Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory

IN January, 1943, when Congress began hearings on extending the LendLease Act, Mr. Stettinius, then Administrator of Lend-Lease, “had to do something for which there is little opportunity in war-time Washington — sit down and look back over the road we have travelled.” It was an excellent preparation for the writing of this well-organized book, Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory, which carries the story down to June, 1943.

There is nothing stuffy about this accounting of stewardship to the American people. It has, as it should have for its audience, the virtues of the best newspaper writing: good narrative flow, lots of unpublicized information, concrete illustrations, vivid glimpses behind the scenes, meaningful anecdotes, and candor. Mr. Stettinius tells about his trip to England as graphically as would a first-rate war correspondent. It is very fortunate that this book is so highly readable, for a popular understanding of LendLease will affect our post-war views as well as strengthen United Nations sentiment among us while the war goes on.

Lend-Lease was a triumph of common sense and human values over financial abstractions. It broke clean away from the old system of war loans, for it recognized, as Mr. Stettinius says, that “the crux of the matter was not dollars; it was planes, guns and ships.”It also recognized that there are benefits not measurable by the dollar sign —“ whatever debts are due . . . they are due first of all for the men who are valiantly risking their lives in battle, rather than for the equipment they are using.”

The whole meaning of Lend-Lease is compressed into the little parable about helping your neighbor fight fire by lending your garden hose which President Roosevelt told at his famous “cut out the financial nonsense” press conference of December 17, 1940, and Mr. Stettinius s organizing instinct is unerring in putting this parable at the opening of his book. In the simplest terms it makes clear the principle of aiding those whose defense is vital to our own, and the further principle of pooling United Nations resources. The parable also makes clear why “the lease would have to be open-ended, with a gentlemen’s agreement for a fair and workable settlement in the best interests of all of us after the Axis had been defeated.”

Mr. Stettinius tells many things the public has not known about Lend-Lease, among them being the origin of the idea in that most conservative department, the Treasury. Credit goes to a Treasury lawyer, Oscar S. Cox, who dug up a statute of 1892 having to do with leasing Army property and then began to think about aid to the democracies in terms of a lease. Macmillan, $3.00.

GORHAM MUNSON