Lend-Lease

Identification Program through which the United States supplied Great Britain with war materials

Date March 11, 1941-September 2, 1945

The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 provided more than $50 billion to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies of the United States during World War II, enabling them to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The program began before the United States entered the war and was structured so that the United States would technically not violate its own neutrality.

By the summer of 1940, Great Britain was the major European opponent of Nazi Germany’s conquest of Europe. The Soviet Union was allied to Germany by the August, 1939, nonaggression pact between the two totalitarian states. The United States was officially neutral, bound by several neutrality acts that forbade the export of arms and ammunition to foreign nations engaged in war. That prohibition had been modified in 1939, after the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, to allow the sale of war materials on a “cash and carry” basis, but with the stipulation that such items could not be carried on American ships.

After the fall of France in June, 1940, and subsequent Battle of Britain, the economic resources of the United Kingdom were essentially exhausted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from Prime MinisterWinston Churchill on December 9, 1940, noting the heavy losses of British shipping from German submarine attacks and stating that Britain would soon run out of cash to buy American war material.

Suggestions of American Aid

A canny but often cautious politician, Roosevelt held a news conference ten days later in which he played down the cash requirement, using the analogy that one would be willing to loan a neighbor a garden hose if his house was on fire, and the neighbor would return the hose once the fire was extinguished. During a December 29, 1940, “fireside chat” broadcast on the radio, Roosevelt claimed that if Britain and its empire fell, the Western Hemisphere might be next to succumb to Nazi tyranny. The United States must become “the great arsenal of democracy,” although, he emphasized, not a combatant. In an address on January 6, 1941, he announced that he was sending the Lend-Lease bill to Congress, thus launching a vigorous national debate.

Congressional hearings began a few days later, with the House of Representatives’ bill cleverly given the number of H.R. 1776. Public opinion was strongly supportive, in part because Britain had successfully repelled the German attack in the Battle of Britain. Wendell Willkie, the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate, was chosen by Roosevelt to be the major advocate for Lend-Lease, while in London, Churchill somewhat disingenuously claimed that with Lend-Lease aid he foresaw no need for eventual American troops.

Opponents of the bill, many from the isolationist America First Committee, which included such iconic figures as aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, claimed the opposite and argued that Lend-Lease would inevitably lead to American participation in the war. Some argued that by sending war materials to Britain, the American rearmament program would be slowed. The pro-Nazi German American Bund and the American Communist Party were united in opposition, reflecting the alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Chicago Tribune, the New YorkDaily News, and the WashingtonTimes-Herald all opposed the bill. One of the most inflammatory statements against the Lend-Lease bill came from Montana’s liberal senator Burton Wheeler. Referring to the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) program, he called Lend-Lease the “triple-A foreign policy; it will plough under every fourth American boy.”

To gain support for the Lend-Lease bill, to counter anti-British criticism from many traditional and Midwestern isolationists, and to establish the truth of the claim that Britain was at the end of its financial resources, the Roosevelt administration seized British assets in the United States, much to the private consternation of Churchill. The isolationist opposition was successful in amending the bill as it was debated in Congress, most notably in explicitly stating that United States naval vessels were prohibited from engaging in convoying ships carrying Lend-Lease items to Britain. The administration later got around that restriction by a semantic sleight-of-hand, stating that American ships were merely “escorting,” not “convoying,” the merchant ships.

Passage and Initial Operation

The Lend-Lease bill easily passed both Houses of Congress in early March, 1941, by a margin of 60-31 in the Senate and 317-71 in the House of Representatives. On March 11, Roosevelt signed the bill (Public Law 77-11), and Congress quickly passed legislation providing for an initial $7 billion in aid to Britain. The New York Times saw passage of the bill as a reversal of the isolationist position that the United States had taken at the conclusion of World War I, when it had not ratified the Treaty of Versailles and thus not become a founding member state of the League of Nations.

Harry Hopkins, a close confidant of Roosevelt, was appointed the first head of the Office of Lend-Lease Administration. Several months later, he was replaced by Edward Stettinius, Jr., who held the position until 1943, when he was appointed undersecretary of state.

Because of the prohibition against convoying, initial shipments of Lend-Lease materials across the Atlantic to Britain went by British ships. In a speech to the House of Commons, Churchill said that Lend-Lease was the “most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” Privately, however, Churchill remained incensed about the forced sale of British assets in the United States. Both sides—the British and the American—remained wary about the aims and actions of the other: whether the United States would continue to send the promised war materials to Britain and, from the American side, whether Britain would continue to fight against Nazi Germany or whether it might revert to the appeasement policies of its former prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. Despite suspicions, both sides were faithful to their commitments.

Extension of Aid

By early 1941, the Battle of Britain had been won, but the Battle of the Atlantic had not. German U-boats were rapidly demolishing British shipping and, thus, Lend-Lease materials. To get around the prohibition against convoying, in April Roosevelt extended the American security zone to include Greenland, then later Iceland. Both were proclaimed to be in the Western Hemisphere, greatly increasing the area that legally could be defended by United States naval ships.

After the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in violation of the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, Lend-Lease aid was extended to the Soviet Union. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had any illusions about the Soviet Union and its totalitarian dictatorship, but they regarded Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany as much worse. Lend-Lease was also extended to other states of the British Empire, including Australia and New Zealand. The United States extended the program to the Republic of China in the summer of 1941; the country had been engaged in war against Imperial Japan since 1937. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hitler declared war against the United States, bringing to an end the prohibitions against convoying on the Atlantic.

By the end of World War II in 1945, United States Lend-Lease aid to about fifty allied states totaled more than $50 billion, with Great Britain and its empire receiving $31 billion and the Soviet Union more than $11 billion. Aid to Great Britain alone included everything from aircraft to prefabricated housing to cigarettes.

Impact

In passing the Lend-Lease Act in March, 1941, the United States moved from its previous policy of providing aid to other democracies, short of war, to assisting the democracies even at the risk of war. Once that threshold had been crossed, Lend-Lease was a crucial element in aiding America’s allies, which ultimately led to victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The United States also engaged in so-called Reverse Lend-Lease, paying for supplies including food and for sites for military bases in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere; such payments amounted to more than $7 billion, most of that going to Britain.

After World War II was over, Europe was economically exhausted. The Lend-Lease program formally ended on September 2, 1945, but to assist Great Britain, the United States agreed to cancel much of Britain’s Lend-Lease debt, allow equipment to stay in place, and sell Lend-Lease materials at drastically reduced prices. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union ended formally in May, 1945, in a reflection of the increasing Cold War divisions, but shipments of material continued until September 20. The debt with the Soviet Union was not settled even provisionally until 1972, as part of the détente that led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of the same year.

Bibliography

Gilbert, Martin. Road to Victory, 1941-1945. Vol. 7 in Winston S. Churchill. London: Heinemann, 1986. In this definitive biography of Churchill, the author discusses Lend-Lease from the British perspective.

Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. In this survey of American diplomacy, the author, a specialist on Lend-Lease, discusses the program.

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Extensive discussion of Lend-Lease by a major historian.

Kimball, Warren F. The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939-1941. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. A major study of the Lend-Lease program.

Parish, Thomas. To Keep the British Isles Afloat. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Claims that Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman, a special envoy to Europe, were the key figures in implementing Lend-Lease.

Stettinius, Edward R., Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Stettinius was the second administrator of the Lend-Lease program.