Watching some documentaries on WWII and lend lease stuff came up and made me ponder tit for tat considering the progress of time.
Had lend lease came with the stipulation that beneficiaries had to officially recognize limited government/individual freedoms(ie, similar to what we in the US are supposed to be), would they have done it? Or would they have viewed a possible German conquest as the lesser evil?
I assume the Soviet .gov wouldn’t have gone for it(and may well have not lost via liberal expenditures of their cannon fodder), but not as sure on the other recipients.
Assuming you mean WWII UK and similar as the top? No, they would not want to be limited, hence the question.
Would WWII UK.gov have found the idea of the playing field with their own citizens being leveled more or less onerous than an increased chance of Berlin using them as puppets or not at all?
Churchill was very invested in keeping the empire going after the war, to the point that the actual dissolution in the 50s and 60s was their ruination- the guilt of what they did to all the poor brown people, and their invitation for all commonwealth citizens to come to Britain and be a GB island citizen, is what killed them, that and the dole for everyone. Socialism never works.
Stalin would have agreed to anything and simply continued to do whatever he felt like. If he had to, Russia could go it alone, all he had to do was keep feeding bodies into the meat grinder. He had lots of bodies and no ethical conflicts.
In the UK, many people, especially Halifax wanted to negotiate terms with Hitler. With Churchill in power it wasn’t going to happen. Not sure what terms Churchill might have agreed to in order to get assistance from the US. But FDR really wasn’t the guy who was gonna give a damn about limited government, he was going in the other direction.
And honestly, with four term FDR, it was probably THIS country that needed some limited government, but we were kind of busy at the time. I’m glad we focused on winning the war because the outcome was hardly guaranteed. Most people expected the war in the pacific to last until 1947.
In Europe it was simply a matter of how far west Russia was going to roll before they stopped. And if there was one great geo-political injustice it was people went to war over the invasion of Poland but at the end of the war, one of the two countries that participated in a joint invasion was allowed to keep it. With that in mind, it really wasn’t the time to flex over ideas of limited government.
Had we not assisted Russia, they would have found lots of ways to keep screwing us. Just look at all the BS they pulled during the cold war.
Should have mentioned some stipulations on making good on it beyond pinky swearing with fingers crossed behind their backs and concur on FDR needing to be rolled back, actually years earlier.
Shortly before this pamphlet went to press, figures were released on lend-lease operations up to the end of 1944. As of December 31, 1944, total direct lend-lease had risen from $28,270,000,000 to $35,382,646,000. No attempt has been made to revise the pamphlet accordingly. Lend-lease is a continuing and expanding operation. Trying to keep the pamphlet abreast of the very latest figures would mean it could never appear in print at all.
What does the dollar volume of lend-lease represent? About 54 percent of all our aid has consisted of fighting equipment, including naval and merchant ships. Some 21 percent has comprised industrial materials and products, such as aviation gasoline, metals and machine tools for the manufacture of munitions, cloth and leather to make uniforms and shoes in the factories of Great Britain and Soviet Russia, surgical and medical supplies for hospitals and military bases, rolling stock for railroads, lumber for docks, and so forth.
Approximately 13 percent of lend-lease aid has consisted of foods and other agricultural products destined for the workers of allied countries and their soldiers in the front lines.
They may have had the manpower to do it, but the food alone we sent was a massive undertaking.
$35,382,646,000 and thirteen percent? We were feeding everyones Army.
Those bodies that Russian Generals like to stack up so much would have likely all starved and been stacked up in Stalingrad.
I doubt it has ever been tried. I wasn’t meaning they would have got to just swear they would be nice, but instead the peons get armed abd equipped from the aid as well.
Well, I’m not sure but a lot of people told me about how Americans fed Italians for years after the war was over.
We didn’t take enough advantage of that. Plus, we never get food distribution right, we tend to give it to those in power and let them figure out distribution which means it ends up on the black market.
I kinda suspect it was a good idea for a select few much like the issue with UK immigration where UK peons get stabbed a lot while the UK top tier live it up.
Well those people were never about to starve anyway were they?
The people who are now getting stabbed are likely more of the type who’s family would be filling the Enlisted ranks in some godforsaken part of India