The House of Representatives passes Lend-Lease

On Saturday 8 February 1941, after five days of debate, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1776, the bill “to promote the defense of the United States”, known as the Lend-Lease Act. Two hundred and sixty members voted in favour, 165 against, and six did not vote. The bill, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had sent to Congress on 10 January, allowed him to transfer arms to countries whose defence he deemed vital to America’s security, without demanding payment in cash. The lower house hedged these powers with a series of conditions – an expiry date, a duty to report, a ceiling on the value of equipment taken from existing stocks, and a clause stating that the act did not authorise the navy to convoy ships – but left the substance of the bill intact. The following evening, Sunday 9 February, Winston Churchill answered the Americans in a radio broadcast with words that have gone down in history: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

Five days in the House

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by the New York Democrat Sol Bloom, had been hearing witnesses since 15 January; the most prominent of them, on 23 January, was Charles Lindbergh, who argued that neither aid nor even America’s entry into the war would make it possible to defeat Germany. At the end of January the committee’s Democratic majority approved the bill with amendments, and the Republican minority submitted a dissenting report. On 3 February debate opened on the floor. It was conducted in the Committee of the Whole House, with the Tennessee Democrat Jere Cooper in the chair, under rules laid down in a special House resolution (H.Res. 89); members could move amendments to each section as it was read out by the clerk. The bill was defended by the Majority Leader, John W. McCormack, who had introduced it, and by Bloom and the committee Democrats, and at key moments the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, also took the floor. The opposition was led by the Republican leader Joseph W. Martin and the bill’s most implacable opponent on the committee, Hamilton Fish, backed by younger Midwestern members such as Karl Mundt of South Dakota and Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

The dispute was the same one that had raged in the press and on the radio since January. Opponents called H.R. 1776 the “dictatorship bill” and the “war bill”: they argued that Congress was handing the President the right to dispose of public property without any financial limit and, in practice, the right to decide on war. Supporters replied that aid to Britain was the cheapest and surest way of keeping the war away from American shores, and that British dollar reserves were running out. Public opinion was mostly on the President’s side: according to a Gallup poll in early February, 54 per cent of Americans supported aid to the British without reservation, a further 15 per cent with reservations, and 22 per cent were firmly opposed. The party divide was, however, clear – 69 per cent of Democrats but only 38 per cent of Republicans backed the bill unconditionally.

The amendments

The Democrats soon realised that without concessions they would lose the votes of some of their own members, especially from districts where isolationism was strong. Already in committee they had written four conditions into the bill. The President could transfer equipment not produced specifically for the purposes of the act only after consulting the Army Chief of Staff or the Chief of Naval Operations, or both. His powers were to expire on 30 June 1943, except for the carrying out of contracts concluded earlier; a further amendment allowed such contracts to run until 1 July 1946 at the latest. The President was to report to Congress on the operation of the act at least once every 90 days, omitting information whose disclosure he considered incompatible with the public interest. Finally, the act stated that nothing in it “shall be construed to authorize or to permit the authorization of convoying vessels by naval vessels of the United States”. On the motion of the Mississippi Democrat William Colmer it was also added that the act did not permit American ships to enter combat zones in breach of the Neutrality Act of 1939, which meant that British purchases still had to be carried in non-American ships.

Two more significant changes were made on the floor. The first, the only one adopted against the wishes of the majority leadership, was Dirksen’s work: Congress could at any time revoke the President’s powers by a concurrent resolution of both houses, which the President could not veto. The second came on the morning of 8 February. The Republican John Taber proposed a ceiling on the value of equipment that could be transferred from stocks already paid for out of earlier appropriations, and McCormack, after talks with the minority, adopted the idea in an amendment of his own. It was settled that the value of such equipment would not exceed 1.3 billion dollars; the House adopted the amendment after rejecting attempts to tighten it.

The opposition dismissed these concessions as cosmetic. In the final round of debate Mundt said that the conditions “used many words to say very little”: he called the convoy clause empty, since his own motion to keep ships out of the waters of belligerent states had been rejected, and the reporting requirement mere “beautiful phraseology”, since it was the President who would decide what to tell Congress. The House rejected one after another the motions that might have changed the character of the act: an amendment by the Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin forbidding the dispatch of soldiers, sailors and airmen beyond the waters of the Western Hemisphere without the consent of Congress (82 votes to 137), and an amendment by Henry Dworshak of Idaho stating that the act did not authorise violations of international law (94 to 142). The most serious alternative was put forward by the New Jersey Republican Charles Eaton, who favoured aid to the British but not powers for the President: in place of the whole core of the act he proposed authorising a credit to Britain of up to 2 billion dollars for purchases in the United States, secured by collateral where possible. In a teller vote the amendment was defeated by 120 to 177. The left-wing New York member Vito Marcantonio, who opposed the act from a wholly different standpoint from the Republicans, tabled an ironic amendment providing that the President could not lease the “thirteen original colonies” to King George; two members supported it.

The vote

On the afternoon of 8 February the Committee of the Whole House finished its work, and the House approved the amendments adopted in a single vote. Fish then moved to recommit the bill with instructions to write Eaton’s version of the credit into it. This was the programme of a large part of the Republicans: to help the British with money but not to give the President a free hand in disposing of American arms. The motion failed by 160 votes to 263. Immediately afterwards, in a roll-call vote demanded by Bloom, the House passed the act by 260 votes to 165.

The division ran almost exactly along party lines. Democrats voted 236 to 25 for the act, Republicans 24 to 135 against; the remaining votes against were cast by members of minor parties, among them Marcantonio. A handful of Republicans, mainly from the East Coast, voted for the act, such as James Wadsworth of New York, who admitted that the President’s powers were “tremendous” but supported them nonetheless. The bill went to the Senate, where the Foreign Relations Committee was still hearing witnesses; Lindbergh had appeared before it on 6 February, and on 11 February Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s opponent in the election of 5 November, who was just returning from Britain, was due to testify.

“Give us the tools”

Willkie had brought to London more than his own support for the act. When he set off at the end of January as an unofficial envoy, Roosevelt gave him a handwritten letter to Churchill, written, according to most accounts, on 20 January, the day of his third inauguration. The President wrote that Willkie was “truly helping to keep politics out over here” in the dispute over aid to Britain, and copied out a stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Building of the Ship (1849), which, he added, “applies to you people as it does to us”. The poem, written at the time of the quarrels that later led to the Civil War, was a hymn to the Union as a ship on which the hopes of the world rested.

Churchill replied publicly on the evening of Sunday 9 February, in a radio broadcast transmitted by the BBC – the first, as he himself pointed out, that he had addressed to the nation and the Empire in five months. Most of it was taken up with a review of the winter. Churchill praised Londoners, who endured the night raids of the Blitz like the British squares at Waterloo, and described the victories in Libya that had ended with the capture of Benghazi and the Italian defeat at Beda Fomm: in his words, the Italian army in eastern Libya, more than 150,000 men strong, had been captured or destroyed in eight weeks. He named Generals Archibald Wavell, Henry Maitland Wilson and Richard O’Connor. He spoke of the bombardment of Genoa by Somerville’s ships at dawn that same day, and of the repulse of the German dive-bombers that in January had attacked the aircraft carrier Illustrious at Malta – the German losses he gave, more than 90 aircraft out of 150, were greatly exaggerated. He warned Bulgaria not to repeat its mistake of 1915 and join the losing side, cautioned that the German army and air force were massing in Romania and already infiltrating Bulgaria, and, following the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, John Dill, repeated that Hitler might yet attempt an invasion of the British Isles, this time better prepared, using gas, parachutists and gliders.

His most important sentences, however, were addressed across the ocean. He thanked the Americans for the visits of Harry Hopkins and Willkie and assured them that Britain did not need their soldiers. In the last war, he said, the United States had sent two million men across the Atlantic, but this was not a war of vast armies hurling huge masses of shells at each other; Britain did not need the gallant armies forming throughout the Union, not this year, nor next year, nor “in any year that I can foresee”. What was needed was “an immense and continuous supply of war materials and technical apparatus of all kinds”, and ships to carry it, because the Germans, now reaching out to the ocean on both sides of the British Isles after conquering France and Norway, would do everything they could to sink British tonnage in the Battle of the Atlantic. At the end he read out Longfellow’s lines beginning “Sail on, O Ship of State!”, which bid the Union, strong and great, to sail on, since humanity, with all its fears and all its hopes of future years, hung breathless on its fate. He then asked what answer he should give, in his listeners’ name, to “this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty millions”. The answer was: trust us; give us your faith and your blessing, and with the help of Providence all will be well; we shall not fail or waver, we shall not weaken or tire; neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long trials of vigilance and effort will wear us down. “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

The speech is sometimes described as yet another plea for help. It was so only in part. Churchill was speaking to two audiences at once: to the British, to whom he presented the war as winnable, and to the American senators who were about to consider the act. His assurance that America was to give arms, not sons, answered precisely the isolationists’ chief charge, that Lend-Lease was the first step towards sending American soldiers to Europe.

Place in the war

The vote in the House of Representatives sealed the fate of the act. In the Senate isolationists such as Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye and Robert A. Taft could drag out the debate, but they did not have a majority. On 11 February Willkie urged the Senate committee to let the British have five to ten destroyers a month, and after three weeks of argument on the floor the Senate passed the act on 8 March by 60 votes to 31. On 11 March the House of Representatives approved the Senate version by 317 votes to 71, and Roosevelt signed the act the same day. At the end of March Congress voted 7 billion dollars for the first aid programme. The conditions won by the opposition in the February debate proved no obstacle: Congress later extended the 1943 deadline.

Churchill’s words became one of the watchwords of the war. His assurance that Britain would not need American armies “in any year that I can foresee”, on the other hand, proved mistaken. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, American soldiers landed in North Africa in November 1942 and in 1943–1945 fought in Italy, France and Germany. The convoy clause did not stand the test either: from September 1941 US Navy warships escorted convoys in the western Atlantic, although legally this rested on the President’s powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces rather than on the act itself. The February debate in the House of Representatives was the last moment at which Congress seriously considered whether America should help Britain only with money and on credit. It chose the more far-reaching path: it made the United States the “arsenal of democracy”, which over the next four years supplied arms, food and fuel to Britain, China and, from the autumn of 1941, the Soviet Union as well.