 Weapons website estimates that the Western Allies provided about 16% of the Soviet tank force in action during the war and about 30% of Soviet warplanes in action between 1942 and 1944. These are significant totals. On the other hand…

As we’ve seen, the Americans and British were providing the Soviets just a fraction, though a meaningful fraction, of their own production. Furthermore, they generally shipped the Soviets stuff they were beginning to discard or didn’t have much use for to begin with. Thus the Americans provided lots of P-40s (which McMeekin generally identifies by their Warhawk and Kittyhawk variants) and P-39 fighters and A-20 Boston bombers, none of which were popular with American pilots. They provided a small number of P-47s and none of their superb P-51s. The British sent Hurricanes and, late in the war, Spitfires, but again models that they had begun to give up themselves. On the ground the Americans sent M-3 Stuart light tanks and M-3 Lee medium tanks, the later an ungainly stopgap design with a high silhouette that the Russians called “a coffin for seven brothers.” (There is a photo of Lee tanks in the photos that follow p. 432 in Stalin’s War. McMeekin mistakenly refers to “M-3 Stuart medium tanks” (p. 418) which did not exist.) Later in the war the Americans sent a couple thousand Shermans, but, again, mostly the M4A2 that they had begun to replace in their own units. The British and Canadians sent several thousand slightly out-of-date Matildas and Valentines.

The Americans and British were, of course, perfectly within their rights to use their own best equipment to equip their own troops. I would trust McMeekin a little more if he acknowledged that the Allies did this. Instead he constantly plays up the quality of American and British equipment, calling the Hurricane “the workhorse of the RAF” (which for a time it was, but it was also markedly inferior to the Spitfire) and quoting a Russian observer’s rather strained praise of American tanks.

Of course, it could be argued that discussions of the quality of the equipment that the Allies sent are beside the point. From the Soviet perspective, after all, the realistic alternative to a lend-lease M-3 Lee tank was not a better American or Soviet tank, but no tank at all. Also, discussion of the relative merits of high-level military equipment distracts from probably the most useful goods the Allies provided, trucks and jeeps as well as fuel and industrial inputs, notably aviation fuel, locomotives, metals, TNT, and ammunition. But the discussion is necessary, because it gives the lie to McMeekin’s contention that the Americans and British gave the Soviets weapons in derogation of their own interests and at the expense of their own soldiers.

Also, of course, it can’t be forgotten that the Americans gave much more to the British than the Americans and British combined gave to the Soviets. I can’t find an equipment breakdown, but it is suggestive that the American Sherman became the principal British tank of the entire war.

McMeekin’s Big Lie

McMeekin repeatedly asserts that the Americans made the British pay for all the equipment they supplied, while the Soviets received American (and even British!) equipment for nothing. In reality, only a small fraction of Lend-Lease assistance was ever repaid by anyone. That goes for the British, the French, and the Chinese, as well as the Soviets.

In giving the false impression that the British were forced to pay, McMeekin gives a highly misleading discussion of the destroyers-for-bases deal, entered into before Lend-Lease was enacted, and a dishonest reference to a postwar loan. More on those below. But I don’t want to overstate the sophistication of his methods: when he writes “[Roosevelt was] charging [Britain] a steep price for the war supplies Britain was now sending to Stalin effectively free of charge” (p. 387) or “every lend-lease item that Britain imported from the United States had to be paid for in full – and it was paid” (p. 407), he’s not just being disingenuous or twisting the facts. He’s flat-out lying.

From Neutrality to Lend-Lease

It is necessary to give a little bit of history. In the late 1930s, the United States was very firmly neutral and isolationist. It was illegal for the United States to sell military equipment to a belligerent. Roosevelt was attempting to maneuver the United States away from isolationism towards active support of the British and French against Hitler. The first big step was “cash and carry,” enacted in November 1939, which allowed belligerents to purchase U.S. weapons provided they paid cash and took the material away in their own ships. Of course this was highly favorable to the British and French, since the British navy controlled the seas. (The Soviet Union was unaffected, since the USA was not selling it any weapons at the time.) Cash and carry, however, steadily eroded Britain’s supply of dollars. As early as May 15, 1940, just a few days after he became Prime Minister, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, “We shall go on paying dollars as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.” But that would take some doing; giving military equipment away for free is quite a big step up from cash and carry. Also, in June 1940, France fell to the advancing Germans, making Britain’s strategic position desperate and also giving the Germans many more U-boat bases at a time when British shipping was being sunk at an alarming rate and the British had just 68 destroyers in service. This was the genesis of the destroyers-for-bases deal, agreed to on September 2, 1940. In exchange for 50 World War I vintage destroyers, the British gave the Americans 99-year leases giving them the right to build bases in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, and Guyana.

In December 1940, Roosevelt publicly broached the idea of supplying Britain with war material without charge. In January 1941, legislation was introduced to this effect, and on March 11, 1941, Lend-Lease was enacted into law, with Congress immediately appropriating $7 billion to the program. In October 1941, the program was formally extended to the USSR. Thereafter, both Britain and the USSR received billions in aid, without payment being expected from either.

McMeekin writes, “At Churchill’s time of dire need in summer 1940, during the desperate juncture after the fall of France when a German invasion seemed imminent, Roosevelt had offered England fifty decrepit World War I-vintage destroyers, in exchange for which Churchill had basically mortgaged the British Empire to Washington. For Stalin, by contrast, Roosevelt had opened a virtually unlimited credit line to order whatever he desired, in exchange for nothing whatsoever.” (p. 364). This is rank dishonesty. The key difference between September 1940, when destroyers-for-bases was agreed to, and late 1941 (when the Soviets were placing their first orders) was not the desperateness of the Allied position but the fact that Lend-Lease had been enacted in the interim. Aid was now being provided to Great Britain on the same generous terms that the Soviet Union was receiving, and in greater quantities, too. And McMeekin’s claim that Churchill “basically mortgaged the British Empire” to get the destroyers is pure bunk. Leases scattered around the Caribbean do not a British Empire make.

OK, so what about the war debt that Britain finally paid off, with much fanfare, in 2006? (See McMeekin, p. 659.) Lend-lease aid that was used during the war did not have to be repaid. However, at the end of the war, the British had received aid which had not been used, which they could either return or convert into a loan. The British elected the latter course. Pursuant to this scheme the Americans “sold” the British a bunch of goods and equipment at ten cents on the dollar, giving an initial loan amount of about $1 billion, which was rolled into a larger postwar economic stabilization loan. This loan was on extraordinarily favorable terms, 2% interest (McMeekin unfathomably refers to “steep interest,” p. 659), and a 50-year term with the right to suspend payments during adverse economic circumstances. It was this loan that was paid off in 2006. Many people in Britain thought the unused Lend-Lease aid should have been written off entirely, and perhaps they were right, but again the Soviets were treated no differently: we demanded repayment from the USSR for unused aid, and the Soviets of course stiffed us. Eventually they paid some $722 million in the 1970s in connection with the grain deals of that decade.

Why Did the Americans and the British Do It?

Even with all the caveats above, there’s no question that the Americans and British provided the Soviets with a lot of aid. McMeekin presents their actions as pure folly and misplaced idealism. Thus, shortly after the Germans invaded the USSR, Churchill took an “impulsive decision” that was “as selfless as it was strategically foolish” (p. 366) to ship Stalin 200 brand-new Hawker Hurricane fighters, as well as 200 American P-40 Tomahawks. He also offered shipments of 200 fighter planes per month starting in October 1941, despite Britain’s allegedly desperate needs. What McMeekin doesn’t mention is how many planes the British got from the United States in 1941: 5,012 airplanes of all types (Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, p. 407). Maybe that’s why Churchill thought he could spare Stalin a few hundred Hurricanes. In reality, compared to what they kept for themselves, or gave to each other, the British and Americans did not give the Soviets very much.

But why did the Americans and British give the Soviets as much as they did? There is a simple answer to that question: for most of the war, the British and Americans were producing more weapons than they could use, because they weren’t doing a lot of ground fighting, especially compared to the Soviets. Between Dunkirk in 1940 and “Operation Torch,” the Allied invasion of North Africa at the end of 1942, the only German ground troops fighting the Western Allies anywhere in the world were the soldiers of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. This handful of German divisions fighting in Libya and Egypt is dwarfed by the approximately 175 divisions the Germans employed on the Eastern Front. Though the disparity in the number of German troops faced by the Western Allies on the one hand and the Soviets on the other became less extreme as the war went on, it never went away. The Germans defended Italy in 1943 and 1944 with some two dozen divisions, a fraction of their forces fighting in Russia. And even after the Allies finally invaded France in June 1944, many more German troops were facing the Soviets than were fighting the Americans, British, and French in France and Italy combined, as even McMeekin concedes.

To make this disparity less pronounced, in evaluating German commitments East and West, McMeekin compares totals of German troops actively engaged in fighting on the Russian Front with soldiers doing garrison duty in the West – even if (like the 20 German divisions in Scandinavia) they did not fight the Allies at all. Obviously the Germans had to keep large contingents in the West to guard against invasion, but equally obviously no Allied weapons were being used against those inactive soldiers. As McMeekin admits, in the two years before Overlord, 80-90% of German battle casualties were suffered in the USSR (p. 545). And even in the second half of 1944 and on into 1945, with the British and Americans racing across France and then Germany itself, German armies continued to be larger, and German casualties continued to be higher, in the East. In the war as a whole, the German armed forces suffered 80% of their combat deaths on the Eastern Front. Put bluntly, via Lend-Lease, excess weapons were shipped East because they could be put to good use killing enemy soldiers there.

McMeekin argues that Lend-Lease should have been curtailed or ended after the Battle of Kursk in 1943, after which it was clear that the Soviets were no longer in danger of defeat. He even suggests that (given the heavy casualties the Soviets suffered throughout the war), the weapons would have been used more “efficiently” by the Western Allies. The Soviets, shorn of Lend-Lease, would have unquestionably been slowed down, perhaps even stopped. And then what? At a minimum, the Germans would have reinforced their armies in the West, and British and American casualties would have been heavier. I don’t think that was a very attractive prospect for Roosevelt or Churchill.

Conclusion

The DR tries to tie everything it doesn’t like about the modern world to World War II, which is why Stalin’s War has been so enthusiastically received there. In reality, a direct line from the war to the current world is hard to discern. In the United States, anti-fascism was replaced after 1945 with anti-Communism, and over the ensuing 30 years the country was willing to ally with fascist and fascist-adjacent regimes around the world provided they would fight the Communists. It was in the political and social shocks of the 1960s and the Vietnam War that the bugaboos of the DR – immigration, identity politics, feminism – really have their roots. But the book is nevertheless highly relevant to today, though not in the way the DR supposes. Today the United States is ruled by the Fredo Corleone of politics, for whom domestic politics is a series of con games and foreign policy is a series of (inept) protection rackets. The contrast with the mighty, confident nation reflected in the pages of Stalin’s War could not be more glaring.

To McMeekin and the DR, Roosevelt and his advisors were suckers, easy marks. They have a point. When Roosevelt says “if I give [Stalin] everything I can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything, and work with me for a world of democracy and peace” (McMeekin, p. 489), one can only cringe. But ultimately Roosevelt was more visionary than sucker. After all, the Nazis were not just genocidal drug-addicted freaks, they were also social Darwinists who thought nations and races were engaged in a war to the death. Hitler believed that even the Germans, if they couldn’t enslave or annihilate their neighbors, deserved to be enslaved or annihilated themselves. By contrast, in the face of the worst war the world has ever seen, Roosevelt somehow believed in a future of freedom and plenty for all. In a way, Lend-Lease was an expression of that worldview: run the American economic machine at full speed and give away whatever we couldn’t use. (It wasn’t all weapons, either. A huge portion of Lend-Lease aid consisted of food.) The optimism and generosity of Lend-Lease is as congenial to the DR as sunlight is to vampires. It is perhaps that very optimism and generosity, and not the war’s supposed political consequences, that explains the DR’s eagerness to turn our histories of World War II on their heads.

There is much in our current moment not to like. There always is. And yet, as naive as Roosevelt and his advisors were, in some ways, their dreams have been achieved. For the first time ever, most people around the world are not living lives of misery and want. In that sense, Roosevelt and his advisors’ vision was much clearer, as well as much happier, than our own.