The Greatest Example of International Working Class Solidarity Ever

The story of American machines and food in Russia during World War II

There had been more snow during the winter of 1939-40. Now Spring had brought with her the rains for the first time in years. Farmers from the Dakotas and Iowa to Oklahoma and Texas celebrated. The long drought called the Dust Bowl, the event that inspired The Grapes of Wrath, was over.

And the Soviet Union was saved, but nobody knew it yet. No one knew that, just two years later, the Kroger assembly line in Cincinnati, Ohio, would be making these meals by the shipload:

That’s canned pork—one pound of pork, lard, spices and onion per can. That, and it’s more famous equivalent,

played several critical roles in helping Russia defeat the Nazis. As Nikita Khrushchev once said,

…without SPAM, we should not have been able to feed our army.

What happened is a story downplayed or even denied by anti-Communist Americans, proud Communists of multiple stripes, and nationalist Russians alike. That’s a shame, because it is a story of what working class people around the world can accomplish when they cooperate in an organized, determined, and focused manner.

In June, 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Franklin Roosevelt immediately extended Lend-Lease, the clever ploy he had used to arm Britain while keep America officially neutral, to Russia. It was limited, at first, to a mere $1 billion in aid, mostly food at first, but it began and would grow into one of the most impressive logistical feats in human history.

Edit to add: No, the aid wasn’t free. It was equipment given for cash to be paid back in installments for several decades, but that’s not the point of this story, which is of the people did a tremendously necessary thing, not the bankers who profited off of it.

That food staved off a famine in unconquered Soviet Russia in from the winter of 1941-42 all the way through the spring of 1943. Most of the food-producing regions of the Soviet Union had been overrun by the Nazis, and hunger was setting in when Russian mothers began finding SPAM on the grocery shelves and Russian soldiers discovered food canned in Ohio or Iowa in their rations.

How did it get there? Well, American farmers produced the food, American workers packaged it, and built the trains and trucks and ships to send it across either the Pacific or Atlantic. American merchant sailors sailed through U-Boats in the Atlantic and suffered through aerial attack from Norway to bring their ships to Murmansk and Archangel, or took one of several long routes to the Persian Gulf.

Once in Persia, Iranian workers loaded the trains and the trucks and shipped them to Baku in the Caucasus, where Soviet workers took over and got the stuff to the front, and to the hungry cities where more workers were busy manufacturing weapons for the Red Army.

The Russians had been forced to move much of their industry to the east, out of German reach but far from the front. This created a transportation problem for them, and once again American workers helped solve it. By 1940, General Motors was already gearing up for war, and their Studebaker Division started making the 2 and a half ton truck, or deuce-and-a-half. (below: convoy in Iran headed for Russia, 1943)

400,000 Studers, as the Russians affectionately called them, were manufactured and shipped to the Soviet Union by Americans during World War II. Some 380,000 of them made it, the rest being lost to enemy action and the hazards of crossing huge oceans and vast swathes of rough terrain.

The first time American trucks directly made a big difference in the fighting was in late 1942, when thousands of them transported the Soviet troops who launched the counteroffensive to trap the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad.

They had already made a significant contribution to the Russian war effort simply by their presence—Soviet workers didn’t have to build the things, and could concentrate on making T-34 tanks and other fun, Nazi-killing toys.

By 1944, they provided transport for the Soviet troops and supplies which would ultimately see Hitler dead in his bunker in Berlin. As Khrushchev later said of the final offensive,

Our losses would have been colossal because we would have had no maneuverability.

As if Russian losses weren’t high enough with the trucks! But it would have been so much worse without them. Joe Stalin acknowledged this fact at the Teheran Conference in 1943, when he said,

The most important things in this war are machines. … The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through lend-lease, we would have lost the war.

The US shipped the Soviets a lot of other things during the war, everything from petroleum to tanks to warplanes, but no two items made more of a difference than the food and the trucks. FDR did it, sometimes over the objections of his generals who wanted to use the material themselves, because he knew that if the Soviet Union collapsed that the United States would follow in its footsteps.

The American workers who grew and manufactured and transported all of these goods knew the same thing, and the Russians used them well. Working class people across the world cooperated to stop a horrific evil from triumphing.

In 1945, those folks had their triumph, as illustrated by Soviet troops driving an American-made tank to meet American troops in Germany as they conquered their common foe.

Perhaps that’s why certain parties would rather we forget this important chapter in American and Russian history, for it proves we can work very well together when we want to, or when we need to, and that we have far more in common with each other than we have fundamental differences.

Russia and America have no other evolutionarily viable choice except to work with each other. We’ve had to since 1941, in one way or the other, even if sometimes it was just a mutual awareness of Mutually Assured Destruction that we shared. If we hadn’t, we would all be dead or unborn and I would not be writing this.

We still have no other viable option. I’ve always thought Russo-American rivalry was stupid, anyway. Just look at a globe! Neither nation controls anything that is existential to the other, and they don’t exactly share a long mutual border.

Looking at a globe, China is clearly more of a potential threat to Russia than is America, something which Kissinger and Brezhnev understood not all that long ago. The fact that the Russians and Chinese are cooperating so much now isn’t due to any mutual love or admiration, but because of the US Empire’s threat to both.

Fortunately, more Americans are becoming aware of that there is no need to be terrified of Russia. A new poll shows that only 38% of Americans now think of Russia as an “adversary,” as opposed to 55% two years ago.

It is not just the horrors of history that must be remembered, the tales of courage, cooperation and triumph must be remembered as well. America and Russia only have a future if both nations can find a way to cooperate with each other, and history shows that is very possible indeed.

If you want more details, please go to this excellent article from the National World War II Museum in New Orleans

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

If you appreciate my scribbling, please share this post consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time donation by buying me a beer so I can keep scribbling.