Why, despite the disasters of 1941, was the USSR able to defeat Germany by 1945?
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baopingzhugmailcom (student)
Why, despite the disasters of 1941, was the USSR able to defeat Germany by 1945? By Jack Herbert Cong
As we know, the USSR won WWII in 1945, although at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army once was defeated by germen. There is no doubt that German totally underestimated the strength of the Red Army and made a series of mistakes during the war are the major reasons. However, from my person point of view, beside the mistakes of Germen, there are still three reasons why the USSR won the war.
Firstly, it cannot be ignored that the success of the first three five-year plans helped the USSR to defeat germen a lot. The first two five-year was greatly focused on heavy industry. Therefore, the great rearmament could be realized which was based on the heavy industries set up during the first two five-year plans. During the third five-year plan, By developing industries can be used of rearmament during the war, a number of tractor factories and airplane factories were set up, many tanks and aircrafts were produced by these factories. What’s more, the value of weapons produced of the USSR was 5 billion dollars. Comparing with the UK and the USA (3.5 billion dollars and 1.5 dollars respectively), it was the total amount of these two powerful countries. Although it was not so much as Germany’s in 1940, the USSR’s value of weapons produced was 8.5 billion dollars in 1941, higher than any country in the world. As the result, the USSR could have enough weapons supplies relatively compare with the WWI, when the Russian army had to use knifes to fight with Germen. However, during the war time, there was a big demand of weapons which gave a big pressure on industries. Therefore, if only depend on domestic factories of the USSR; it was impossible for the USSR to defeat Germen on its own.
