Sword into Plowshare

The torrent of Lend-Lease has apparently passed its peak. Month by month since August the flow of weapons, food and clothing to 33 Lend-Lease nations has steadily declined. Alternately, the stream of reverse Lend-Lease (TIME, Nov. 22) has just as steadily swelled, has already topped $1,174,900,000.

From the British Empire and North Africa, and to a lesser extent from Russia and China, raw materials in increasing quantities are coming into the U.S. To the nation which forged Lend-Lease as a new weapon for war, this busy two-way traffic has posed a new question. Will Lend-Lease form a new basis of world trade in peace?

Oil Bases. Last week, in his 13th Lend-Lease report to Congress, the President touched for the first time on the key role Lend-Lease may play in postwar commerce. He confidently indicated that the settlement of Lend-Lease balances will be a powerful lever: 1) to guarantee that the raw materials of the world will be available to all comers; 2) to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers.

With a sidelong look at the five globetrotting Senators and their worries over the U.S.'s shrinking oil supply (TIME, Oct. 25), the White House report stressed the assertion that such a postwar policy, for example, would give the U.S. adequate access to the oil of the world. Similarly, disposition of the globe-straddling United Nations air bases which the U.S. helped build, and which will be some of the prize plums of postwar commerce, would be a part of the final settlements. (The President did not give details of what that part might be.) How much would the U.S. stake be in those settlements?

In the first 33 months of Lend-Lease, the report showed that the U.S. had poured out $18,609,000,000, or 13.5 cents out of every dollar it spent for war. But the report also pointed up the decline in shipments. The passing of the peak gave the U.S. a breather. It could look back and see just how big a bite Lend-Lease had taken out of the U.S. economy.

Tanks & Locusts. This was measured, not by the President, but by white-thatched Edward R. Stettinius Jr., 43, who ran Lend-Lease from August 1941 until it merged with Leo Crowley's Foreign Economic Administration last September. Now Under Secretary of State, Stettinius this week published a fat, 358-page book, Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory (MacMillan; $3). (Although he signed and sweated over it, the book is actually the joint effort of Stettinius and some 50 others in & out of Lend-Lease, with a final polish by professional writers.) Straightforward, barren of "inside information," the book offers the most comprehensive picture of Lend-Lease to date. It is jampacked with facts, big & little. Some of them:

P:By mid-'43, 13,000 planes were Lend-Leased. The greatest number went to Russia. Lend-Lease also accounted for 38 out of every 100 tanks the U.S. produced, $9 out of every $100 worth of machine tools, four out of every 100 bbl. of petroleum products.

P:When a Biblical plague of locusts swept the food lands of the Middle East in 1942, threatening disaster to General Montgomery's drive against Rommel, Lend-Lease rushed planes, technicians and insecticides to the scene. They gave the area its first lesson in scientific insect control, and saved the larder of the Eighth Army. >When Axis propaganda implied that Polish and Yugoslav prisoners of the Axis had been forgotten by the United Nations while British and American prisoners received food packets monthly, Lend-Lease acted. It now supplies 56,000 Polish and 140,000 Yugoslav prisoners with an eleven-pound food package each month.

Give & Take. Author Stettinius has some meaty facts for famine shouters, who have loudly blamed Lend-Lease for U.S. food shortages. Said he: "In the overall picture the Lend-Lease slice of American food has been small--6% in 1942 and about 10% in 1943. In crucial items the percentage has been even smaller . . . half a pound of beef out of every hundred pounds, three quarts of milk in a hundred, one of every 100 cans of vegetables.

"We have sent only one pound of butter out of every hundred and that has gone to Russia (chiefly for convalescent soldiers). On less critical foods the drain has been greater . . . twelve pounds of pork in every hundred, ten eggs per hundred, 18% of our dried fruit.

"I think we have got our money's worth in more than double measure. The total impact of Lend-Lease on our economy has been relatively small. The dividends it has paid have been enormous."

Like the President, Author Stettinius firmly believes that Lend-Lease will open a new era of postwar trade. But will the dispatch of such Lend-Lease materials as machine tools to England, of complete plants and refineries to Russia, mean serious competition for the postwar U.S.? Under Secretary Stettinius is not worried. He wrote: "What have we to fear? The United States should be the last country in the world to fear competition after the war is won. . . . We shall have by far the greatest industrial power, immense material resources, a country undamaged by the enemy, businessmen who can stand up to businessmen anywhere in the world."

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