Abstract

"Capitalist Trucks for Communist Troops: Studebakers Transport the Red Army"

Philip Scranton, Rutgers University (scranton@rutgers.edu)

Barbarossa, the summer 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for Stalin’s regime in multiple ways. One of the retreat’s most ominous aspects was the destruction or loss of 275,000 military trucks by year’s end, at least half of the Red Army’s transportation fleet. Over objections by British officials and his close advisers, President Franklin Roosevelt made supplying Moscow’s military requirements a top priority in the US Lend-Lease program. Trucks were as important as weapons, for Soviet strategy was anchored in mobility and deception, so as to avoid recreating the stalemates of trench warfare. General Motors truck division, already producing the first waves of some 600,000 2.5 ton “Jimmies” for UK and US forces, could not also meet Soviet needs. Hence US war leaders selected Studebaker’s South Bend, IN plant to build replicas of GM models for export to Russia. Engines had to come from Hercules (Canton, OH) though, as GM had no spare capacity in its engine factories. This proved a fortunate shift, for low compression Hercules engines could run on low octane gasoline (68 vs. the usual 80), and low octane gas was the only gas the Soviets could distill. Complex and contested logistical issues surrounded the supply process. Trucks had to be disassembled and crated for ocean shipping, both to save space and to prevent damage, then reassembled on arrival. The British were durably hostile to the Russians and the Russians were obsessed with secrecy. Spare parts were a constant misery, as was assembling repair and maintenance crews for the “Studers” once distributed across Red Army fronts. And at home, the whole notion of handing 400,000 trucks (as well as hundreds of thousands of weapons) to the Bolsheviks was far from popular. Nevertheless, the trucks got through and proved durable; in retrospect, Soviet Marshal Gyorgy Zhukhov conceded that “Without American ‘Studebekkers,’ we could have moved our artillery nowhere.” However strained and temporary, this unity of interests yielded priceless resources that helped generate an Anglo-American-Soviet victory.