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I'll be interested to see that. I would suspect that this was mostly in the second half of 1941 after Lend-Lease was passed, when the US FDR taking the lead against Japanese aggression.
I certainly can't see them extending much help from July - Oct 1940 after they've shut down the Burma road.
Nor will financial help do much good at the beginning of 1941, without the ability to buy US armaments.
It took a few days for me to consider the implications of this scenario. Though not apparent its fundamentally different from Ctrians theory. Ctrian was basically arguing that Britain could not survive without Lend Lease, and (by extension) that the US was the sole source of military production that made any difference to the allied fortunes. Clearly I do not agree with that basic position.
Parsifal said:I would argue until the cows came home that Britain had the capacity to survive indefinately from Germany, she did not have the means to defeat her. Put as eloquently as I can, Britain was the instrument of Allied survival, but the US was the instrument of victory. Without the US onboard, there could be no thought of defeating the Germans.
Thats a strong possibility but its also possible that without lend lease the Eastern front could drag on for years ending in a stalemate like Iran Iraq..
Parsifal said:What this hypothetical is asking, is what would happen if the Len Lease Act were not enacted. By extension, I suppose we also need to spend some time on what would happen if the US remained neutral, and Japan also did not enter the war.
GM and Ford were both im Canada amd pumped out 800000 military vehicles 2nd only to US , Canada also delayed declaring war so that they could order militray stuff from US without messing up US neutrality stanceSorry Free if I don't have the grey matter to really respond intelligently to your post - at least for the next month!But a few have surmised about no Lend-Lease. Could US manufacturers have moved operations into Canada vis-a-vis GM and Mexico and thereby by-passed the neutrality restrictions?
They basically did supply the UK with motorized transport. A surprising thing and little known is the amount of Canadian women that worked the assembly line from Canada at both Curtiss and Bell no green card required at the time and they are close to border. Niagara Falls on both sides of the border was very heavy into abrasives due to the proximity of power sourcesThanks Neil, but would it be a possibility to increase production there to meet UK demands? And Boeing and Curtiss, etc moving to Canada for the same ?
Freebird,
British financial contributions to China are discussed in a 1991 essay by Philip Richardson '"Plucking the China Brand from the Burning": Britain's Economic Assistance to China and Sir Otto Niemeyer's Mission, 1941-42', China Quarterly No. 125, pp. 86-108. I made a mistake in my original statement - British financial aid outstripped all others, including the US, through the end of 1940. One addition, however, was that the UK-based loans were made on far more favourable terms than those of the US.
KR
Mark
Plucking the China Brand from the Burning': Britain's Economic Assistance to China and Sir Otto Niemeyer's Mission, 1940–42
Philip Richardson
For over four years from the Marco Polo Bridge incident to Pearl Harbour China fought alone against Japanese military expansionism in the Far East. Both Britain and the United States recognized China's strategic importance but gave relatively little in the way of material help. On the one hand sufficient aid had to be given to ensure that China continued to act as a bulwark against Japanese imperialism and to keep China from gravitating to the Soviet Union (whose aid programme was more immediate, more generous and took the form of military supplies). On the other hand assistance was limited by British resource constraints, by American isolationist public opinion and by the fear, on both sides of the Atlantic, that overt military aid would provoke Japan into widening the conflict into their own respective spheres of interest.
One must also remember the political aspect - Churchill was willing to employ pretty much any tactic to draw the US closer into the war on the side of the Commonwealth. In that context, Lend Lease was a major victory for his political strategy.
The only powers who could stop Japan were Britain and America. Without Britain, America had to do it all alone, which simply wasn't conceivable. When it became apparent that British gold reserves were running out, making it difficult for her to continue buying US armaments, the options were to leave Britain hanging out to dry or to find some way of helping. Lend Lease was the implementation of the latter approach.