Transcript: Lend-Lease

NARRATOR: September 1940, German bombs were destroying London. Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France had fallen. England stood alone. Prime Minister Winston Churchill desperately needed help from Franklin Roosevelt. Month after month for over a year, Churchill had been sending secret messages to Roosevelt. "It has now become most urgent for you to let us have the destroyers for which we have asked... Mr. President, with great respect, I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now." Roosevelt wanted to help, but most Americans were against involvement in any war. There's no thought in the minds of the great bulk of Americans that they will ever send another land army to Europe to fight in a war again. This is the abiding feeling in the United States-- avoid involvement in any war.

NARRATOR: Roosevelt had to move cautiously.Congress had passed a series of neutrality laws forbidding the president to take sides. Whenever Roosevelt suggested that the United States play any part on the world stage, he met with violent isolationist opposition. It would take all of FDR's political genius to get Churchill what England needed to survive. "If Great Britain goes down," Roosevelt said, all of us in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun." Congress had prohibited Roosevelt from sending weapons unless England paid in cash, and England was bankrupt. The president would have to outmaneuver the lawmakers.

ROOSEVELT: I do not recommend that we make them a loan of dollars with which to pay for these weapons.

NARRATOR: Roosevelt proposed a daring plan with an innocuous name-- lend-lease. Lend-lease was a way to give the British planes, tanks, guns, artillery, ammunition without them really paying for it. And reporters at a press conference ask him, "What does this mean? What does lend-lease mean?"

NARRATOR: Roosevelt explained that we would lend England the weapons, and when the war was over, England would return them. It was like lending a neighbor a garden hose to put out a fire, he said. After the fire was out, the neighbor would simply return the hose.

DALLEK: Well, of course it was patent nonsense. What were the British going to do? Give us the tanks back that were blown up, the planes that were shot down? But Roosevelt's invocation of this homily about the neighbor and the garden hose is a wonderful way for him to sell it to the public. And that was his political genius. That was something that he had a kind of sixth sense for. You can't understand it, you can't define it, you can't put it under any scientific rubric. It simply was something that the man had.

NARRATOR: On March 11, 1941, Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed into law, lend-lease.

ALISTAIR COOKE: There was an emergency press conference called this morning he'd signed the lend-lease bill. A reporter said, "Mr. President, have you got ships and materiel and tanks and things? Are they already, you know, left the ports and crossing the Atlantic?" Well, my British supply man had told me that there were cargoes just about to arrive in Liverpool and Southampton. And Roosevelt looked up like an innocent child and he said, "Oh," he said, "we work fast, but not that fast." And of course, I mean, if they'd known the truth, you know, the whole Atlantic was thick with all the things already on their way.

NARRATOR: The lend-lease lifeline stretched across the Atlantic. Roosevelt had bent the law, outflanked Congress and provided England with billions of dollars worth of weapons and supplies.