Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act

On Tuesday 11 March 1941, at ten minutes to four in the afternoon, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed at the White House “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”, known as H.R. 1776 or, from its key words, the Lend-Lease Act. A few hours earlier the House of Representatives had accepted, by 317 votes to 71, the amendments made to its text by the Senate, which had passed the bill on Saturday 8 March by 60 votes to 31. This ended two months of controversy that had divided American politics since the bill was introduced on 10 January, and with it the first chapter of the third term of the President, re-elected in November 1940. Roosevelt did not wait a single day: within three hours of signing he issued the first two directives, declaring the defence of Britain and of Greece vital to the defence of the United States, and approved the first lists of equipment to be shipped to them.

The Act provided neither for loans nor for sales on credit. It allowed the President to manufacture or procure weapons and other “defense articles” for any country whose defence he deemed vital to America’s security, and to transfer them to that country on whatever terms he considered satisfactory. The United States, still formally neutral, thus became the material base of the war against Germany and Italy – the “arsenal of democracy” that Roosevelt had promised in December 1940.

Three weeks in the Senate

The House of Representatives had passed the bill on 8 February, by 260 votes to 165, and sent it to the Senate. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had been hearing witnesses since the end of January – among them, on 6 February, Charles Lindbergh, who argued that aid to the British would not decide the outcome of the war, and, on 11 February, Wendell Willkie, who called for that aid to be increased – recommended the bill by 15 votes to 8. The Senate took it up on 14 February, and the debate on the substance began on 17 February with a speech by the Democratic majority leader, Alben Barkley. Barkley, who had introduced the bill in the Senate in January, argued that if Hitler won, America would face a hostile world: Germany would dominate Europe, Italy Africa, and the Axis fleets would be two and a half times as strong as the American navy. He called aid to Britain the surest way of keeping war away from the United States. The bill was also supported by the assistant Republican leader, Warren Austin of Vermont.

Its opponents, led by the Republicans Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Gerald Nye of North Dakota and the Democrat Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, repeated the arguments familiar from the House debate: that the bill gave the President unlimited power to dispose of the nation’s property and, in practice, the power to decide on war and peace, and that it was the first step towards sending American soldiers to Europe. The debate dragged on for almost three weeks, and the bill’s supporters accused the opposition of deliberately prolonging it to delay the vote. The Senate rejected more than a dozen amendments that might have changed the character of the bill, including a motion by the Wyoming Democrat Joseph O’Mahoney requiring the consent of Congress for the delivery or convoying of supplies to Europe by American armed forces (28 votes for, 63 against). Proposals to replace the whole scheme with an ordinary credit, or to name in the Act the countries that could receive aid – only Britain, China and Greece, for example – also failed. Opponents pointed out that the general wording would allow the President to help even the Soviet Union, still bound to Germany at the time by the pact of August 1939; the administration replied that the situation was changing too fast to pass a new law with every shift in the strategic position.

The administration did, however, accept after negotiation an amendment by the Louisiana Democrat Allen Ellender, which became Section 10 of the final text: nothing in the Act was to be construed as changing existing law on the use of American land and naval forces, except for the manufacture, procurement and repair of equipment, the communication of information and other non-combatant purposes. The Senate adopted it by 65 votes to 24. The final text also laid down that weapons for other countries could be produced only within the limits of funds appropriated by Congress for the purpose, and that equipment bought from future army and navy budgets could be transferred only if Congress expressly allowed it. The other reservations added by the House in February – the expiry of the powers on 30 June 1943, a ceiling of 1.3 billion dollars on equipment from existing stocks, reports every 90 days, the right of Congress to withdraw the powers by a concurrent resolution of both houses, and a clause stating that the Act did not authorise the navy to convoy ships – remained in the text.

Late on the evening of Saturday 8 March the opposition gave way and the vote was taken. Sixty senators voted for the bill and 31 against. The division was similar to that in the House of Representatives, though less sharp: 49 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted in favour, 13 Democrats and 17 Republicans against, and the remaining two votes were cast by senators from outside the two major parties.

Tuesday 11 March

Because the Senate had changed the text passed by the House of Representatives, the bill had to go back to the House. The leadership of the Democratic majority did not want to risk a conference committee and further weeks of delay, so the House voted on a special resolution (H.Res. 131), whose adoption meant agreeing to all the Senate amendments at once. The Republican Hamilton Fish, the bill’s most ardent opponent, warned in the final debate that the war to which it was leading would make the First World War look like “a mere picnic”. His voice no longer changed anything: on 11 March the House adopted the resolution by 317 votes to 71. Immediately after the vote the Republican leader in the House, Joseph W. Martin, and the Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, both active opponents of the bill, issued statements saying that now that it had become law they would support its implementation.

The bill was at once engrossed and taken to the White House. Roosevelt signed it in the afternoon, at 3.50 p.m. It became Public Law No. 11 of the 77th Congress. The text ran to a mere eleven sections, and its supporters took its title literally: arms sent to the British were, for them, an investment in their own security. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, said during the debate that America was not lending anything but buying its own security at a time when it was arming itself.

The first directives

The administration was ready. Some of the equipment destined for Britain had already been packed at the end of February, when passage of the bill seemed certain. According to Edward Stettinius, who ran the programme from the autumn of 1941, Roosevelt issued two directives within three hours of signing the Act. Directive No. 1 declared the defence of Britain vital to the defence of the United States and authorised the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, to transfer to the British 28 PT boats and related submarine chasers, which had only just entered service with the US Navy, together with 3,000 depth-charge propelling charges and medium-calibre naval guns with mountings and ammunition for arming merchant ships. The British had asked for these boats as early as the summer of 1940, at the time of the destroyers-for-bases deal, with the defence of the English Channel against invasion in mind, but they were then still under construction and the law at the time did not allow them to be transferred. The guns for merchant ships answered the most pressing need of the moment: in the Battle of the Atlantic U-boats and German aircraft were sinking more and more British tonnage, and weapons for merchant ships were so scarce that the British later, with the President’s consent, passed some of these guns on to the Norwegians, Dutch, Greeks and Yugoslavs, whose merchant fleets sailed in Allied convoys.

Directive No. 2, issued the same day, declared the defence of Greece vital to the United States and authorised the Secretary of War to transfer to the Greeks 50 75 mm guns with 150,000 rounds, and 30,000 rounds for the 155 mm howitzers they were using against the Italians in the mountains of Albania. Greece, governed since the death of Ioannis Metaxas by Alexandros Koryzis, had been successfully repelling the Italian invasion since October 1940, but by March 1941 it had managed to buy little in America: some tens of thousands of mortar bombs and a few hundred tonnes of TNT. Now its position was becoming desperate. On 1 March Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact, and German troops, who had crossed the Danube at the beginning of March, took up positions on its frontier with Greece; on 7 March the first British units began landing at Piraeus. The American aid was modest and late: the guns and ammunition could not be loaded onto a ship until mid-April, and on 28 March Roosevelt ordered thirty Grumman fighters, originally intended for the British, to be diverted to Greece. The first of them sailed from New York on 1 April, a few days before the German attack on Greece.

Loan, lease or credit?

Brief chronological summaries describe the Act as permission for Britain, China and other Allied countries to buy American military equipment and defer payment until the end of the war. This is a simplification that captures the intention but not the mechanism. The Act named no country – neither Britain nor China – and provided neither for credit sales nor for loans. Section 3 allowed the President to authorise the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy or the head of any other department to manufacture or procure defence articles for the government of any country “whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States”, and then to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” them. The terms were set by the President alone, and the benefit to the United States could be “payment or repayment in kind or property, or any other direct or indirect benefit” that he considered satisfactory.

This was the legal form of the garden-hose parable that Roosevelt had told journalists on 17 December 1940: you lend your hose to a neighbour whose house is on fire and ask not for payment but for its return when the fire is out. In practice it meant that equipment supplied under Lend-Lease served the recipient until it was destroyed or returned, while the settlement was put off until after the war and need not take the form of money. The President and his advisers, especially the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, remembered well that the credits of the First World War, which the Europeans had been unable to repay, had poisoned transatlantic relations throughout the 1920s and 1930s and had led in 1934 to the Johnson Act, which banned loans to countries in default on their debts. Lend-Lease was meant to avoid that trap: not to create a dollar debt that would again become a bone of contention after the war.

The Act also contained safeguards. The recipient had to undertake not to pass on the equipment or information received to anyone else without the President’s consent. The President could order repairs of foreign warships in American yards and communicate military information about the equipment supplied. But he could not, as the amendments stressed, use the navy to convoy ships or send American ships into combat zones in breach of the Neutrality Act of 1939. Lend-Lease cargoes therefore had to cross the Atlantic in British and other countries’ ships, through waters where German submarines were hunting.

The new rules did not cover orders placed earlier. For equipment contracted before 11 March the British still had to pay in cash, which weighed on their dwindling dollar reserves throughout 1941. Aid “on the garden-hose model” applied only to new deliveries, and these required new money.

Seven billion dollars

The Act itself gave the President no money beyond the right to transfer equipment worth up to 1.3 billion dollars from existing army and navy stocks, and those stocks, needed to train an army that was expanding after the introduction of conscription, were small. By the end of 1941 equipment worth only 173 million dollars had been transferred from them. That is why, as early as 12 March, Roosevelt asked Congress for 7 billion dollars for the production of aircraft, tanks, guns, ships, raw materials, industrial equipment and food for the countries whose defence had been declared vital. The sum was larger than the entire US defence budget of a year earlier. Both houses passed it by large majorities within two weeks – the isolationists’ resistance, spent in the debate on the Act itself, had no strength left – and on 27 March the President signed the Defense Aid Supplemental Appropriation Act. Money from this fund could not, however, be quickly turned into weapons, because months passed between placing an order and the equipment leaving the factory. Food went soonest: on 16 April Roosevelt ordered the transfer to the British of 100,000 cases of evaporated milk and 11,000 tonnes each of cheese and eggs.

At first the programme was in practice run by the President’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, who in January and February had spent several weeks in Britain finding out what the British really needed. Roosevelt reserved to himself the personal signature of every decision allocating funds and every directive transferring equipment.

“A new Magna Carta”

In London the Act was received with relief. The next day, 12 March, Winston Churchill answered a question in the House of Commons from the Member Hastings Lees-Smith. The Act, he said, had become law when the President signed it, and in the name of the House and the nation he expressed “our deep and respectful appreciation of this monument of generous and far-seeing statesmanship”. The most powerful democracy, he went on, had declared in a solemn statute that it would devote its overwhelming industrial and financial strength to ensuring the defeat of Nazism, so that nations great and small might live in security, tolerance and freedom. The government and people of the United States had thereby written a new Magna Carta, which not only respected the rights on which a healthy and advancing civilisation could rest but also proclaimed the duty of free men and free nations to share the responsibility and burden of their defence. A few weeks earlier, on 9 February, he had appealed on the radio: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” Now the Americans had undertaken to supply those tools.

Roosevelt summed up the debate on 15 March in a broadcast speech at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association. The decision of Congress, he said, was “the end of any attempts at appeasement in our land; the end of urging us to get along with dictators; the end of compromise with tyranny”. The decisions of a democracy are reached slowly, but once reached they are proclaimed “not with the voice of one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions”. He promised the British and their Greek allies ships, aircraft, tanks, guns and ammunition, and assured China, which had been fighting Japan since 1937, that it too would receive American help. He repeated that time was of the essence: what was needed was “speed, and speed now”.

Place in the war

The Act signed on 11 March 1941 ended American neutrality in the old sense of the word. Congress, which in 1935 had banned the sale of arms to all belligerents alike and in 1939 had allowed only cash purchases, now authorised the President to choose a side and arm it at the American taxpayer’s expense. The general wording that its opponents had so feared turned out to be its greatest strength. On 6 May 1941 Roosevelt declared the defence of Chiang Kai-shek’s China vital; soon afterwards he extended aid to the governments-in-exile of occupied countries, Poland among them, and after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June to the USSR as well: on the basis of a protocol signed in Moscow on 1 October, and formally from 7 November 1941. By the end of the programme, shortly after Japan’s surrender in the summer of 1945, the United States had supplied under it goods worth some 50 billion dollars, roughly one-sixth of its war expenditure: more than 31 billion went to Britain and its empire, more than 11 billion to the USSR, about 3 billion to France and more than one and a half billion to China. Equipment, fuel and food flowed across the Atlantic, by the Arctic convoys to Murmansk, through Iran and across the Pacific to Vladivostok. The Allies reciprocated with “reverse Lend-Lease”, mainly services and supplies for American forces, worth some 7.8 billion dollars.

The settlement, as promised, was not made in dollars. Most of the equipment was destroyed in combat. In return, in the Mutual Aid Agreement with Britain of 23 February 1942, Washington secured a commitment to build jointly an open post-war economic order. Only deliveries that arrived after the programme ended were paid for: Britain bought them with a long-term loan, which it paid off in 2006.

The logic of the Act also led further than its reservations envisaged. The weapons had to reach their recipients, and in the Atlantic the U-boats were sinking ships faster than they could be built. As early as the spring of 1941 the US Navy was extending its patrols into the western Atlantic, and from September, despite the convoy clause, it was escorting convoys and had orders to fire on German submarines, invoking the President’s powers as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. The United States entered the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war in December 1941. From 11 March, however, it was no longer a mere spectator but the rear base of the coalition fighting the Axis powers – the “arsenal of democracy” without which it is hard to imagine either Britain’s survival in 1941 or the later victories of the Red Army, which moved largely on American lorries.