Lend Lease Aid to Britain
In the 1930s in response to the strength of the isolationists in the United States the US Congress passed the Neutrality Act prohibiting the sale of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” to nations at war. It later amended the Act to prohibit loans of money to belligerents. US ships were forbidden from carrying war materials, even if they originated in other nations. FDR opposed the Neutrality Act, and at his urging Congress provided an amendment that allowed for the purchase of vital materials which were not implements of war, such as oil or aluminum, as long as they were paid for at the time of purchase and delivered in ships not of US registry.
In 1939, as war erupted in Europe, Roosevelt pushed through a new Neutrality Act which allowed for belligerent nations to purchase the formerly proscribed instruments of war, but the “cash-and-carry” requirement remained. Theoretically the Germans could have purchased war materials from the United States, but they lacked the shipping to carry it, while England and France did not. After France fell and England and its Empire carried on the fight, they quickly found there coffers were being drained of cash and the provision of the Act which prohibited loans to belligerents remained. There were actually two laws which prohibited lending money to Britain, the Johnson Act of 1934 denied credit to countries which had not repaid their war debts from the First World War. Britain had not.
Lend-lease was designed to allow the United States to send supplies for which payment would be deferred, and eventual payment would be in part in the form of other considerations besides money. The terms of Lend-Lease were first negotiated between the British and Americans before a bill was prepared for debate within Congress. Throughout early 1941 the issue was hotly debated, with the isolationists believing that it would drag the United States into the European war. Proponents pointed out that if England was allowed to fall to the Germans the British fleet – the world’s largest – would be in the hands of the Germans.
The bill was passed in March 1941, and in addition to Britain it extended aid to China and Free French forces. Eventually as the war expanded lend lease was provided to over 30 countries, with some countries paying in gold bullion and others returning the items provided after the war, or providing payment in kind. While officially the United States remained a non-belligerent and neutral, the lend-lease program began the conversion of the US economy to a war footing.
The first lend-lease shipments were sent in a convoy to rendezvous with British escorts near Iceland. During the shipment, the United States Navy could not convoy vessels carrying materials of war to a belligerent nation. To do so would have been an overt act of war. But the US Navy could and did perform convoy drills, a legitimate peacetime operation, supported by patrol aircraft from some of the bases acquired by the bases for destroyer’s agreement. By the end of the summer of 1941 American ships were routinely covering the convoys, and reporting U-boat sightings to British and Canadian ships and aircraft.