The Lend-Lease Act
-Jason
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At the outbreak of World War II, the United States declared its neutrality to avoid the conflict. As a result, the United States was a noncombatant between 1 September 1939 and 8 December 1941. Despite this official declaration of neutrality, many Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, sympathized with Great Britain and France, and believed that Nazi Germany needed to be defeated.
Hitler had spent the years leading up to World War II rearming Germany. Despite not having all their weapons systems fully completed, the Nazis enjoyed considerable advantages at the beginning of the war: better combined arms tactics, skilled officers, and plenty of combat experience thanks to the Spanish Civil War (fought between 1936 and 1939). The Allied Powers did have technological advantages, but their plans initially mirrored the failed tactics of World War I. The pre-war British and French governments had done everything they could to avoid another devastating World War.
By May 1940, the Germans had conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. And the Germans were on the verge of seizing France. German armored units had cut through the supposedly impassable Ardennes Forest and cut Allied forces off in Belgium. The situation for the Allies was dire as the some of the best formations were threatened with destruction. The British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, and many French troops were trapped by the Germans along the English Channel and repeated Allied counterattacks failed to break the Axis lines.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sought to evacuate the BEF and redeploy it back to France. However, all the heavy equipment needed to be abandoned if the evacuation was to take place. The British Army would lose a significant portion of their tanks, artillery, and trucks. Even though the BEF was saved during Operation Dynamo, it was stripped of the weapon systems needed to further resistance the Germans. Even with the English Channel acting a natural barrier against immediate invasion, the Germans had demonstrated their ability to carry out successful airborne and amphibious attacks.
The situation continued to deteriorate once Italy declared war upon the Allies on 10 June 1940. This opened new theaters of war in North and East Africa as well as throughout the Mediterranean Sea. Churchill tried to keep France in the war by landing new British forces throughout mid-June. However. French government sued for peace after German forces captured Paris and penetrated behind the defenses of the Maginot Line. Field Marshal Phillipe Pétain, the hero of Verdun and World War I, became French Premier and asked for armistice terms on 17 June 1940.
The British Empire was the last democracy in Western Europe still at war with the Axis Powers by the end of June 1940. The loss of so many tanks, artillery pieces, machine guns, and other vital weapons left Britain vulnerable on all fronts. The Royal Air Force and Royal Navy were also stretched to the breaking point trying to defend not only the Home Islands, but also the vital Atlantic Convoy routes and the Mediterranean possessions. British industry was struggling to keep the pace of war production up while being subjected to German aerial attacks.
Churchill had been in communication with Roosevelt since his election as Prime Minister in early 1940. The American president was fully aware of the dire situation for the Allies and had been taking every conceivable action to aid them. A series of Neutrality Acts which had been passed in the 1930s prevented war materials from being sold and shipped by American companies to enemy combatants.
However, there was a way for those materials to reach the people who needed them: the “Cash and Carry” amendment to the Neutrality Act of 1939 was the key to this dilemma. Cash and Carry meant that if a combatant had the money on hand and ships to transport the war materials from the United States to their home country, the American technically were not breaking the Neutrality Acts! Since Great Britain and France had both the money and ships to buy US weapons, they had access to the industrial power of North America.
Despite this clause, the Allies eventually ran out of both money and ships to transport new equipment. The national reserves for both the British and French were quickly exhausted, and demand never went down. The United States Congress also began to fear that by sending these weapons overseas, the US military would be bereft of equipment for itself. The acquisition of warships, tanks, planes, and other war materials could not be easily made up as American industries were still on a peacetime program.
This situation quickly deteriorated once the German U-boats were able to penetrate the North Atlantic after the Fall of France and start sinking Allied merchant ships. The British enacted the convoy system to alleviate the losses but found that they had too few escort ships to protect every convoy. The Royal Navy needed many destroyers in the Home Islands to prevent a German amphibious invasion. New naval construction programs would take months to come online and make up the difference. This deficit left the convoys vulnerable to Axis naval and air attacks.
Roosevelt had been concerned about the potential of the British government asking the Germans for a ceasefire. He pressured the US government to find ways to expand, or replace, the flagging Cash and Carry program. He also asked for larger and larger military acquisition bills to be passed to strengthen the US military and push the American industry towards wartime production. His arguments, though persuasive, were stilled viewed by isolationists as warmongering.
Roosevelt and Churchill privately discussed a new scheme that could help both powers: the concept of Lend-Lease. The United States Navy had considerable numbers of World War I-era destroyers sitting in reserve. These ships were not actively being used by the US Navy and could make up a portion of the escorts needed by British convoys. The British could not immediately pay for these ships, thus the usual Cash and Carry policy was not possible. However, the British did possess considerable overseas territories that could be used by the United States military.
Roosevelt and Churchill worked out a scheme by which the United States would supply the destroyers to Britain in exchange for leasing British bases in the Caribbean Sea to the US. These bases would not officially change hands, rather the US could expand the facilities while temporarily garrisoning them for a set number of years. American war materials could then be channeled to the British without immediate payment and fear of breaking Neutrality Laws.
Even though Lend-Lease was agreed upon by the heads of the American and British governments, it still needed to get past Congress and Parliament. Roosevelt argued that Lend-Lease was the same as lending your neighbor your garden hose to help put out a fire before it reached your house. It would give American industries time to shift to war production and build up American military forces before it was drawn into the world conflict. It was not until 11 March 1941 that Roosevelt was able to pass the Lend-Lease bill into law. It had already been established that most Americans supported the idea of aiding the British.
The signing of the Lend-Lease Act ensured that the British, and later, all Allied Powers, had access to whatever materials they needed to continue fighting the Axis. Weapons, warships, merchant ships, planes, and ammunition are the primary items that most people think of with Lend-Lease program, but those were just a small list of what was sent. Agricultural goods and machines were dispatched, as well as medicine, food, clothing, and fuel. Roosevelt also hinted that the materials lent to fellow allies would not have to be sent back or paid for immediately after the end of the war; and so most of the debt the Allied Powers accrued was forgiven.
By the time that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, American industrial power had shifted to war production and the US government had already invested millions of dollars into expanding factories and shipyards. Despite the devastating losses suffered by the Allies in the Pacific, US factories and shipyards were more than capable of replacing everything that had been destroyed. Without Lend-Lease it seems unlikely that the Allies would have prevailed against the Axis Powers.