http://www.fireonthevolga.com/Photo%20albums.html The top set of pictures are from the 11th Panzer Division were taken in December of 1942 from the outside on the Stalingrad pocket. In two of the pictures, you can see Lend-Lease British Matilda tanks that have been destroyed during theses battles. To acknowledge the material aid which we received in the past from our adversaries of the present doesn't have any bearing on the situation of today. We shouldn't boast that we vanquished the Germans all by ourselves and that the Allies moved in only for the kill. That's why I give my own view of the Allies' contribution, and I hope that my view will be confirmed by the research of historians who investigate objectively the circumstances which developed between 1941 and 1945. The English helped us tenaciously and at great peril to themselves. They shipped cargo to Murmansk and suffered huge losses. German submarines lurked all along the way. Germany had invaded Norway and moved right next door to Murmansk. As Mikoyan confirmed after his trip to America, we received military equipment, ships, and many supplies from the Americans, all of which greatly aided us in waging the war. After Stalin's death, it seemed that all our artillery was mounted on American equipment. I remember proposing, "Let's turn all the automotive equipment we're producing over to the military so that the tractor-mounts in our parades will be Soviet-made." Almost all the artillery in the GDR [East Germany] was mounted on American Studebakers. I said, "This simply won't do. It's disgraceful: Just look how many years have passed since the war ended, and we're still driving around in American equipment!" By this I wanted only to stress how many of our cars and trucks we had received from the Americans. Just imagine how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without them! Our losses would have been colossal because we would have had no maneuverability. In addition we received steel and aluminum from which we made guns, airplanes, and so on. Our own industry was shattered and partly abandoned to the enemy. We also received food products in great quantities. I can't give you the figures because they've never been published. They're all locked away in Mikoyan's memory. There were many jokes going around in the army, some of them off-color, about American Spam; it tasted good nonetheless. Without Spam we wouldn't have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands—the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. I repeat, the Allies gave us this help neither out of compassion for our people, nor out of respect for our political system, nor out of hope for the victory of Socialism and the triumph of Marxism-Leninism. The Allies helped us out of a sober assessment of the situation. They were facing a matter of their own life or death. They helped us so that our Soviet Army would not fall under the blow of Hitlerite Germany and so that, supplied with modern weapons, we would pulverize the life force of the enemy and weaken ourselves at the same time. They wanted to wait to join the war actively against Germany at a time when the Soviet Union had already spent its might and was no longer able to occupy decisive position in the solution of world problems. Nikita S. Krushchev on lend-lease, from Krushchev Remembers, trans. & ed. by Strobe Talbott, Little, Brown & Co., New York: 1970, pp. 235-240:
Here are some pictures from unpublished private estate of German soldiers severing in or around the Stalingrad battle.
Here are some quotes from Nikita S. Krushchev about Lend-Lease.
Responses