Why the Red Army Asked for American Boots Before It Asked for American Aircraft

Archangels. The last day of August 1941. Seven merchant ships lie along the northern Deina and Soviet dockers are lifting the first Allied cargo of the whole war out of their holds. 15 fighter aircraft packed flat in crates, 10,000 tons of Indian rubber, tin, 3,800 depth charges and magnetic mines, and 1,500 tons of army boots.

 The Red Army has been in this war for 10 weeks. In that time, it has lost most of its air force, most of its western military districts, and something close to 2 million men. Aircraft, you would think, guns, anything that shoots. The footwear came anyway in the same holds on the same first ships before the lend lease act had been extended to the Soviet Union at all.

 And the Soviet request list would go on asking for it in larger quantities every single year right to the end of the war during which the Soviet Union outbuilt Germany and aircraft and turned down several Allied weapons to its face. So what does a government know about its own war that makes leather a first order strategic request? Why does an army that has just lost thousands of airplanes spend its bargaining power on something a cobbler makes? And why three years later were there American factory lines dedicated to it? Here is something you

can check before we start. The man commanding those seven merchant ships was 49 years old. 15 months earlier, he had been decorated for taking a ship into Dunkirk twice under fire and bringing back more than two and a half thousand men. Within 13 months of that August morning at Arangelsk, he would be pulled out of the Arctic Ocean twice more from two different sunken flagships on this same run to Russia.

 Moscow, the Spirit of Novka Palace, the evening of the 29th of September, 1941. Part one. The record of that conversation sits in the foreign policy archive of the Russian Federation, and it is one of the strangest chopping lists in the history of coalition warfare. Lord Beaverbrook for Britain, Averil Haramman for the United States, Stalin on the other side of the table, and an interpreter writing it all down.

Beaverbrook offers 3in mortars. Stalin says they will not be needed. Beaverbrook offers 25 pounder field guns. Stalin says they can do without them. Beaverbrook offers hand grenades. Stalin says they have grenades. Beaverbrook mentions Thompson submachine guns and adds a little wounded that 20,000 have already been sent.

 Stalin says he does not want them. The Soviet magazine holds 10 rounds. Then, in the middle of a discussion about tank weights and cannon calibers, the man running the largest land war in human history asks a question about wire. What about barbed wire? Haramman says they can supply it. Stalin asks how much. Haramman says he will have to find out.

The next evening, Stalin comes back to it unprompted. 4,000 tons a month is not enough. They would like 10 to 15,000 tons, and could the Americans send two months worth in one, and then near the end, they would very much like to receive trucks. I have read a fair amount of Allied supply correspondents from this period.

 What is striking is not that Stalin haggled. It is that the haggling ran in the opposite direction from every assumption the two visiting delegations had arrived with. They came prepared to argue about weapons. He wanted wire, wheels, and rope. Here is the number that makes the rest of the story legible.

 In 1940, the last full year of peace for the Soviet Union, the country manufactured 211 million pairs of leather shoes. Around 4 and a half billion linear meters of cloth, nearly a quarter of the entire industrial workforce, something on the order of 23% was employed in light industry. By volume of industrial output, the Soviet Union stood first in Europe and second in the world.

 211 million pairs for a population of about 190 million. Whatever else was wrong with the Soviet economy in 1940, and a great deal was wrong with it, this was not a country that could not put shoes on people. It had the tanneries and the factories and a shoemaking tradition dragged out of the artisan workshops of the empire into industrial mass production during the 1930s.

 So when the Red Army arrived at the table in September 1941 and started asking for footwear, it was not asking because the Soviet Union was a backward peasant country that could not manage a boot. That is the explanation almost everybody reaches for and it is wrong in a way that hides the whole mechanism. Now put the demand side next to it.

 On the 22nd of June 1941, the Soviet armed forces had roughly 4.8 million people under arms. Within a week, more than 5 million reserveists had been called up. Over the four years that followed, something in the region of 34 million people passed through the Red Army and its associated services. At the peak, more than 11 million were serving simultaneously.

 What each of those people was owed down to the item had been written out five months before the invasion. Order number 05 of the people’s commisseriat of defense dated the 1st of February 1941 laid down the standard list of clothing and equipment for junior commanders and rank and file soldiers summer and winter peace time and wartime.

 It is a dry document. It is also a contract, the state undertaking in writing to put specific objects on a specific number of bodies. And the first line of any such contract in any army that has ever existed is what the man stands in. Every one of them needed something on their feet, not once, continuously. A pair of army boots in field conditions is not a possession.

 It is a consumable, like ammunition and bread. Marching wears them, mud pulls them apart. Frozen ground splits the soles. Wet rots the stitching. In the Red Army of the Second World War, every single pair of army footwear passed through the hands of the repair cobblers at least once, and most of them went through several times.

 Set that against what happened to supply. Soviet production of leather footwear in millions of pairs. 1940, 211, 1941, 158, 1942, 52.7. Read those three figures again because they are the reason for everything that follows. In two years, the output of Soviet shoe factories fell by three quarters.

 It did not recover during the war. In 1943, it was 56 million. In 1944, 67. in 1945 63. Across the entire war, the Soviet Union never again made in a single year even a third of what it had made in 1940. While the number of people it had to shoe roughly doubled. That is the shape of the problem. Demand doubling, supply collapsing by 75% and no possibility of rationing the difference because the difference is a barefoot infantryman. Picture that.

 The second industrial power on Earth, in the middle of the largest mobilization any society has ever attempted, is producing fewer pairs of shoes for a nation of 190 million than it had produced for its civilians alone in a quarter of the year before. There is a temptation when you see a curve fall like that in a country under invasion to file it under the obvious heading and move on.

 The factories were bombed. The factories were captured. Total war, terrible losses. Of course, everything fell. I do not think the record supports that reading. And the reason matters more than the correction. Soviet aircraft production went through the same invasion, the same evacuation, the same catastrophic winter.

 And it went up 15,700 aircraft in 1941, 25,400 in 1942, the worst year of the war, the year of Stalenrad. with aviation plants still being reassembled on frozen ground in the eurals. 35,000 in 1943, 40,000 in 1944. Aircraft factories are more complex, more fragile, and more dependent on precision than shoe factories in every way that engineering can measure. They recovered anyway.

 The shoe factories did not. Something was happening to footwear that was not happening to airplanes. And it was not a matter of bombing. And this is where the request list from the Spiridonovka palace starts to look less eccentric. A government reading those three production figures in the autumn of 1941 already knew what it was going to run out of and roughly when it did not need to be told about aircraft.

 It was watching its own aviation plants come back to life on the other side of the eurals. What it could not see coming back was the thing in the first line of order five. And the men who understood why were not in the Kremlin. They were in a trade that most governments never think about until the day it stops.

 Here is what it looked like at the receiving end. Arena Dunvkaya was a military interpreter and she kept a diary from 1942 to 1945 that was published in Moscow in 2010. In 1942, she was issued a pair of Soviet army boots four sizes too large. No women’s sizes below 38 were made, and those went instantly. On the roads in the wet season, she wrote, huge clouds of clay stuck to them.

 The boots sank into the liquid mess of the road, and to move a leg at all, she had to make an enormous effort, and then scraped the clay off with her hands. Closer to the front line, it got worse. In the communication trenches, the thick clay slurry poured in over the tops and pulled the boots off her feet.

 More than once, soldiers fished her drowned boot out of the mud with a bayonet while she stood on one leg like a stork. They poured out the liquid filth, and she pulled the rescued boot back on over a wet footcloth. A year later, a sergeant major from a neighboring unit got hold of a pair that actually fitted her.

 Soft calf leather, the kind that officers were supposed to have. She recorded that as an extraordinary piece of luck which tells you exactly how ordinary the other thing was. That is one woman on one road. Multiply it by 11 million. So the first explanation is dead. This was not the poverty of a backward country.

 It was the collapse of one specific industry inside a country that was simultaneously doubling its output of combat aircraft. And if the bombs and the occupation were not the cause, then something else had gone missing between the herd and the last something that a factory in the eurals could not replace no matter how many shifts it worked.

Part two. In the late summer and autumn of 1941 on the roads running east out of Ukraine, Bellarussia and the western districts of Russia, there were columns that no war film has ever bothered to show you. Not tanks, not refugees, though they were there, too. Cattle, collective farm herds were driven east on foot in front of the advancing German armies by teenagers and old men and women with sticks along roads that were being strafed.

 They walked for hundreds of kilometers. Many of the animals died on the way of exhaustion, of thirst, of having nothing to eat at the end of a day’s march because the fields had been harvested or burned. about two and a half million head of livestock were got out. The official evacuation figures put that number in the same tally as the 2593 industrial enterprises that were lifted off their foundations and moved east in the same months, which tells you how the people running it understood the problem. A cow was capital equipment.

 2 and a half million heads sounds enormous until you set it against what was left behind. In the first six months of the invasion, the Germans took or cut off territory that had held more than 60% of the Soviet Union’s livestock and close to 40% of its grain. I have read a fair number of Soviet evacuation orders from 1941.

 What is striking is not the scale of what got moved. It is that a state which planned the location of every rolling mill down to the siding had no worked out plan at all for the herd and ended up improvising it with school children, old men and sticks on roads under air attack while its trained agricultural administrators sat in offices filling in returns.

 When the accounting was finally done, the Soviet state put its agricultural losses at 7 million horses, 17 million head of cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats, and 110 million head of poultry killed on the spot or driven west into Germany. Now, why does that belong in a story about a supply protocol? Because of where leather comes from and how long it takes.

 A hide is not a raw material in the way that iron ore is a raw material. Nobody farms hides. A hide is what is left over when an animal that was raised for milk or meat or draft work is killed. A byproduct and therefore a quantity you cannot increase on demand at any price. If you want more soul leather next year, you need more cattle to have been born three or four years ago.

 There is no crash program for that. There’s no second shift. The entire supply is set years in advance by a biological process that no economy on Earth has ever found a way to accelerate. And then having got the hide, you have to turn it into leather, which in the Soviet Union of 1941 meant something closer to a slow chemical marination than to manufacturing.

 The great Soviet encyclopedia describing the traditional Russian process gives the cycle as up to 180 days, six months. The hides go into pits of tannin liquor drawn from bark, moving gradually from weak solutions to strong ones, so that the tanning agent penetrates evenly all the way through instead of case hardening the outside and leaving raw skin in the middle.

 Soul leather is the thickest and slowest of all of it because soul leather has to be dense enough to be walked on for months. You can ask a factory to work three shifts. You cannot ask a pit to hurry. There’s a second squeeze inside that one and it is worth 30 seconds. The tanning liquor itself comes from bark and wood extract which means forestry and extract plants.

 The alternative process, chrome tanning, needs chromium salts, which means mining and chemical capacity that the Soviet Union in 1942 was pointing at armor plate and shell fuses. Both roads to leather ran through industries that the war had already claimed. Even the byproduct had a byproduct problem. Picture that the largest army on earth and the rate at which it can put men into the field is being set by how many calves were born in Ukraine in 1938.

 and by how long bark takes to soak through cowhide. Here is what that means, stated flatly. And it is the piece of this story that almost every account leaves out. The Soviet footwear collapse of 1941 and 1942 was not primarily a factory problem. It was a raw material problem and the raw material was alive. The shoe plants of Moscow, Lennengrad, Fergana, and Quebeesev could be retoled, restaffed, put on war orders, and driven around the clock, and several of them were.

 What none of that could do was conjure hides that had been eaten by the Vermacht in Ukraine, or shorten the six months a heavy hide has to lie in a tanning pit before anyone can cut a soul out of it. By the time the shoe factories were ready to work, the queue at the top of the process was empty, and the clock at the bottom of it could not be moved.

 The Soviet war economy is usually taught as a demonstration of what industry can be made to do when a state is prepared to push hard enough. Evacuate it, freeze it, starve it, work it 18 hours a day, and watch the output curve climb anyway. I read the leather figures as the exception that shows where the pushing stops working.

 And I think that exception is the more interesting half of the story. Steel, aircraft, tanks, shells, every one of those runs on inputs that are inorganic, storeable, and expandable. Dig more ore, mine more coal, build another furnace, and the curve bends upward inside 18 months. The Soviet Union proved that at a scale nobody had thought possible.

Leather runs on a herd, and a herd is a living stock of capital that takes years to rebuild. and can be destroyed in an afternoon. There’s exactly one strategic material in the Second World War whose supply the enemy could permanently reduce simply by having lunch. This was it.

 And that is why the request that went to London and Washington was not shaped like the requests for aircraft. Aircraft were a production problem. And the Soviet Union was solving production problems. This was a biology problem. And there is no five-year plan for biology. You can see how far it went from a single document. In 1942, the main quartermaster directorate issued an instruction on the collection, repair, and use of items of uniform, footwear, and equipment belonging to killed Red Army soldiers.

 Read the title again slowly. It is an administrative document about stripping the dead. And it is not a scandal. It is a procedure with a distribution list and a filing number. Because in 1942, a serviceable pair of boots was a resource the state could not afford to bury. Rear area units went on wearing worn ankle boots and repaired footwear returned from the front until October of that year.

 None of which was news in Moscow. It had happened before inside living memory to the same country on the same ground. 90 seconds of 1915 and then straight back to the tanning pits. On the eve of the First World War, the Russian army had roughly 4 and a half million pairs of footwear in stock. It looked comfortable. Then the mobilization came and by the end of 1914, there were more than 5.

3 million men underarms. Within months, the stock was gone. In early 1915, to save leather, the army began issuing short ankle boots with cloth putties instead of the tall boot the Russian soldier expected. It did not work. By the middle of that year, on the standard figure, one Russian soldier in three was effectively barefoot.

 The army that came out the other side of that experience, the Red Army of the Civil War began its existence with men in based sandals made of platted leather scraps. Every senior Soviet quartermaster in 1941 had either lived through that or been trained by men who had. When the state standard for army footwear made of heavy Russia leather was signed on the 5th of April 1941 11 weeks before the invasion.

 It was signed by people who knew exactly what a footwear shortage does to an army because they had watched one dissolve an empire back to the pits and to the autumn of 1941. The men who walk those herds east are not commemorated anywhere. There is no monument to a dver. If a story like that is worth keeping in circulation, the like button is one second of your time and it is the whole mechanism by which this reaches people who care about getting the details right rather than the slogans.

So the second explanation dies too. The Germans did not simply capture the shoe industry. They removed its input and its lead time and no amount of Soviet organizational genius could put either back. which leaves an obvious objection and it is the one that every Russian school child could raise because the answer to it is one of the genuinely famous Soviet achievements of the war.

The Soviet Union did not need cows. It had already invented a way around them. Part three, Moscow, the evening session of the 11th of December 1935. The military council under the people’s commasar for defense is sitting and a man named Di Kosich who runs the Red Army’s directorate for transport and clothing supply gets to his feet holding a boot.

 The stenographic record of that meeting was published in 2008. So we know what he said. He reported to Veroschelof that the troops unanimously reject the ankle boot worn with Putties. Then he held up his sample. The leg of this boot, he explained, was made entirely of cotton cloth. Five layers of it, impregnated with a compound invented in a laboratory.

 A month of wear in the field had been enough to convince him it looked like leather. It wore like leather. That laboratory compound had been sitting in the Russian archives for 30 years, waiting for somebody to need it badly enough. In 1903, a major general named Mikail Pomort, a chemist, a meteorologist, one of the founders of Russian errology, took several layers of sail cloth and soaked them in a mixture of egg yolk, paraffin wax, and rosen.

What came out was described at the time as a material of great strength and complete impermeability to water, which could be given the appearance of leather at will. He named it after a coarse tough woolen cloth used for soldiers great coats. In the summer of 1905, an experimental batch went to the Far East to be tested by the Russo Japanese War.

Horse harness, ammunition bags, equipment covers, and padding for the seats of artillery limbers. The soldiers called the stuff devil’s hide. In 1913, Pomorph made and tested the first boots. The legs were entirely substitute. Only about 15% of the whole boot was cheap, heavy leather. He took nothing for it.

He wanted no royalty and no license. He simply wanted the army to be shaw and he spent the last three years of his life going back and back to the main quartermaster directorate to say so. He died in 1916 with the Russian army in the middle of the boot crisis that his invention had been designed to prevent.

The idea went into a drawer for 20 years. What brought it out was chemistry. In the early 1930s, Soviet industry began producing synthetic rubber in quantity. And a latex-based impregnation could do what egg yolk and rosin had done, only better and cheaper. A batch of boots made from the new version was issued in 1935 and worn for eight months of trials, which is the batch Kosich was waving in front of the people’s commasar.

 Then it went to Stalin’s desk. In his personal papers at the Russian state archive of social and political history, there is a note from Timoshenko with a draft resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars and the central committee attached setting out how much heavy leather, chrome leather, and sole leather the substitute would save the country every year.

Production was set up at the artificial leather works in Kira. And from 1937, the boots began reaching the troops. Picture that. a general who had been dead for 20 years, an egg yolk recipe from the reign of Nicholas II, and the entire footwear policy of the world’s largest army, now resting on five layers of cotton with rubber in it.

 And then in the winter of 1939, it failed. The Soviet Union invaded Finland and the new material went to war for the first time in temperatures that reached 40 below. It cracked. It broke. It held no warmth whatsoever, so that men in the newest footwear the Red Army possessed were freezing in it. Some soldiers came out of the line with eczema from the chemicals in the impregnation. Production was stopped.

That is the failure that almost nobody mentions, and it is the hinge of the entire story because of what happened next. In 1941, the state went back to the chemist Ivan Vasilovich Plotnikov, born 1902, who with a colleague named Alexander Kutov had developed the original synthetic rubber version, was put in charge of fixing it in the middle of the worst months of the invasion.

With the raw material arithmetic from the last part closing in on the army, he fixed it. By November 1941, the reformulated material was in mass production. On the 10th of April 1942, 11 specialists connected with the invention and industrial introduction of leather substitutes were awarded the Stalin Prize, second class, and 100,000 rubles. It worked.

 That has to be said plainly because the temptation in a story about foreign aid is to make the domestic solution look like a failure. And this one was not. In April 1942, a guard’s technician lieutenant named Be Corsov wrote in his diary that he had been issued new boots of the stuff and was no longer afraid of mud or water. They had stood the test well.

 By the end of the war, something like 10 million Soviet soldiers were walking in it. And here is the thing that the famous version of this story never gets to. The substitute replaced the leg of the boot. It did not replace the foot and it could not replace the sole. Go back to Pomortz’s boot of 1913. Legs entirely artificial and still 15% leather.

 That proportion never really moved. The modern boot made on Plotnikov’s technology is still roughly 85% substitute and 15% specially prepared heavy leather. And that 15% is not decorative. It is the vamp and the sole. The part that takes the impact, the part that is soaked and dried a hundred times, the part that is walked on.

 You can make the shaft of a boot out of cloth. Nobody in 1942 could make the part that meets the ground out of anything except leather or rubber. Which is why one of the more remarkable industrial creations of the Soviet war effort was a factory in the city of Ianovo with a name you could not invent, the artificial soul combine.

 Over the course of the war, it produced 6,000 tons of soul rubber. And out of that rubber came 76 million pairs of army footwear. 6,000 tons from a country whose rubber came either from a synthetic process competing with tire and tank production or from the tropics. And the tropics were now Japanese. Remember the largest single item in the hold of that first convoy at Arangelsk? 10,000 tons of Indian rubber.

 Now look at what the Soviet Union actually asked its allies for. And the shape of the request tells you everything. In the second protocol covering July 1942 to June 1943, the Soviet requirements are numbered line by line. Item 71 is soul leather. 18,000 short tons requested. Item 72 is army boots. 4,800,000 pairs requested. Item 73 is army cloth.

Soul leather comes before the boots. It is the higher line on the list and it is the request for a raw material, not a finished article, which is what a country asks for when its factories are working and its inputs are not. What the Red Army was short of in the end was never footwear as an object.

 It was the one component of footwear that has to be grown. The invention of the substitute is remembered in Russia as proof of self-sufficiency. The war won in domestically produced boots. No thanks to anybody. I read the same episode almost the other way round. What Plotnikov and his colleagues actually achieved was to shrink the leather requirement of the Red Army by roughly 85%.

And thereby to make the remaining 15% absolutely non-negotiable. Before the substitute, a footwear shortage was a broad blurry problem across a whole industry that could be attacked from many directions at once. After it, the entire footwear supply of the Soviet armed forces balanced on one narrow requirement, heavy sole leather and vamp leather with no slack left in the system anywhere because all the slack had already been used up.

 The invention did not remove the dependency. It concentrated it into a single point and then the point sat in a tanning pit for six months and then it sat in Ukraine and Ukraine was gone. I have gone through a fair amount of Allied protocol paperwork from these years. What is striking is not that the Soviet Union asked for soul leather.

 It is that in the second year of the alliance, the request went in at 18,000 tons, which is not a stop gap figure. It is the figure of a country that has done the arithmetic and knows it will not be closing this gap itself before the war ends, which raises the question that decides whether any of this mattered. The Soviet Union had asked in the world’s richest economy with the largest cattle herd in the industrial world behind it.

 Somebody now had to write an answer next to item 71. And the answer they wrote is not the one anybody expects. Part four. The answer sits in the protocol document itself, printed by the United States government printing office in 1948. It is nine words long. No soul leather available except as included in finished shoes. that is the United States in the middle of 1942 telling its ally it does not have the leather against a request for 18,000 tons it could offer none at all as raw material only what was already sewn into completed shoes the country that would

build 96,000 aircraft in a single year had run out of cowhide picture that the arsenal of democracy with more cattle than any industrial nation on earth and the one line on the Soviet requirement schedule it cannot fill is the one a village tanner could have understood in the 14th century.

 6 months later, the consequences arrived on Main Street. On the 7th of February, 1943, James F. Burns, the director of economic stabilization, announced that leather footwear would be rationed in the United States. The order took effect two days later with almost no warning. Every man, woman, and child in America was allowed three pairs of shoes a year.

 In March 1944, that was cut to two. To stretch the leather further, the Office of Price Administration also dictated what could be made. Four colors only. Black, white, a shade called town brown, and army russet. Nothing over 10 in tall. Heels no thicker than two and 5/8 of an inch. Men’s sandals, house slippers, running shoes, and golf shoes vanished from the market.

 Rationing was not lifted until the 30th of October 1945, nearly 3 months after the war ended. The stated reason in the announcement itself was a shortage of the heavy leather used for souls. The American army was substituting exactly as the Russians were. Its type 3 service shoe issued to combat troops from 1943 had a sole and heel of composite and reclaimed rubber recycled in part from worn out tires.

 The richest army in the world was walking on retreads. Where the hides finally came from, close is it. In the last wartime protocol, running from July 1944 to June 1945, the Soviet Union asked for 22,000 tons of leather. Look at what was offered. 509 tons of American soul leather. 9,481 tons of sole and insole leather from South America.

 And the same pattern in the upper leather, 780 tons American, 1,193 South American, 509 tons against 9 and a half thousand. By 1944, the leather in a Red Army boot was overwhelmingly an Argentine or Uruguayan or Brazilian cow. The Alliance had gone to the Southern Hemisphere because the Northern Hemisphere had none to spare.

 That is what a real strategic shortage looks like. Three continents being searched for an animal. So, the idea that footwear was America’s cheap gesture, the easy thing to send instead of a second front, does not survive contact with the paperwork. It cost the United States its own civilian shoes in the hides of another hemisphere.

 The story of lend lease is usually told in every country involved as a story about the top of the list. Aircraft, tanks, trucks, the things that photograph well. I read these protocol schedules as evidence that the top of the list was the easy part. Airplanes were a question of factory capacity, and factory capacity was the one thing the United States could conjure out of nothing in 18 months.

 It was the bottom of the list. The leather, the wool, the hides, the things that grow, where the alliance actually strained, where it had to bargain with neutrals, ration its own population, and comb three continents. Anyone can build a bomber if they have enough steel and enough Detroit. Nobody can build a cow.

 And what they built instead is the single strangest object in this entire story. Open the United States War Department’s ledger of lend lease shipments compiled on the 31st of December 1946 and go to the quartermaster section. There are the ordinary lines you would expect. 991,472 pairs of standard American enlisted men’s service shoes.

 32,143 pairs of civilian conservation corps shoes swept out of some dep depot. 99,669 pairs of women’s service shoes. And then a line that reads shoes service Russian last 13,470,936 pairs. A last is the form a shoe is built around the shape of a foot carved in a block. It is the most conservative object in shoemaking because every last encodes a national assumption about what feet are like and what they will be asked to do.

 American factories did not send the Soviet Union their own shoes. They cut new lasts to a Russian pattern and built 13 12 million pairs on them. How they learned to do it is recorded by the man who ran the program. Edward Statatinius, the Lend Lease administrator, published a book on the operation in January 1944 with a passage in it about Soviet footwear.

 The Red Army, he wrote, had asked whether besides standard boots, the Americans could make the tall Russian boot drawn from the hide with no seam where the leg meets the foot. So there is no line for water to get in and made by hand in Russia for centuries. In his book, the Russian word for it is printed in Latin letters.

 Because there was no English term for the thing, the Americans went looking for a way to make that boot by machine, and it was not easy. In the end, they found a man who knew everything there was to know about it, the former head of a boot factory under the Zar. They asked him whether he would help make footwear for the Soviet Union. He took the job.

 Machine production of the Russian boot got underway quickly after that, and Statinius noted red army men were wearing them. sit with the geometry of that. A man who had run a shoe works for Nicholas II, driven out by the revolution that created the Soviet Union, standing in an American factory in about 1943, teaching American machinery to reproduce the boot of the Imperial Russian infantrymen for the Red Army.

 What arrived at the other end was not always the answer to anyone’s prayers. Some British supplied ankle boots had soles built from layers of pressed impregnated cardboard because they had been made for colonial garrisons in Asia. In the Russian mud season, the cardboard drank water, swelled and buckled, and the men who got them noticed.

 Boris Gorbachevski, 19 when he was sent to the Rusev sector, wrote one of the more unsparing Soviet infantry memoirs. In it, his comrades call themselves the Poutier army, laughing about it and eyeing anybody in proper boots with open envy because their own would not survive even light damp. Now turn the camera around because the other side was solving the same equation and losing.

The German jack boot is one of the 20th century’s visual cliches. It was also unaffordable. In 1939, the leg was shortened by 3 cm purely to save leather. From 1940, the army stopped issuing it to rear area personnel who got ankle boots and canvas gators instead. From 1941, new recruits did not receive it at all.

 By late 1943, production of the marching boot had stopped altogether. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with an army whose most recognizable single item of equipment it had already decided it could not afford to make. what the cost is in the medical returns. In the winter of 1941 to 1942, the German army recorded well over a 100,000 cold injury casualties with something on the order of 15,000 amputations.

feet. Overwhelmingly, across the entire war on the Soviet side, the recorded figure for frostbite casualties in the Red Army was 90,880 for four years for an army twice the size in the same climate. I have read a fair amount of German quartermaster material from these years. What is striking is not that the army froze in the winter of 1941.

It is that the decision which made freezing likely had been taken in peace time on a desk by men with a complete picture of their own hide supply who shortened the boot to save leather and then marched east in it anyway. Those German casualty figures are almost always explained by winter clothing policy and by the assumption in Berlin that the campaign would be finished before the snow.

 I read them as a raw material verdict that had been written before a shot was fired. If you read them the other way, put it in the comments and say what you are basing it on. The medical returns and the procurement orders are both in the public record and that argument is worth having properly. But there is still an objection standing and it is the strongest one.

 13 12 million pairs is a very large number until you put it beside what the Red Army actually issued over four years. Set against that total, the whole Allied contribution is a fraction. and a fraction on the face of it is not a cause of anything. Part five. The last wartime protocol runs from the 1st of July 1944 to the 30th of June 1945.

 And the footwear line in it is short. Request 5 million pairs. Offer 5 million pairs. No haggling, no reduction. Five for five in the year the Red Army crossed into Poland, Hungary, East Prussia, and finally Germany itself. Getting them there was its own campaign. After the destruction of convoy PQ17 in July 1942, the northern route to Mormansk and Arangelsk was effectively shut for months and the traffic went round the world instead.

Roughly half of all American aid crossed the Pacific in Soviet flagged ships to Vladivvastto. The Soviet Union and Japan were not at war and then traveled west on the Trans Siberian Railway to reach a front it had already sailed away from. The other road ran up through the Persian Gulf.

 Nearly 8 million long tons unloaded in Iran and Iraq and hauled north into Soviet Azerbaijan. Picture that. A hide off an Argentine steer tanned in the United States, cut and lasted on a wooden form shaped like a Russian foot. shipped to the Persian Gulf, driven a thousand miles through Iran, and issued to a rifleman outside Vitb who has never heard of any of those places.

 Now, the objection that has been standing since the start of this, across the whole war, the Red Army received about 63.79 million pairs of footwear. Of that total, 12.5 million came from the Allies. Call it one pair in five. On the face of it, that is a supporting role, not a decisive one. And Soviet historians spent 40 years making exactly that point, usually with the percentage in bold. The percentage is correct.

 It is also close to meaningless for two reasons. The first is timing. Those deliveries were not spread evenly across four years like butter on bread. In the first year, there was almost nothing. A few thousand tons on the early convoys, 400,000 pairs promised in the first protocol, and shipping losses on top. The volume arrives in 1943, 1944, and 1945, and so does the request. 4.

8 million pairs in the second protocol year, 3.6 in the third, 5 million in the fourth. That curve does not track the Soviet Union’s need for shoes in general. It tracks something much more specific. Which brings the second reason, and it is the one that decides the question. An army sitting in defensive positions consumes footwear slowly.

 An army advancing consumes it at a rate the supply returns can barely keep up with. From the summer of 1943, the Red Army stopped sitting down. Kursk, the Neper, Bellarussia, the Vistella, Berlin, roughly 2,000 kilometers west on foot in three campaigning seasons through two mud seasons a year of the substance Arena Dunvkaya was fishing her boot out of.

American trucks carried the shells and the fuel. The infantry that took the ground walked and the ground destroyed as they walked in. So the honest way to state the arithmetic is not as a share of a total. It is this. In 1942, the entire Soviet Union, every factory for every purpose for soldiers and war workers and children and collective farmers alike produced 52.

7 million pairs of leather footwear, while the army’s establishment alone was well over 10 million people. There was no margin anywhere in that system, which means an imported pair was never competing with a domestic pair for a place on a shelf. It was the difference between a battalion that could be moved forward on the 12th of the month and a battalion that could not.

 The percentage argument treats war material as though it were water in a reservoir, where the only question is the total. I read supply the other way round, and I think the record forces it. What decides an operation is the marginal pair, the one that is or is not in the dep depot at GML on the day the order comes. Averaged over four years and 11 million men, 12 million imported pairs look like a rounding error.

distributed as they actually were, arriving in bulk exactly in the years of continuous offensive movement into a system with no slack left in it. They are the reason a specific number of rifle divisions were shot on the specific mornings when somebody needed them to walk 25 km. Nobody will ever put a figure on that.

 It does not follow that the figure is small. The men who ran the Soviet supply system had no illusions about it, though they said so in private and after Stalin was dead. Anastas McCoyen, who as people’s commisar for foreign trade personally handled the reception of Allied deliveries from 1942, told the historian Gorgi Kuman many years later that without Lend Lee, the Soviet Union would certainly have fought on another year, perhaps 18 months longer than it did.

 I have read a good deal of what Soviet officials said about Allied aid in public and what they said in private and the gap is instructive. In public, it was 4% and a footnote. In private, from the man whose job it was to take delivery of the stuff, it was a year to 18 months of additional war, which at the casualty rates of 1944 is a figure with several million people inside it. The verdict.

 There is one line in the last protocol that nobody quotes and it settles the whole question of what the Soviet Union thought it was buying. In the same document that asked for 5 million pairs of boots and 22,000 tons of leather, the Soviet negotiators also asked for textile manufacturing equipment machines to the value of 6,913,000.

The American offer written next to it was $13,000 with anything further listed as under study. $13,000 against 6.9 million. It is the most one-sided line in the entire schedule. And here is why it matters. Across four years of protocols, the Soviet Union asked for finished footwear by the million and raw leather by the ton again and again and again, escalating every year.

 and it asked to be sold the machinery to make more of it exactly once at the very end almost as an afterthought and did not press when it was refused. That is not the behavior of a country that had lost its shoe industry. It is the behavior of a country whose shoe industry was standing there staffed and powered and waiting with nothing to put into it.

 You do not buy a second oven when what you are short of is flour, which is the answer to the question in the title, and it can be said in one sentence. The Red Army asked for boots before it asked for aircraft because aircraft were the part of the war that could still be manufactured, and leather was the part that could only be inherited.

 And in the summer of 1941, the Soviet Union stood and watched its inheritance being driven west and eaten. Everything follows from that. The airplanes came back because Oay comes out of the ground on demand and Soviet industry proved it could turn or into aircraft faster than Germany could.

 The hides did not because hides come out of a herd. And a herd is the one form of industrial capital an enemy can destroy by having dinner. Every other shortage in that war economy had a domestic answer somewhere if you were ruthless enough. This one had an answer only in Argentina and Argentina could only be reached through Washington.

 As for the man we started with, Commodore John Charles Keith Dowing, Royal Naval Reserve, born at Duggar in British India on the 1st of November 1891, brought the first Allied cargo of the war into Arangelsk on the last day of August 1941. Turned round and went back. In June 1942, he took out convoy PQ17, the worst disaster of the Arctic route, had his flagship torpedoed under him, and was pulled out of the sea.

 He then went back into the ice in a corvette, searching for scattered merchant men and shephering survivors into port, which is a large part of the reason, as many ships came home from PQ17 as that September, he took the returning convoy QP14, and his flagship was sunk under him.

 a second time and he was pulled out of the Arctic again. He was appointed CBE, went home and died in 1965 at 73. He never fired a shot at anybody. He delivered rubber, tin, wire, blankets, wool, and 1500 tons of boots and then kept going back. And if you want one image of how the alliance actually worked, it is a middle-aged merchant captain in the water off Bear Island for the second time in three months.

 If this was worth 40 odd minutes of your attention, the like button is the whole mechanism by which it reaches other people who would rather have the protocol schedules than the slogans. Subscribe if you want the next one because there are a dozen more lines in those ledgers that nobody has ever bothered to read out loud.

 And keep one thing in mind the next time somebody tells you what won a war. The things that decide it are almost never the things that photograph well. They are the things an army spends quietly every single day until the day there are none left. And the men who noticed that first were not generals. They were quarter masters.

 And nobody has ever built them a monument.