Australia USA Lend Lease

[Lang]

This has just been mentioned on another thread. I put it up a long time back but can not find it.

This is one of the finest documents ever written by two governments with a will to get the job done. Only months after the war all Lend Lease arrangements (both ways) were finalized. Australia was $20 million behind but laid off debts by giving USA title to land ie the American Embassy in Canberra and promising to run education programs - I don't know if they ever did such a thing.

You will note that any US manufactured items are never to go back to USA and all current orders are to be completed (I think the Studebakers we did not need were in this category). This was to prevent the collapse of American industry while retooling for peacetime production.

[Matthew P]

One of the most interesting objects in my collection is a US made tent with a US quartermaster Depot tag on it... that the tag clearly states is "Australian Pattern". It was lend Lease that either never made it or, as you just mentioned was returned? Either way it is rare and makes for quite the conversation when I use it at reenactments.

Matt

[Lang]

One of the things not quite clear in the USA/Australia relationship is the fact Australia actually paid cash for a huge amount of equipment in normal commercial sales outside Lend Lease.

A very large amount of stuff coming in to Australia was actually paid for unlike the British after the first 18 months. That is one of the reasons the deal could be finalised so quickly as the ledger balance was close to even.

Churchill's greatest feat of the war was to convince the unwilling Americans to give them stuff on time payment (Lend Lease). Britain was absolutely broke, they had turned all their gold reserves over to the Americans who demanded COD. They even tried to run roughshod over the Australians and Canadians to use their gold reserves on American shopping sprees for Britain but common sense prevailed.

Lang

[Mike Cecil]

Lang,

For the period Sept to Nov 1939, there was no purchases whatsoever of warlike stores from the USA. From Nov 1939 to March 1941, it was the 'Cash and Carry' period where a country had to pay for all purchases in cash, and from March 1941 it was mostly Lend Lease, with the Australian policy being to obtain as much as possible under Lend Lease and only small cash purchases were allowed.

According to the Ministry of Munitions, the balance of LL to RLL at war's end was that the RLL side of the ledger was about 75% of the LL side.

Mike

[Lang]

Mike

That was my point.

There was LL and Reverse LL. If as you say the balance was 75/25 how did Australia finish up so close the square? Certainly more at play with this treaty then raw LL/RLL figures.

Lang

[Mike Cecil]

$27M difference in 1946 $ hardly seems like 'close to square' to me, Lang. The only cash purchases I have found record of after March 1941 were small amounts in the hundreds of $$ per transaction, which fits with the government policy ceiling of $1,000 USD. Even then, the purchase had to be approved by the US LL authorities as being in the mutual interest and best use of the resource.

Given the wide variety of items and quantities supplied to US Forces under RLL, it seems quite reasonable to me that Australia reached around 75% of the LL total supplied to Australia by war's end.

Mike

[Hanno Spoelstra]

This surely makes for interesting reading. Convinced now more than before that Lend-Lease was used as a money-making scheme for some of the actors in the "value chain". Also think of (mainly US?) companies with overseas plants in occupied countries making equipment for the enemy...

Read the Canadian perspective here: Canadian Economy: US and British Wartime Aid by David Hayward

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[Ed Storey]

While Lend Lease certainly paved the way for the Allied victory in the SWW, it also helped open up global markets that were closed to US manufacturers as it was tied to the European powers dismantling their overseas empires in the post-war era.

[Mike Cecil]

250M pounds of wool = between 600,000 and 950,000 bales depending on quality/packing density = much less than a year's Australian wool clip. By June 1942, the US stock of wool from all global sources exceeded 2.7 million Bales of wool. It is why, by 1945, with all the difficulties of selling and exporting wool during the war years, there was over 5Million bales in storage in Australia, most owned by Australia.

The British purchased wool in large quantities in the years 1939 to end 1941 for strategic reasons: (1) to prevent Aust wool being sold to the Japanese and (2) to prevent Aust wool being sold to third countries which could then on-sell to Germany by importation through Russia. By the end of 1941, both strategic reasons had vanished. The Brits sold some of their Aust wool in storage to the US in late 1941 (agreement reached in September) to provide the British with much needed US$ but as noted above, the quantity was not even a single year's Australian clip. So ships heading to the USA in late 1941 and early 1942 may well have carried wool on the return journey.

But did wool and wheat vector into the LL-RLL formaula? Nothing I have found supports that contention. As detailed in Butlin and Schedvin's volume of the official history, the LL-RLL account did not include unprocessed commodities.

The Canadian Mutual Aid agreement - now that's a whole different bag of worms!!



Mike

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Originally Posted by Ed Storey

While Lend Lease certainly paved the way for the Allied victory in the SWW, it also helped open up global markets that were closed to US manufacturers as it was tied to the European powers dismantling their overseas empires in the post-war era.

And who was demanding the European countries to dismantle their overseas empires? Right...

[Ed Storey]

Yeah, its amazing how that works. If you look at current events, as the market in Afghanistan for western manufactured weapons closed, another quickly opened in Ukraine. Ah, there is nothing like a good war to make money off of.