Lend-Lease

1. Lead

Lend-Lease was the programme by which the United States supplied its Allies with the weapons, vehicles, food and raw materials they needed to fight the Second World War — before the United States itself entered the war, and in ever greater quantities afterwards.

Between March 1941 and September 1945, the United States sent about 50 billion dollars’ worth of aid to Britain, the Soviet Union, China, France and more than thirty other countries: tanks and aircraft, trucks and locomotives, guns and ammunition, steel and oil, wheat and canned meat. The aid was given under the Lend-Lease Act, signed by President Franklin D.

Roosevelt on 11 March 1941, which allowed the president to “lend” or “lease” war material to any country whose defence he considered vital to the defence of the United States. It was, in Roosevelt’s phrase, the policy of making America the “arsenal of democracy”.

Lend-Lease changed the course of the war. It kept Britain fighting in 1941, when the country stood alone and its factories could not produce enough weapons; it supplied the Soviet Union with the trucks, food and raw materials that kept its armies moving after the German invasion; and it sustained China in its long war against Japan. It also changed the relationship between the Allies: it made the United States the workshop of the coalition, and it left a legacy of debt, gratitude and argument that lasted long after the war. This article explains how Lend-Lease began, what was sent and where, how the supplies reached their destinations, and how historians judge its importance today.

2. Key Facts

What	The American programme of military and economic aid to the Allies, 1941-1945
Law	The Lend-Lease Act (H.R. 1776), signed 11 March 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Total aid	About 50.1 billion dollars (1941-1945), the equivalent of hundreds of billions in today’s money
Main recipients	Britain (about 31.4 billion dollars), the Soviet Union (about 11.3 billion), France (about 3.2 billion), China (about 1.6 billion)
What was sent	Tanks, aircraft, ships, trucks, locomotives, guns, ammunition, steel, oil, food, clothing and raw materials
Main routes	The North Atlantic to Britain; the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel; the Persian Corridor through Iran; the Alaska-Siberia air route
Reverse Lend-Lease	About 7.8 billion dollars of goods and services supplied by the Allies to the United States
Ended	September 1945, after the Japanese surrender; debts were settled over the following decades

3. America Before Lend-Lease

Neutrality and the “arsenal of democracy”

When the Second World War began in September 1939, the United States was neutral, and American law forbade the sale of arms to belligerents. The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, passed after the experience of the First World War, were designed to keep America out of European wars, and public opinion was firmly against intervention: most Americans believed that the war in Europe was not their war, and that the United States should stay out of it.

President Roosevelt disagreed, but he could not act openly against the law or against public opinion. His first step was the “cash and carry” policy of November 1939, which allowed belligerents to buy American arms if they paid in cash and carried them away in their own ships — a policy that favoured Britain and France, who controlled the seas, over Germany.

By the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, Britain stood alone, and it was running out of money to pay for American arms. Roosevelt’s answer, in a fireside chat on 29 December 1940, was the idea of the “arsenal of democracy”: the United States would become the great workshop of the free world, supplying the weapons that Britain and others needed, while remaining at peace itself.

The destroyers-for-bases deal

Before Lend-Lease, Roosevelt had already found one way to help Britain without breaking the law. In September 1940, he agreed to give Britain fifty old American destroyers, in exchange for ninety-nine-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.

The deal was presented as a bargain for the United States — the bases would help defend the Americas — but its real purpose was to give Britain the ships it needed to fight the U-boats in the Atlantic. The deal was controversial in America, where critics called it an unconstitutional act of war, but it showed the direction of Roosevelt’s policy: he would help Britain by every means short of war, and he would stretch the law to do it.

The destroyers-for-bases deal was the first step towards Lend-Lease, and it established the principle that American aid to Britain was in the American interest, because a Britain that fell would leave the United States alone against Germany.

The debate in Congress

The Lend-Lease Act was debated fiercely in Congress in the winter of 1940-41, and the debate divided America. Its supporters, led by Roosevelt, argued that the defence of Britain was the defence of the United States, and that the choice was not between war and peace but between helping Britain now and fighting Germany alone later.

Its opponents, the isolationists, argued that Lend-Lease was a blank cheque for war, that it would drag America into the conflict, and that it gave the president powers no president should have. The debate was long and bitter, and it was carried on in the press, in public meetings and in Congress, but in the end the supporters won: the House of Representatives passed the bill on 8 February 1941, the Senate on 8 March, and Roosevelt signed it on 11 March 1941.

The bill was numbered H.R. 1776, a number chosen deliberately to recall the year of American independence. Its full title was “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”, and its opening words gave the president the power to lend or lease war material to any country whose defence he considered vital to the defence of the United States.

4. The Lend-Lease Act

How the Act worked

The Lend-Lease Act was a work of legal ingenuity, designed to do something the Neutrality Acts forbade — to supply arms to a belligerent — without declaring war and without giving the arms away. The fiction was that the material was “lent” or “leased”, like a garden hose lent to a neighbour whose house is on fire: Roosevelt used the analogy in a press conference in December 1940, saying that if a neighbour’s house was burning, you would not haggle over the price of the hose, you would lend it to him and get it back after the fire.

In practice, most of the material was never returned: it was consumed in battle, worn out, or destroyed, and the question of payment was left for after the war. The Act gave the president sweeping powers, but it also gave Congress a measure of control: the president had to report to Congress every ninety days on what had been sent, and Congress could revoke the Act at any time.

The administration of the programme was entrusted to a new agency, the Office of Lend-Lease Administration, headed by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest adviser, who became the programme’s driving force.

Harry Hopkins and the administration

Harry Hopkins was the man who made Lend-Lease work. A social worker turned government administrator, Hopkins had run Roosevelt’s relief programmes in the 1930s, and he was the president’s most trusted adviser on the war. He travelled to London in January 1941, before the Act was passed, to assure Winston Churchill that America would help, and he travelled to Moscow in July 1941, a month after the German invasion, to assess what the Soviet Union needed.

Hopkins’s office coordinated the demands of the Allies, the production of American factories, and the shipping that carried the goods across the oceans, and he did so with a small staff and a direct line to the president. His method was to cut through bureaucracy: when a decision was needed, he took it to Roosevelt, and Roosevelt took it to the service chiefs.

The programme’s success owed much to Hopkins’s energy, and to the fact that Roosevelt gave him his full confidence. When Hopkins’s health failed in the last years of the war, the programme continued, but it lost some of its drive.

What America sent

The scale of Lend-Lease was enormous, and it grew every year. In 1941, the programme was still small, and much of what was sent went to Britain. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, American production expanded rapidly, and the programme became a flood: in 1943 and 1944, the United States was sending more war material to its Allies than any country had ever sent to another in history.

The list of what was sent covers almost everything an army needs: tanks, aircraft, artillery, small arms and ammunition; trucks, jeeps, motorcycles and spare parts; locomotives, railway wagons and rails; ships, landing craft and naval guns; steel, aluminium, copper and rubber; oil, petrol and lubricants; wheat, flour, sugar, canned meat and powdered milk; boots, uniforms, blankets and medical supplies.

The food alone was a major item: the Soviet Union received millions of tons of food, including the canned meat that Soviet soldiers called “the second front” — a joke that carried a serious point, because the food kept soldiers and workers alive when Soviet agriculture had been devastated by the invasion.

5. Aid to Britain

Britain alone

Britain was the first and the largest recipient of Lend-Lease, receiving about 31.4 billion dollars of aid — more than 60 per cent of the total. In 1941, Britain stood alone against Germany, and its position was desperate: its army had lost its equipment at Dunkirk, its cities were being bombed, its shipping was being sunk by U-boats, and its treasury was nearly empty.

Lend-Lease arrived at the moment when Britain could no longer pay for American arms, and it kept the country in the war. The aid included tanks, aircraft, guns and ammunition, but it also included the less glamorous things that an island nation at war needs: food, oil, steel, machine tools, and the ships to carry them.

American food — wheat, sugar, canned meat, dried eggs — fed the British people when German U-boats were sinking the ships that brought food from the Empire, and American machine tools equipped the British factories that built the weapons of the later years of the war.

The Atlantic lifeline

The Battle of the Atlantic

The aid to Britain had to cross the Atlantic, and the Atlantic was a battlefield. German U-boats sank Allied shipping at a rate that, in 1942, threatened to starve Britain into surrender: in that year alone, the U-boats sank more than 1,100 Allied ships, and the losses were so great that the British government feared it would run out of food and oil.

Lend-Lease supplied the weapons to fight that battle: American destroyers and escort carriers, American aircraft for coastal patrol, and the Liberty ships — mass-produced cargo vessels built in American yards at a rate of more than one a day — that replaced the ships the U-boats sank.

The turning point came in the spring of 1943, when improved escorts, radar, sonar and long-range aircraft, many of them supplied through Lend-Lease, drove the U-boats from the Atlantic. The battle was won not by a single victory but by the steady accumulation of ships, aircraft and weapons, and Lend-Lease was the source of much of that accumulation.

Reverse Lend-Lease

The flow of aid was not one-way. Britain and the other Allies supplied the United States with about 7.8 billion dollars of goods and services under what was called Reverse Lend-Lease: bases, food, fuel, transport, and the use of British factories and ports by American forces.

The largest item was the support given to American troops in Britain before D-Day: the British built the camps, airfields and ports from which the invasion was launched, and they fed and housed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Reverse Lend-Lease was a fraction of the aid the United States sent, but it mattered politically: it allowed the British government to say that the alliance was a partnership, not a charity, and it allowed the Americans to say that their allies were contributing.

The principle of reciprocity was written into the Lend-Lease agreements, and it was honoured, even if the balance was never equal. British bases in particular — the airfields, ports and camps built for the American forces — represented an enormous investment of British labour and materials, and they were provided without charge under the same principle of mutual aid.

6. Aid to the Soviet Union

The decision to help Stalin

The decision to extend Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union was one of the most controversial of the war. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, the United States and Britain were faced with a dilemma: the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship, the enemy of everything the democracies stood for, and yet it was now fighting the common enemy, and its survival was essential to the defeat of Germany.

Roosevelt decided within days that the Soviet Union should receive aid, and Harry Hopkins flew to Moscow in July 1941 to meet Joseph Stalin and to assess Soviet needs. The first protocol, signed in Moscow in October 1941, promised the Soviet Union 1,800 aircraft, 2,250 tanks and large quantities of other material.

The decision was attacked in America, where critics argued that aid to a communist dictatorship was a betrayal of American values, but Roosevelt’s answer was practical: the Soviet Union was killing more Germans than any other country, and every German soldier killed in Russia was a German soldier who would not have to be killed by an American or a Briton.

Trucks, food and raw materials

The aid to the Soviet Union was different in character from the aid to Britain. The Soviet Union produced its own tanks and aircraft in large numbers — the T-34 tank and the Il-2 aircraft were Soviet designs, built in Soviet factories — and what it needed most from America was not finished weapons but the things its own industry could not produce fast enough: trucks, food, raw materials and machine tools.

The most famous item was the truck: the United States sent about 400,000 trucks to the Soviet Union, including the Studebaker US6, which became the standard vehicle of the Red Army and the mount for the Katyusha rocket launchers. The trucks gave the Soviet armies their mobility, and they were essential to the great offensives of 1943-45, when Soviet forces advanced hundreds of kilometres and needed to carry their supplies with them.

The food was equally important: the United States sent millions of tons of food, including canned meat, sugar, flour and powdered milk, at a time when the German occupation had taken the richest farmland of the Soviet Union. The raw materials — steel, aluminium, copper, rubber, oil — kept Soviet factories running, and the machine tools equipped the factories that had been moved east of the Urals.

How much did it matter?

Historians have argued for eighty years about how much Lend-Lease mattered to the Soviet victory, and the argument is still going on. Soviet historians, during the Cold War, minimised the aid, arguing that it was a small fraction of Soviet production — about 4 per cent, by one calculation — and that the Soviet Union would have won without it.

Western historians have argued that the percentage is misleading, because the aid was concentrated in the things the Soviet Union needed most: trucks, food, aluminium for aircraft, explosives, and the locomotives and rails that kept the railways running. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s greatest general, is reported to have said, in a conversation recorded after the war, that without American production the Soviet Union could not have equipped its armies — a remark that Soviet historians later tried to suppress.

The fairest judgement, most historians now agree, is that Lend-Lease did not win the war for the Soviet Union, but that it shortened the war, saved lives, and made the Soviet offensives of 1943-45 possible on the scale on which they were fought.

7. The Routes of Supply

The Arctic convoys

The most famous and the most dangerous of the supply routes was the Arctic route, by which ships sailed from Britain and Iceland around the North Cape of Norway to the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel. The route was short, but it was also the most exposed: the ships sailed within range of German aircraft, U-boats and surface ships based in occupied Norway, in appalling weather, in darkness in winter and in perpetual daylight in summer.

The convoys, given the code names PQ for the outward journey and QP for the return, lost many ships: the worst disaster was Convoy PQ-17 in July 1942, in which the Admiralty ordered the convoy to scatter, and 24 of its 35 merchant ships were sunk by German aircraft and U-boats.

The Arctic convoys carried about a quarter of all the aid sent to the Soviet Union, and they became a symbol of the alliance: British and American sailors died in Arctic waters to deliver supplies to a country that was, until a year before, their ideological enemy. The convoys were suspended in the summer of 1942, resumed in the autumn, and continued, with interruptions, until the end of the war.

The Persian Corridor

The second route to the Soviet Union was the Persian Corridor, by which supplies were landed at ports in the Persian Gulf, carried by rail and road across Iran, and delivered to the Soviet border in the Caucasus. The route was longer and slower than the Arctic route, but it was safer, and it became the largest route by volume: by 1943, it was carrying more supplies than the Arctic convoys, and by the end of the war it had carried about half of all the aid sent to the Soviet Union.

The corridor required a major engineering effort: the Americans and British rebuilt the Iranian railways, built roads, assembled trucks in factories at the Gulf ports, and drove them in convoys across the Iranian desert and mountains. The corridor also required a political arrangement: in August 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly occupied Iran, deposed the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, and installed his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in his place, in order to secure the route and to deny Iran to Germany.

The occupation of Iran is a reminder that Lend-Lease was not only a matter of ships and trucks, but of politics, and that the supply routes shaped the politics of the countries they passed through.

The Alaska-Siberia air route

The third route was the air route, by which American aircraft were flown from Alaska across the Bering Strait to Siberia, and then across the Soviet Union to the front. The route, known as ALSIB, was used to deliver about 8,000 aircraft to the Soviet Union, most of them fighters and bombers built in American factories.

The aircraft were flown by Soviet pilots, who collected them in Alaska and flew them in stages across Siberia, in extreme cold and with few navigational aids, and the route was a remarkable feat of organisation. It was also a route that brought Americans and Soviets into direct contact: American mechanics and Soviet pilots worked side by side in Alaska, and the airfields built for the route became the nucleus of civil aviation in the Soviet Far East.

The air route carried a smaller volume of aid than the sea routes, but it carried the most modern and the most valuable items — the aircraft themselves — and it did so quickly, in weeks rather than months.

8. Aid to China and Others

China and the Burma Road

The long war in China

China had been at war with Japan since 1937, and it received about 1.6 billion dollars of Lend-Lease aid, a smaller sum than Britain or the Soviet Union received, but a vital one for a country that was fighting alone and that had lost its ports and its industrial heartland to the Japanese.

The problem was delivery: with China’s coast in Japanese hands, supplies had to be flown in over the Himalayas, on the route known as the Hump, from India to Kunming, in one of the most dangerous airlift operations in history. American transport aircraft flew the Hump in all weathers, and hundreds of aircraft and aircrew were lost in the mountains.

The supplies that got through — weapons, ammunition, fuel, medical supplies — kept the Chinese armies in the field, and they sustained the American air bases in China from which bombers attacked Japan. The aid to China was also a political statement: it showed that the United States regarded China as a great power, and it was one of the reasons China was given a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council after the war.

The Flying Tigers and the Hump

The most famous part of the American effort in China was the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, led by Claire Chennault, who flew American P-40 fighters against the Japanese in 1941-42, before the United States entered the war. The Flying Tigers were not, strictly speaking, a Lend-Lease operation — they were volunteers, paid by the Chinese government — but they were supplied with American aircraft under Lend-Lease arrangements, and they became a symbol of American support for China.

The Hump airlift, by contrast, was a Lend-Lease operation in the fullest sense: it was run by the United States Army Air Forces, it carried Lend-Lease supplies, and it was paid for by the American government. The Hump was flown by American and Chinese aircrews, and it became a byword for courage and endurance: the pilots flew in unpressurised aircraft, over mountains higher than their service ceiling, in weather that could change in minutes.

The airlift continued until the end of the war, and it delivered about 650,000 tons of supplies to China.

Free France and the other Allies

France received about 3.2 billion dollars of Lend-Lease aid, most of it after the liberation of 1944, when the Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle were re-equipped with American weapons and fought alongside the Allies in the last year of the war.

The aid to France was important not only for its military value but for its political value: it allowed France to claim a place among the victors, and it equipped the French army that took part in the occupation of Germany. Other recipients included the governments-in-exile of Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece and Yugoslavia, and the countries of Latin America, which received smaller quantities of arms and equipment.

In total, more than thirty countries received Lend-Lease aid, and the programme became the largest system of international aid the world had ever seen. Its scale is a measure of the industrial power of the United States, and of the extent to which the Second World War was a coalition war, fought by many countries with weapons made in one.

The human cost of delivery

Lend-Lease was not only a matter of factories and figures; it was also a matter of the men who delivered the aid, and many of them died doing it. The merchant seamen of the Arctic convoys, the aircrews of the Hump, the drivers of the Persian Corridor, and the sailors of the Atlantic all faced danger, and their losses were heavy.

The Arctic convoys alone lost more than 100 merchant ships and thousands of seamen, and the Hump airlift lost more than 500 aircraft and more than 1,000 aircrew. These men are remembered in the memorials of their own countries — the merchant navy memorials in London and Liverpool, the Hump memorials in India and China — but they are often forgotten in the story of Lend-Lease, which is told as a story of factories and diplomacy.

This article remembers them, because without them the aid would never have arrived, and the programme would have been a promise without a delivery.

9. The End and the Settlement

The end of the programme

Lend-Lease ended abruptly, in September 1945, a few weeks after the Japanese surrender. President Harry Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945, ordered the programme to be wound up, and the ships that were on their way to Britain and the Soviet Union were turned back or diverted.

The sudden end caused anger in Britain, where the government had expected the aid to continue during the transition to peace, and it contributed to Britain’s post-war economic crisis: the country had spent its reserves on the war, and it now needed American help of a different kind, which came in the form of the Anglo-American loan of December 1945, a loan of 3.75 billion dollars that Britain spent decades repaying.

The end of Lend-Lease was a reminder that the programme had been a wartime measure, not a permanent system of aid, and that the alliance that had won the war would not survive the peace in the same form.

The debts

The question of payment was left for after the war, and it was settled slowly and, in the case of the Soviet Union, bitterly. Britain’s debt was settled as part of the Anglo-American loan of 1945, and Britain made its final payment on the loan in December 2006 — sixty-one years after the war.

The Soviet debt was more difficult: the United States asked for about 1.3 billion dollars, the Soviet Union offered far less, and a 1972 agreement set the figure at 722 million dollars, to be paid over thirty years. Only a small part was paid before the debt was renegotiated, and the last of it was settled only decades later, after the end of the Cold War.

The debts were a small matter compared with the scale of the aid, and they were never the point of the programme: Roosevelt had designed Lend-Lease so that the question of payment would not stand in the way of the war, and in that he succeeded.

The debts are remembered today less for their money than for what they show about the transition from war to peace, and about the difficulty of settling accounts between allies who had become rivals.

The transition to the Marshall Plan

The end of Lend-Lease was followed, within two years, by a new American programme of aid to Europe: the Marshall Plan, announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947. The Marshall Plan was different from Lend-Lease in purpose — it was aid for reconstruction, not for war — but it was similar in scale and in method: American money and goods, sent to Europe to rebuild what the war had destroyed.

The connection between the two programmes is direct: the men who ran Lend-Lease ran the Marshall Plan, the factories that had supplied the war supplied the peace, and the idea that American prosperity depended on the prosperity of its allies, which Roosevelt had stated in 1940, was the idea that underlay the Marshall Plan.

The transition from Lend-Lease to the Marshall Plan is the story of how wartime cooperation became peacetime cooperation, and of how the alliance that won the war became the alliance that rebuilt Europe.

10. Legacy and Debate

The legacy of Lend-Lease is, first, a military one: it helped the Allies win the war, and it did so by a method — the supply of one coalition by the industry of one country — that has never been repeated on the same scale.

Second, it is a political legacy: it created the habit of American leadership in the world, and the expectation, in Europe and in Asia, that the United States would help its friends in a crisis. Third, it is an economic legacy: it showed that a country could mobilise its industry for war and then for peace, and that the line between military aid and economic aid is thinner than it looks.

The programme’s critics, at the time and since, have argued that it gave the president too much power, that it dragged America into a war it should have avoided, and that it propped up a communist dictatorship. Its defenders have argued that it was the cheapest way to win the war, that it saved American lives by arming others to fight, and that it was the foundation of the post-war order.

Both sides are partly right, and the debate continues.

The “arsenal of democracy” today

Roosevelt’s phrase, “the arsenal of democracy”, has outlived the programme it described, and it is still used today whenever the United States supplies arms to an ally. The phrase is a reminder of what Lend-Lease was: not a gift, and not a sale, but a policy — the policy of a country that believed its own security depended on the security of others, and that was willing to pay for that belief in steel, in ships, and in food.

The phrase is also a reminder of the limits of the policy: an arsenal can supply weapons, but it cannot supply the will to fight, and the history of Lend-Lease shows both the power and the limits of American aid.

Britain, the Soviet Union and China all had the will to fight, and Lend-Lease gave them the means; where the will was absent, as in France in 1940, no amount of aid could have saved the country. That distinction — between the means and the will — is the most important lesson of Lend-Lease, and it is the lesson that is most often forgotten when the phrase is used today.

Remembering Lend-Lease

Lend-Lease is remembered in different ways in the countries it touched. In Britain, it is remembered as the aid that kept the country in the war, and as the debt that took sixty years to repay. In Russia, it is remembered with ambivalence: the trucks and the food are remembered fondly by veterans, but the official history long minimised the aid, and only in recent years has it been given its due.

In the United States, it is remembered as the first great act of American internationalism, the moment when the United States accepted that it could not stay out of the world. There is no single memorial to Lend-Lease, and there is no single day on which it is commemorated, but its memory lives in the museums and the memorials of the Arctic convoys, in the Hump memorials, in the Liberty ships preserved as museums, and in the histories of the war that give it its proper place.

It deserves that place, because without it the war would have been longer, harder, and more costly in lives.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Lend-Lease?
Lend-Lease was the American programme of 1941-1945 that supplied Britain, the Soviet Union, China, France and more than thirty other countries with about 50 billion dollars of weapons, vehicles, food and raw materials.

When was the Lend-Lease Act signed?
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act on 11 March 1941. The bill was numbered H.R. 1776.

Who received the most Lend-Lease aid?
Britain received the most, about 31.4 billion dollars. The Soviet Union received about 11.3 billion dollars, France about 3.2 billion, and China about 1.6 billion.

What did the Soviet Union receive?
The Soviet Union received about 400,000 trucks, thousands of tanks and aircraft, millions of tons of food, and large quantities of steel, aluminium, oil and machine tools. The trucks and food mattered most.

How did the supplies reach the Soviet Union?
By three main routes: the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel, the Persian Corridor through Iran, and the Alaska-Siberia air route, which delivered about 8,000 aircraft.

When did Lend-Lease end?
Lend-Lease ended in September 1945, after the Japanese surrender. The debts were settled over the following decades; Britain made its final payment in December 2006.

Related articles

• Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum
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• Holocaust Memorial Berlin

Sources

1. Robert H. Jones, The Roads to Russia: United States Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union (University of Oklahoma Press, 1969) — the routes, the quantities and the administration of aid to the Soviet Union.
2. David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 1982) — the origins of Lend-Lease and the debate in Congress.
3. Wikipedia, “Lend-Lease” — the Act, the totals, the recipients and the routes.
4. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Lend-Lease and Military Aid to the Allies in the Early Years of World War II” (history.state.gov) — the Act and its administration.
5. Alexander Hill, The War Behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941-1944 (Routledge, 2005) — cited for the Soviet use of Lend-Lease trucks and supplies.
6. Hubert P. van Tuyll, Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 (Greenwood Press, 1989) — food and raw materials in aid to the Soviet Union.
7. Thomas Parrish, Roosevelt and Marshall: Partners in Politics and War (William Morrow, 1989) — Roosevelt, Hopkins and the administration of the programme.