Too often wars are described in terms of presidents and generals, emperors and kings, grand strategy and elaborate campaigns. But wars affect the lives of all people - the soldiers who fight and the women, children, and men who support the effort from home. The Lend-Lease program was a turning point during WWII, and an essential home front undertaking.
Early in 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared: "Give us the tools and we ...
Too often wars are described in terms of presidents and generals, emperors and kings, grand strategy and elaborate campaigns. But wars affect the lives of all people - the soldiers who fight and the women, children, and men who support the effort from home. The Lend-Lease program was a turning point during WWII, and an essential home front undertaking.
Early in 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared: "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." The Lend-Lease operation eventually provided the British, Soviets, and other Allies with $50 billion worth of "tools" - much more than the $32 billion cost to the United States for World War I. In May of 1945, when war ended in Europe, Winston Churchill stated: "It was American war production that won the war in Europe." Indeed, from 1941 to 1945, American factories poured out an avalanche of weaponry: 40 billion bullets, 300,000 aircraft, 76,000 ships, 86,000 tanks, 2.6 million machine guns, and massive amounts of non-military items.
In the three years of the Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Airway, thousands of Americans worked with Soviets on the cooperative program. At its height, up to 600 Soviet pilots and other personnel served in Great Falls, Montana; and Fairbanks, Galena and Nome, Alaska. From 1942to 1945, the Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease program demonstrated that two nations could set aside differing views, cultural values and principles to achieve a common, mutually beneficial goal - the defeat of Nazi Germany and its Axis powers.
This book is a moving testimonial to what peace-seeking nations can achieve when they cooperate in the face of a common enemy. Dr. Jeffrey W. Hahn, Professor of Political Science, Villanova University.
Alexander Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev, in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and attended the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center.
In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years and an archaeologist for five years at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States after living one year in Austria and Italy. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981 while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He then settled in Alaska - first, in Sitka in 1985, and then in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was the U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education and Yukon-Koyukuk School District from 1988 to 2006; and Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.org) from 1990 to present. He has conducted approximately 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and the United States (including Alaska).
Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, and Clipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manage for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Memorial erected in Fairbanks, Alaska in 2006. Dolitsky is the founder and Program Manager of the "White Nights Festival of Russian Culture" that is held annually in the Southeast Alaska.
He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography in Current Anthropology, Artic, American Antiquity, Ultimate Reality and Meaning, Siberia, and in many other professional journals. His more recent books include: Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During World War II; and Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East.
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Overview
Early in 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared: "Give us the tools and we ...