Lend-Lease Act
The Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 was the decisive step in American involvement in World War II before Pearl Harbor — and, for the Soviet Union, one of the most consequential single acts of assistance in the war's history. It emerged from the problem that Britain was running out of hard currency to pay for American war materiel under the existing 'cash and carry' system. Roosevelt presented Lend-Lease to the American public with the analogy of lending a garden hose to a neighbour whose house was on fire — repayable in kind when the fire was out. In practice, most Lend-Lease materiel was never returned or repaid; Britain's Lend-Lease debt was finally settled in 2006. The programme's scale was enormous. By the end of the war the US had supplied: - Britain: $31.4 billion (aircraft, ships, tanks, food, oil) - Soviet Union: $11.3 billion (including 375,000 trucks, 1,900 locomotives, 400,000 jeeps, 2,600 aircraft, 4.5 million tons of food) - China: $1.6 billion - France and other countries: the remainder For the Soviet Union, the trucks and vehicles were strategically irreplaceable. Soviet industry had been catastrophically disrupted by the German invasion; domestic truck production was a fraction of military requirements. American trucks (particularly Studebaker 6×6s) gave the Red Army the logistical mobility to conduct deep operational offensives from 1943 onward — the Bagration and Vistula-Oder operations that destroyed German Army Groups Centre and A were supplied in large part by American vehicles. Soviet Marshal Zhukov later stated that the Red Army could not have fought the war without Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease also included 4.5 million pairs of boots, 15 million pairs of army boots, and a vast quantity of food that supplemented Soviet rations throughout the war. Aviation fuel of higher octane than Soviet production enabled more demanding Soviet aircraft operations.
- Year: 1941 CE
- Category: Political
