WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Passed on March 11, 1941, this act set up a system that would allow the United States to lend or lease war supplies to any nation deemed “vital to the defense of the United States."

Detailed explanation-2: -Most importantly, passage of the Lend-Lease Act enabled a struggling Great Britain to continue fighting against Germany virtually on its own until the United States entered World War II late in 1941.

Detailed explanation-3: -Despite this opposition, Roosevelt and his Congressional supporters prevailed, and on March 8, 1941, HR 1776, the Lend-Lease Act (subtitled “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”), passed through a final vote in the Senate. On March 11 the president signed it into law.

Detailed explanation-4: -Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today’s currency, the Lend-Lease Act of the United States supplied needed goods to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the “enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy-bloodthirsty Hitlerism.”

Detailed explanation-5: -The principal recipients of aid were the British Commonwealth countries (about 63 percent) and the Soviet Union (about 22 percent), though by the end of the war more than 40 countries had received lend-lease help. Much of the aid, valued at $49.1 billion, amounted to outright gifts.

Detailed explanation-6: -Despite the domestic restraints of the Neutrality Acts enacted by Congress in the 1930s and strong public isolationist sentiment, Roosevelt proposed the Lend-Lease plan to provide Great Britain with necessary weapons, and used his powers of persuasion to see it through a resistant Congress.