Under the terms of the Lend Lease Act passed March 1941 the US government allowed the President?

Answer 1

The Lend-Lease Act allowed the President to order military equipment and supplies transferred to other nations (Great Britain, the Soviet Union, later China and France, and others) without the necessity of it being paid for. The British were bankrupt. They had been buying material on a cash and carry basis to that point, but their Treasury was empty. This was controversial on several counts. Congress had passed a Neutrality Act, designed to keep the US strictly uninvolved, so "selling" military equipment and supplies to a belligerent nation was probably a violation of this Federal Law. Selling to only one side in a war is hardly "neutral". Also the US Military was desperately trying to rearm and re-equip, in anticipation of eventual US involvement in the war. There was not enough military equipment being produced to do both, so the British got the equipment and US soldiers were training with broomsticks for rifles, bags of flour for grenades and trucks with big signs on their sides that said "tank" to simulate armor.

Roosevelt gave one of his "fireside chats" over the radio to sell the program to the American people. He used the famous "garden hose" analogy, posing a hypothetical situation where your neighbor's house was on fire, and he needed your garden hose to put out the fire. Would you insist on bargaining on the price he must pay, and then require immediate payment before letting your neighbor have the hose??? NO!!! You'd let him take the hose and return it when the fire was out. This was a disingenuous argument on several counts. First, the neighbor's house would either burn to the ground in an hour or two or the fire would be put out in about the same time. "Lending" this war equipment looked to be, and in fact was, a matter of years. The neighbor lived next door, while Britain was thousands of miles away across an ocean. And the hose would be returned little the worse for wear, but anything returned from Lend-Lease (and I don't think anything actually was), if it was not destroyed in the war first, would be worn out and obsolete.