longer manufacture for themselves in the necessary quantities. For they lacked labor, materials, and plant, and they kept falling further behind under air attack.
The Neutrality Act forced belligerents to pay dollars for United States goods, and to come and fetch them. The Act posed more of a dilemma for Roosevelt than for the British. For them, a clear wise course lay open: negotiated peace with Germany. As this writer has often pointed out, had England made such a peace the British Empire would exist today. The Soviet Union would have been crushed in a one-front war, and instead of a rampant Bolshevism we would see in Russia at worst some pacific, disarmed form of social democracy. But none of this fitted in with Roosevelt’s ideas. He had no intention of allowing Germany to gain ascendancy over the Euro-Asian heartland in a world-dominating partnership with the sea lords of Britannia.
And so, to circumvent the Neutrality act, Franklin Roosevelt devised Lend-Lease, which was nothing more or less than a policy to give the British free of charge — and later the Russians too — all the war materials they needed to fight us! The audacity of the trick was breathtaking; the disguise was cunning. And while the record shows that Roosevelt’s clever advisers did much to push this unprecedented proposal through the stunned, balky congress, it also clearly shows that the revolutionary idea sprang, in the phrase of Sherwood, straight from Roosevelt’s “forested mind.”
Roosevelt sold this scheme to the simpleminded, inattentive American people with a typical bit of Augustan demagoguery, the famous comparison to a garden hose. When a neighbor’s house is on fire, he said at a press conference, one does not bargain with him over the sale or renting of the garden hose he needs to put it out. One gladly lends him the hose, so as to keep the fire from one’s own house. Once the fire is out, the neighbor returns the hose; or if he has damaged it, there is time enough then to settle the account.
This was, of course, shameless and hollow poppycock. Warships, warplanes, war materials are not garden hoses. To take Roosevelt’s comparison at its face value, if your neighbor’s house is on fire, what you really do is rush over there and fight the fire with him. You do not lend him your hose, and then stand idly by watching him try to cope with the flames. That this silly stuff was swallowed whole by the Americans simply shows how uncannily shrewd Roosevelt was in managing them. During his successful 1940 election campaign for an unprecedented third term, he had declared in a famous speech, “
The Real Meaning of Lend-Lease
It was impossible for him — and this he knew — to present the case to his people in realistic terms. Otherwise he could have told them in effect, “My friends, this war is for the mastery of the world. Our aim should be to achieve that mastery ourselves, but with a minimum of blood. Let us encourage others to do our fighting for us. Let us give them all the stuff they need to keep fighting. What do we care? In developing the industries to produce this Lend-Lease stuff, we will be preparing ourselves, industrially and militarily, for world leadership. They will use up all our early models, our discardable stuff, killing Germans for us. May they will do the whole job for us, but that is doubtful. We will have to step in at the end, but mopping up will be easy. We will have gained a world victory with the expenditure of a lot of hardware, which we can turn out faster, and in greater quantities, than all the world put together, without even feeling the pinch. The others will shed the blood, and we will take the rule.”
That was what Lend-Lease meant and that was how it worked.
First the British, and then the Russians, were induced by Lend-Lease to keep on with extremely bloody, almost hopeless struggles, when the easier, safer, more profitable alternative of negotiated peace always lay open to them. There is reason to think that at Stalin’s low point late in 1941, when his armies and his air force had virtually ceased to exist as coherent battle formations and we were smashing toward Moscow, that supreme realist would have proposed peace again, if not for the encouragement in words and supplies — not in lives — of the United States. As it was, the Russian people made sacrifices in blood never matched in all history, to transfer world hegemony from one Anglo-Saxon power to another.
And Franklin Roosevelt so maneuvered matters that the British had to beg for this bloodletting help! They were put in the position of being abjectly grateful for the chance to fight Roosevelt’s battles. On December 8, 1940, Churchill wrote the American President a very long letter, which deserves a bolder place in history than it now holds. Churchill once said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the Empire, but with this letter he dissolved it. Churchill in this document frankly stated that England had come to the end of her rope, in the matter of ships, planes, materials, and dollars; and he asked the President to “find ways and means” to help England in the common course. This was what Roosevelt had been icily waiting for in his wheelchair: this written confession by the British Prime Minister that without American aid the Empire was finished. Within two weeks he had proposed Lend-Lease to his advisors and within a month he had laid it before Congress.
Empire means rule, and sufficient armed power to enforce the rule. In Churchill’s letter, he acknowledged that his country and his empire had become powerless to enforce their rule, and begged for succor. Roosevelt leaped to comply. Even if England was finished as an imperial power, she remained a country of forty millions with a good navy and air force, at war with Roosevelt’s archrival; a splendid island base just off the coast of Europe, moreover, from which to attack Germany in the future. The first order of business was to keep her fighting.
Bargain War-making
Despite all the quack language in the act about lending and leasing, the transfer of American weapons and materials through the war was a gift. No formal accounting was even kept. The President asked, and the Congress granted him, power to send arms and war goods wherever he pleased. Certainly the Congress when they passed the law would have balked at including Bolshevist countries. But at that time the Soviet Union was supposedly Hitler’s friend. Later, when war broke out on the eastern front, Roosevelt poured a flood of supplies to the Bolsheviks without consulting Congress. The Americans complain that the Russians have never shown proper gratitude. The attitude of the Russians is more realistic. Having spilled the blood of perhaps eleven million of their sons to help the United States to its present world position, they tend to feel that the tanks and planes were paid for.
The Yankees love a bargain. Lend-Lease was bargain war-making. For the big corporations, and for millions of workers, it merely meant a tremendous increase of prosperity. The price was painlessly postponed to the future by means of defense bonds. Others did the actual fighting and dying.
Roosevelt and his advisers did discuss the risk that Germany would take Lend-Lease as an act of war — which it certainly was — and would formally declare war on the United States. Since this was just what he wanted, he was prepared to run the risk. America would have responded with a militia-like surge. Little as Adolf Hitler understood the United States, he did understand that. He had no intention of taking on the United States until he had finished with the Soviet Union, an operation which was already in an advanced planning stage. So Germany swallowed Lend-Lease with some harsh words, and the “arsenal of democracy” tooled up to help British plutocracy and Russian Bolshevism destroy the Reich, the last bastion in Europe against the red Slav tide.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Most broad statistics of the war are approximations, and the figures on total deaths vary widely from one source to another. The low rate of eventual American losses is a fact. We planned and fought that kind of war, expending money and machines instead of human lives where possible. Roon seems to think this indicates a deficiency in American valor. We had enough valor to beat the Germans wherever we took them on. That was all the valor we needed. — V.H.
Chapter 37
