Lend Lease Act
Through the first half of World War II, Allied shipping losses to German U-boats climbed steadily from over 400,000 tons in the last four months of 1939 to more than two million tons each in 1940 and 1941, before reaching a staggering 6,266,215 tons in 1942 following the entry of the United States into the war. Read more
Lend Lease Act
For decades Americans have been spoiled by the instant coverage of war in the media. Read more
Lend Lease Act
They have been called “the other Navy,” the “Navy’s stepchildren,” and perhaps most fittingly, “the forgotten Navy.” Officially, however, they were the Naval Armed Guard or more simply the Armed Guard (AG). Read more
Lend Lease Act
In German it was called Operation Rösselsprung, which translates to “Long Jump.” Its goal was to kill or kidnap the Allies’ “Big Three” leaders––Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston S. Read more
Lend Lease Act
On February 1, 1943, a group called the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the modern-day National Security Agency (NSA), began a project to intercept and analyze diplomatic signal traffic sent by an ally of the United States: the Soviet Union. Read more
Lend Lease Act
President Franklin D. Roosevelt electrified the world when on December 29, 1940, he called on America to become “the great arsenal of democracy.” Read more
Lend Lease Act
Between September 1939 and December 1941, the United States moved from neutral to active belligerent in an undeclared naval war against Nazi Germany. Read more
Lend Lease Act
General of the Army George C. Marshall called it America’s greatest contribution to modern warfare. General Dwight D. Read more
Lend Lease Act
After Adolf Hitler’s audacious invasion of Russia finally ground to a halt in December 1941 on the forested outskirts of Moscow, the exhausted German Army stabilized its winter front in a line running roughly from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. Read more
Lend Lease Act
Throughout World War II, the British Admiralty’s deepest concern was the all-important shipping lanes that supplied their island fortress. Read more
Lend Lease Act
In director Howard Hawks’s 1941 film classic, Sergeant York, then-Corporal Alvin York, portrayed by Gary Cooper, single-handedly knocks out more than 30 German machine-gun nests and, with little assistance, captures 132 enemy soldiers. Read more
Lend Lease Act
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so an old saying goes. Perhaps it was the grandest exercise in political pragmatism and expediency that the world has ever known. Read more
Lend Lease Act
America was not at war, but American sailors were dying when American-owned ships were torpedoed by German submarines. Read more
Lend Lease Act
Sergeant Charles Callistan looked through the sights of an antitank gun at an approaching enemy tank. His weapon, a six-pounder cannon, was in the perimeter of a surrounded British outpost named Snipe. Read more
Lend Lease Act
Prior to American entrance into World War II, the USS Washington battleship’s initial assignment was escorting supply ships between England and Russia in support of the Lend Lease Act. Read more
