| Lend lease was major for the Russians, but much of it came in the form of trucks, railway equipment, and cargo ships. Those things make a big difference. They did get warplanes.
Normandy was an important battle, but it wasn't a turning point.
If you look at the Russian army, not long after its humiliating defeat by Finland, a country with virtually no air power, little armor, and meager artillery, and combine that with the supposed victories of Germany's lightening war in France and Poland, then I think you can make a pretty good case that the Battle of Moscow was the actual turning point of the war.
So many things were at issue. The biggest one was the continuation of Russia in the war. If they had lost at Moscow, that would have meant the results in Finland were final and binding - that the Russian army just plain sucked and was going to continue to suck until quickly eliminated in mass by a truly superior strategy.
In point of fact, those results were not final. What the Fins exposed was that lightening war was full of inherent weaknesses. The Fins survived all aspects of lightening war: air power, fast tanks, and fast and massive infantry. The key was having a rear (depth) and never giving up. Lightening war had no knockout punch, and it wore itself out. It was too easy for meager forces to inflict crippling casualties on it.
The Fins proved infantry, with improvised explosive devices and battlefield wit, could eliminate large numbers of tanks. They proved that air power, as it existed in WWII, was easily survivable by a fighting force, and they proved that reliable submachine guns in the hands of dedicated fighters could destroy large numbers of bolt-action infantry - certainly enough to force a superior force to accept peace.
All the Russians had to do was to turn all of that around on the attacking Germans, and it took them just a matter of months to get it done.
The outcome of the war, other than the rest of the dying, was decided. Blitzkrieg was an overhyped failure as a strategy. For the rest of the war in Europe it would continue to fail. It became the ETO's version of the Banzai in that, regardless of who used it, it was usually a gift to its opponent.
The Americans never gave up on it, and it never really worked very well for them either. And their blitz was the fastest and most sustainable in war.
The Russians discovered the war's victorious strategy, and they discovered it very early in the war: pray for more blitzes, then kill them. |