Lend-Lease: Roosevelt's Garden Hose, the Tizard Box and Soviet Spam

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In the 1930s the Nye Committee's merchants of death hearings led to Neutrality Acts that made it a federal crime to sell arms to nations at war. After 1939 the cash and carry policy let Britain buy weapons only with gold and its own ships, and by late 1940 Britain was nearly out of money. In September 1940 the Tizard Mission carried a black box of British secrets across the Atlantic, including the cavity magnetron, Whittle jet engine plans, gyroscopic gunsights and the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum on atomic weapons. Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched aid with his garden hose analogy, Senator Robert Taft answered that lent weapons were like chewing gum no one wants back, and the bill passed in March 1941.

Lend-Lease cost $50.1 billion, about 17 percent of U.S. war spending, with $31.4 billion going to the British Empire and $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union after Germany invaded in June 1941. Supplies moved through the Arctic convoys, the Persian Corridor and a Pacific route on Soviet ships. Reverse Lend-Lease returned about $7.8 billion in goods and services, mostly from the British Empire. When the program ended abruptly in 1945, Britain bought leftover supplies at about 10 percent of value on a 2 percent loan, while the Soviets countered a $1.3 billion bill with $170 million. Article 7 of the master agreement tied repayment to building a liberalized postwar trade order.

• The United States supplied 92.7 percent of Soviet wartime railroad equipment, including more than 1,900 locomotives and 11,000 rail cars.
• By 1945 nearly a third of Red Army trucks were American Dodges and Studebakers.
• An entire Ford tire plant in Michigan was dismantled and rebuilt in the Soviet Union.
• Georgy Zhukov, in a conversation secretly recorded by the KGB, admitted the Soviets depended on American steel and explosives.
• Britain made its final loan payment on the last working day of December 2006, and the Soviet Union agreed to pay $722 million in 1972.