ROOSEVELT’S LEND-LEASE TO AID WAR AGAINST AXIS

Washington, D.C. January 6, 1941

Three days after Adolf Hitler had sent his Wehr­macht (Ger­man armed forces) into neigh­boring Poland on Septem­ber 1, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. Nine months later, following France’s sur­render to the Wehr­macht in June 1940, the British govern­ment, which since 1939 had been paying for arms and other goods to fight the Nazi jugger­naut using its gold reserves under the U.S. “cash and carry” pro­gram, had liqui­dated so many of its assets that the Nazi hold­out was running short of cash. (The “cash and carry” revision to the U.S. Neu­trality Acts of the 1930s per­mitted the sale of war material to bellig­erent nations so long as they arranged for its trans­port in their own ship bottoms and paid cash on the barrelhead.)

On this date, January 6, 1941, in his annual State of the Union address to mem­bers of the U.S. Con­gress, Presi­dent Frank­lin D. Roose­velt pro­posed Lend-Lease assis­tance to the Allies fighting the Axis scourge: Nazi Ger­many, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The pro­posal followed on Roose­velt’s Decem­ber 29, 1940, radio address during which he pro­claimed the U.S. would be the “arsenal of demo­cracy,” arming and supporting the Wes­tern demo­cra­cies in Europe and to a lesser extent the Nation­alist Chi­nese in their fight-to-the-death against the forces of tyranny and enslave­ment. Enacted on March 11, 1941, Lend-Lease was a pro­gram under which the United States—tech­nically a non­com­bat­ant—supplied mili­tary aid (wars­hips, war­planes, tanks, and other wea­ponry) as well as aid of an econo­mic nature (food, oil, railway equip­ment, trucks and jeeps, clothing, blankets, and army boots) to coun­tries whose defense the presi­dent deemed vital to the U.S. The act estab­lished the Office of Lend-Lease Admin­is­tration, which dis­bursed monies from 1941 to the con­clusion of the war against Japan, the last Axis hold­out, in August 1945. In general the aid was free. In return the U.S. was given 99‑year, rent-free leases on naval and air bases in British and Commonwealth territories during the war.

Over $50 billion (equivalent to $876,844,444,444 in 2024) worth of supplies were shipped to U.S. allies, equiv­a­lent to 17 per­cent of total U.S. war expen­di­tures following initial Congres­sional authori­za­tion of $7 billion. The money took the form of interest-free credit; in accor­dance with the Lend-Lease bill, the debts were to be paid after the war. In all, $31.4 bil­lion in Lend-Lease materials went to hard-pressed Great Britain (“the spear­head of resis­tance to world con­quest,” as Roose­velt called that coun­try in Decem­ber 1940) followed by $11.3 bil­lion to the Soviet Union. Some $3.2 bil­lion went to France, $1.6 bil­lion to Nation­alist China, and the remaining $2.6 bil­lion to other Allies. (Canada operated a simi­lar pro­gram called Mutual Aid, loaning $1 bil­lion in supplies and $3.4 bil­lion to Britain and other Allies.) Lend-Lease effec­tively ended the United States’ pre­tense of neu­trality vis-à-vis the Axis nations and was a deci­sive retreat from the policy of non­inter­ven­tionism that had been char­ac­teristic of U.S. foreign policy since the early Thirties. War­time Prime Minis­ter Win­ston Chur­chill expressed his appre­ci­a­tion on behalf of Great Britain for the Lend-Lease measure, calling it a “new Magna Charta.”

Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, Oil on Canvas, 1943

In his State of the Union Address to the U.S. Congress on Janu­ary 6, 1941, Presi­dent Roose­velt out­lined his desire for a world based, not on a “new order of tyranny”—an allusion to the “new Euro­pean order” cham­pioned by Nazi Ger­many and Fascist Italy—but on 4 essen­tial human rights: free­dom of speech, free­dom of wor­ship, free­dom from want, and free­dom from fear. These essen­tial rights hearkened back to the Atlantic Charter, a joint state­ment of post­war aims signed by Roose­velt and war­time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Placen­tia Bay, Newfoundland, in mid‑August 1939.

The illustrator Norman Rockwell created a quartet of paintings depicting Roose­velt’s Four Free­doms that was first published in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1943 the Office of War Infor­ma­tion printed 240,000 copies of Rock­well’s Four Freedoms to be used as an incen­tive for war bond pur­chasers. Sales of the posters and the tour of Rock­well’s 4 paintings to major American cities raised more than $130 million in war bond sales.

Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech, 1943Rockwell’s Freedom of Worship, 1943
Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, 1943Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear, 1943

Top Row (L–R): Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship
Bottom Row (L–R): Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear

Listen to President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Speech

Roosevelt Proposes the Lend-Lease Program to the U.S. Congress, Urging Americans to Become the “Arsenal of Democracy”