What about all the equipment the west supplied the Soviets ? And if the west wasn't fitting the Germans do you think Russia would still have won
Just my 2 cents
The equipment, (lend lease) that the West supplied to the Russians was more to appease Stalin who wanted a second front opened in the West. The Russians were losing hundreds of thousands of men a month, or even week sometimes while for several years, the Western Allies were just building up and training in England and playing in the Sandbox with Rommel.
The Lend Lease program was to give Stalin the sense that the West was doing something at the same time as the West not being willing to incur the same manpower losses as the Soviets.
By all accounts, historical and contemporary, the Soviets hated the Western equipment. The ammunition for the weapons was hard or impossible to find once the supply lines were in danger, the Red Army soldier preferred anything that fired the 7.62 x 54R because it was easy to come across. American and British Ammunition was virtually impossible to find and once the box of it that came with the rifle was gone, there was no more.
Western Lend Lease vehicles were unfamiliar to the Soviets, compicated and broke down a lot in the Russian terrain ran terribly in winter, and there were no replacement parts around at all. The typical Red Army soldier wanted nothing to do with the Western equipment. Stalin was appeased, but barely. He still demanded reapeatedly that the West open a second front.
Then, once the Soviets recovered their manufacturing capability by moving their factories East in to the Urals, the production ramped up and any Western equipment was a strange novelty the soldiers didn't want to risk their lives using.
After the Summer of 1943, the Soviets were outproducing the West in artillery, aircraft and tanks by orders of magnitude. This is where the Western help came in handy, raw metals were used by Soviet factories, however the Russians had their own supplies, and should the Western metals not be available, would have been able to maintain production, though not as fast. The help from the west was a tradeoff, they give to the Russians and the Russians bore the brunt of the human casualties. The West knew that they could not manage to fight the Germans with the same rates of loss as the Russians...they'd have had to sue for peace by 1943 by public pressure or sheer attrition had they done so. The Soviets on the other hand could keep going for years, and the Germans were quickly falling short on manpower.
If the West had never landed in Normandy, nor helped the Soviets, the Red Army would still have eventually overan Berlin and likely liberated France themselves. This is what the West was fearful of. In fact, in the last weeks of the war, with the Western Allies knowing that Germany was deafeated, the race was less about the Germans and more about seizing territory and blocking the Soviets from taking control over it. Think Denmark, the West left the Soviets to capture the meatgrinder of Berlin knowing they had an agreement for a division of the city post war already, and instead decided to sidetrack and block the Russians from moving into the Nordic nations. They also focussed on Italy and finishing off the German resistance there while the Russians were busy in Germany. If you think further afield, once the Soviets declared war on Japan, the US was also worried that the post war division of Japan would include a Soviet section, and this played into the decision to use the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.
I think to this day, the West completely underestimates the power of the Red Army in 1945. I also think that can be blamed almost all on Hollywood and American history book publishers (media).
