Wikileaks-gawd bless

[Brian Abraham]

Just to clarify the Lend-Lease. Up until 11 March 1941 when it was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (18 months after the war had started) Britain paid cold hard cash, as did the USSR. When the British began running short of money, arms and other supplies, Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt for American help. Sympathetic to the British plight but hampered by the Neutrality Acts, which forbade arms sales on credit or the loaning of money to belligerent nations, Roosevelt eventually came up with the idea of “Lend-Lease.” As one Roosevelt biographer has characterized it: "If there was no practical alternative, there was certainly no moral one either. Britain and the Commonwealth were carrying the battle for all civilization, and the overwhelming majority of Americans, led in the late election by their president, wished to help them." As the President himself put it, “There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs.”

The American position was to help the British but not enter the war. In early February 1941 a Gallup poll revealed that 54 percent of Americans were unqualifiedly in favor of Lend-Lease. A further 15 percent were in favor with qualifications such as: "If it doesn't get us into war," or "If the British can give us some security for what we give them." Only 22 percent were unqualifiedly against the President's proposal. When poll participants were asked their party affiliation, the poll revealed a sharp political divide: 69 percent of Democrats were unqualifiedly in favor of Lend-Lease, whereas only 38 percent of Republicans favored the bill without qualification. A poll spokesperson also noted that, "approximately twice as many Republicans" gave "qualfied answers as...Democrats."

There was reverse Lend-Lease also. British supply of Spitfires and Mosquitos to the US being but two examples. At one point the value of New Zealands aid to the US (food) exceeded what the country was receiving in war materials.