I recall reading that Ford's engineers and production managers despaired of trying to educate Russian automotive managers and workers about the importance of dimensional control and uniformity of parts production. (The Russian Factory managers were always shadowed by political commissars who emphasized the Boss's [Joseph Stalin's] production deadlines and quantitative goals over everything else. It is worth mentioning that the political commissars won the battle, such that Ford withdrew his consultation engineers and quality managers from the Russian plants in the mid-1930s. Consequently, by June 1941, when Hitler's armies invaded Soviet Russia, the Soviet Red Army had a LOT of GaZ trucks, but they required virtually constant nightly maintenance in order to provide a next-day of operations. Senior Soviet Army analysts found that, under wartime conditions of constant retreat or relocation of assets, their GaZ trucks mean-time-to-failure was less than 24 hours of operation. Thus the Red Army's motorized units found themselves unable to retreat as fast as the Axis forces were advancing. Thousands of GaZ trucks were abandoned or destroyed in place where they broke down, and German Army mechanics actually began to salvage them and re-use them with Ford-of-Germany-produced spare parts and German paint & markings. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Red Army's first large-scale counter-attacks which actually stopped the advance of the German Center Group outside Moscow occurred when substantial numbers of Lend-Lease war-aid American Studebaker 4x6 trucks were available. Also, it is instructive to note that, for that attack, the Katusha solid-fuel rocket artillery (a uniquely terrifying weapon) launcher tubes were removed from the GaZ trucks and installed onto Studebakers to utilize their enormously greater reliability. (Ford's consulting engineers and quality managers returned [at Stalin's request] to the GaZ factories in late 1942. By late summer 1943, GaZ trucks had far better reliability, and spare parts were actually interchangeable between vehicles.)
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