Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021718 | |||||||||
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INTERNATIONAL FINANCE
LEND-LEASE Why was Britain in debt with the US when the Lend Lease was supposedly 'free'? Original article: Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Why was Britain in debt with the US when the Lend Lease was supposedly 'free'? Wes Frank, Masters in American History from Northwestern University Updated Aug 19, 2019 Lend-Lease was written as a non-loan loan program to get around the neutrality act. As both the Germans and the republicans pointed out at the time, steel, carbide bits, food, trucks, tanks, and airplanes “lent” to a country at war were not ever going to be returnable. It was also obvious that Roosevelt didn’t care. He arranged through Lend-Lease to pour resources worth the equivalent of $659 billion dollars, in modern currency, into the Allied war effort, mostly to Britain and the Soviet Union. There were token repayment programs applied to the program. An Australian I chatted with a few weeks ago insisted that the air bases Australia let the Americans use were worth at least as much as the flood of supplies the Americans sent to Australia during the war. Could be true. Of course, the embattled and ravaged British and Soviet states could not conceivably pay the United States for everything that came over in those great convoys for four years, and all that aid was essentially written off. The stink that rose up about Lend-Lease, and this still embitters some Britons, is that, immediately after the end of the war, the congress decided to spite Roosevelt, Truman, Stalin, the British, the British socialists, and the British Empire by cutting off the spigot while hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid were still en route. This hit the British hard, as their economy was collapsing with the end of the war and they were still trying to demobilize their army, navy, and air forces and at the same time stabilize the empire. The Truman administration sent an envoy over to Britain and folded the bill for some of the material still in ships and storage into the Anglo-American loan, which was severely discounted and paid off in 2006. The article I linked to notes that Canada had loaned a smaller amount to the British during the war and this was also paid off in 2006. Lend-lease was an incredibly generous program that contributed immensely to the Allied war effort. For example, Lend-lease provided the majority of the trucks that kept the Soviet Army mobile for the last three years of the war, and it equipped entirely the Free French army that fought gallantly alongside the Americans for two and half years. It is a shame that the program ended with such a bitter epilogue, and as much that some Britons know so little about it that all it serves in their memories as one more reason to be spiteful towards Americans. | |||||||||