Lend-Lease Act

Introduction

In December 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with chilling news: Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy. The war with Germany, which had begun in earnest in the spring of 1940, had drained the British treasury. London would soon be unable to pay for the supplies and weapons it was buying from the United States. That might doom Britain’s effort to hold off the Nazi onslaught. Churchill’s news put FDR in a bind. A month earlier, he had won an unprecedented third term as president after promising Americans worried about the conflict in Europe that their “boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” But FDR also believed that a German victory would be disastrous for the United States. Knowing he had to act, he used the next three months to build congressional and public support for a plan to lend supplies to Britain and other countries fighting the Axis powers. The resulting Lend-Lease Act, which Churchill called “the most unsordid act,” provided more than $50 billion in aid to fifty nations and helped win World War II. SHAFR historians ranked the Lend-Lease Act as the fifth-best U.S. foreign policy decision.

The congressional and public insistence on rigid neutrality began to weaken after Germany seized Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Roosevelt pushed Congress to expand a provision adopted in 1937 that gave him discretion to permit countries at war to buy supplies (but not weapons) from the United States, provided they paid cash and shipped their purchases on non-American vessels. Roosevelt had pushed for this so-called cash-and-carry provision because he calculated that only Britain and France would be able to take advantage of it should Europe go to war. They, not Germany, were likely to control the high seas.

War came to Europe in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Two months later and after heated debate, Congress ended the ban on selling weapons to countries at war, provided they observed the terms of the cash-and-carry rule. Britain quickly made use of the opening that Roosevelt had engineered to buy arms and other supplies from the United States. But the provision had one obvious weakness: countries had to have cash to pay U.S. manufacturers. The letter that Roosevelt received from Churchill on December 8, 1940, showed that would not be the case for much longer.

Roosevelt recognized that he could not provide Britain with aid on the scale it needed without Congress’s approval. In September 1940, he had issued an executive order trading fifty old U.S. Navy destroyers for the right to lease naval and air bases in eight British territories in the Western Hemisphere. Anti-interventionists were outraged. They argued that he had exceeded his constitutional powers with the “destroyers-for-bases” deal and risked embroiling the United States in the war in Europe. Indeed, Churchill called the trade a “decidedly unneutral act.” FDR knew he had tested the limits on what he could do on his own authority and now needed congressional consent.

With the 1940 presidential election safely behind him, Roosevelt took up the challenge. In January 1941, he submitted a draft Lend-Lease Act to Congress. The proposal was sweeping in scope. It authorized him, “when he deems it in the interest of national defense…to sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” war materiel to the “government of any country whose defense the president deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Such a grant of authority to the president had no precedent in U.S. history. It would be a bitter point of contention in the legislative fight to come.

The United States provided more than $50 billion in supplies and services to fifty nations under the terms of the Lend-Lease Act over the course of World War II. Britain received approximately half of all Lend-Lease aid. The Soviet Union, which no one during the debate over the legislation imagined would become a recipient because it was allied with Germany at the time, received around one-fifth. Lend-Lease did not fulfill Roosevelt’s claim that it would keep the United States out of the war by enabling other countries to defeat the Axis powers. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nine months after the bill passed brought the United States into the war. Lend-Lease nonetheless helped sustain Britain when it stood nearly alone in resisting Germany, and it became a critical source of support for the Soviet Union after Germany turned on it in June 1941. Lend-Lease also boosted the U.S. economy. The law defined aid broadly, meaning that everything from weapons to grain exports to ship repair services were covered, which spurred the agricultural and industrial production that the United States would need when it entered World War II.