{"id":3789,"date":"2013-03-15T20:14:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-16T02:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/?p=3789"},"modified":"2013-03-15T20:14:16","modified_gmt":"2013-03-16T02:14:16","slug":"this-week-in-the-war-10-16-march-1941-lend-lease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/?p=3789","title":{"rendered":"This week in the War, 10–16 March 1941: Lend-Lease"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week in the war, 11 March 1941, President Roosevelt signed into law a statute that was diplomatically titled ‘An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States’; it was the famous Lend-Lease<\/em> bill. Ideas and intentions that flowed from the ‘garden hose’<\/a> of FDR’s press conference of 17 December 1940 were about about to materialize and to flow to beleaguered Britain in the form of guns, planes and explosives.<\/p>\n

\"Winston<\/a>

Winston Churchill and US Ambassador, John G. Winant sign the Lend-Lease Agreement, London, 11 March 1941 [Public domain, Australian War Memorial]<\/p><\/div>The agreement was signed on the same day in London by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the US ambassador to Great Britain.<\/p>\n

\"British<\/a>

British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) women unload armfuls of Winchester rifles newly arrived from the USA under the Lend-Lease Agreement, 1941 [Public domain, wikimedia]<\/p><\/div>Nine months before Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt steered his country further away from neutrality and closer to its role as the arsenal of democracy<\/a>—a phase he coined in one of his ‘fireside chats’.<\/p>\n

Britain could no longer pay for its war with Germany, and the USA charged nothing for Lend-Lease supplies. The American public saw supporting Britain as a way to stay out of the fighting themselves.<\/p>\n

Lend-Lease was extended to China one month later, and to the Soviet Union six months after that. The United Nations would never have won the war without Lend-Lease—a fact that even Joseph Stalin eventually acknowledged. By the time the USA itself became a belligerent, its war-production factories were up and running.<\/p>\n

For the UK domestic front, see Wartime Britain 1939–1945<\/em> (Review, 2005) by Juliet Gardiner. She mentions Lend-Lease as supplying US-made food, such as tinned meat—including the now world-famous spam<\/a>—and also Virginia tobacco.<\/p>\n

\"Cases<\/a>

Cases of TNT shipped from the USA under Lend-Lease are stacked in an underground ammunition dump, somewhere in England [Public domain, wikimedia]<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week in the war, 11 March 1941, President Roosevelt signed into law a statute that was diplomatically titled ‘An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States’; it was the famous Lend-Lease bill. Ideas and intentions that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,1],"tags":[351,34,350,261,54,403],"class_list":["post-3789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-world-war-ii","tag-arsenal-of-democracy","tag-churchill","tag-garden-hose","tag-lend-lease","tag-roosevelt","tag-spam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3789"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3808,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3789\/revisions\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}