Lend-Lease and Soviet Aviation in the Second World War Volume 4

By the later years of the Second World War, Allied aircraft were no longer unfamiliar novelties in Soviet service. Thousands had been absorbed into the Red Army Air Force, Air Defence Forces and Naval Aviation, while imported raw materials, industrial equipment and technical knowledge had also become embedded within the wider Soviet aviation system. The concluding volume of Lend-Lease and Soviet Aviation in the Second World War brings together the final—and in some respects most revealing—elements of this remarkable story.

Detailed studies of the Bell P-39 Airacobra and Armstrong Whitworth Albemarle conclude the history of Lend-Lease aircraft in Soviet hands, and then the story then turns to aircraft that reached Soviet hands by less conventional means, including Allied machines acquired through emergency landings, internment, capture or sheer circumstance.

The final volume then reaches well beyond the individual aircraft. It examines the impact of Allied assistance upon the Soviet aviation industry itself, together with British and American influence on aircraft and aero-engine development. The book also follows the winding down of wartime cooperation, the end of Lend-Lease and its longer-term legacy as the wartime alliance gave way to a very different post-war relationship.

Drawing the four-volume study together, Volume 4 assesses Lend-Lease neither as the decisive reason for Soviet victory nor as something insignificant, but as an important component of Soviet wartime aviation and technological development.

Illustrated throughout with an exceptional collection of archive photographs, colour aircraft profiles and technical illustrations, this concluding volume provides a fitting visual as well as analytical finale to the series.