The U.S. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941. It gave the President power to sell, transfer, lend, or lease necessary war supplies (including food, machinery, and services) to nations whose defense was vital to the strategic interests of the United States in the Second World War. (That vast amount of materiel was provided, in theory, for a return of land, to house military bases. [ed.]). The Act provided that a country should receive aid on such terms, as “the President deems satisfactory”.
Lend-Lease was originally intended for the British Empire and China. After the temporary military alliance between the USSR and Nazi-Germany was broken by the latter with the German invasion of Soviet-occupied territories, the USSR was included in the Lend-Lease agreement in November of 1941. On August 21, 1945, President Harry S. Truman announced the end of lend-lease aid. Total lend-lease aid given exceeded $50,000,000,000, of which the British Commonwealth had received some 31,000,000,000 American dollars, and the USSR had received $11,000,000,000. As of December 1959, settlements had been made with all countries that had received aid except China, Greece, Saudi Arabia, and the USSR.
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However, the following information will not be found in your encyclopedia. During the Second World War years a retired First World War veteran named George Racey Jordan returned to military duties as the Lend-Lease expediter at Great Falls, Montana, in charge of airfreight to Moscow. During that time Major Jordan grew progressively suspicious of sealed and so-called “diplomatic” cargoes. Even though he was faced with violent protests Jordan examined such cargoes closely.
What he discovered became basis for his almost incredible revelations to Fulton Lewis, Jr., and subsequently to The House Committee on Un-American Activities. Notwithstanding the Security blockade, and despite the specific limitations declared by Congress in approving Lend-Lease legislation, everything from America’s atomic plans and materials to top-secret State Department memoranda flowed in a steady, subversive stream down “The Red Pipeline To Moscow”.
Congress was horrified to learn that the U.S. government’s gifts to Communism even included master plates from the U.S. Treasury, so that Russia could print American occupation currency. Which, then, the Americans had to redeem. Thus, in essence, the American leadership had handed the Red Butchers “the greatest mail-order catalogue in history”… with all items paid for by the unsuspecting American taxpayers.
Inevitably, Major Jordan became the target of heavily-financed character assassins, smear artists and Communist Fronts. That his fully documented testimony was unimpeachable was perhaps most succinctly described by John O’Donnell in „The New York Daily News“, who said “his statements prove true.” And Senator Pat McCarran commented, “the Jordan charges explain why Russia was able to get our atomic secrets and to produce a bomb far ahead of schedule.”
Not to forget the expertise from the kidnapped German scientists at the war’s end, either. Or, as „The Omaha World-Herald“ put it in a lead-editorial: “Developments thus far indicate that Major Jordan knows what he is talking about. And they suggest that the events he witnessed in Great Falls may have been part of a much larger conspiracy to give the Soviets everything they sought… including atomic materials, which were supposed to be super-secret, and engineered plans for the American atomic plants.”
Remembering the Lend-Lease
Archived Articles | 10 Aug 2007 | H. KorbEWR
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