VAST EXPANSION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 September 1942, Page 2

VAST EXPANSION

IN THE LEND=LEASE PROGRAMME PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S SURVEY. TRIBUTE TO ALLIED NATIONS. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.55 a.m.) RUGBY, September 14. The value of lend-lease deliveries for the eighteen months from March, 1941, to August, 1942, totalled 5,129 million dollars, and the scheme is now being administered at the rate of 8,000 million dollars annually.—This information was given by President Roosevelt in a message to Congress. He said Britain, China and Russia, from the beginning, had carried on without enough guns, tanks or planes. It was through their uphill fight that the war had not been lost. “Only by strengthening our Allies and combining their strength with ours can we surely win,” added the President. Mr Roosevelt gave a warning that only by stripping civilian economy to the bone could the maximum production necessary to ensure victory be achieved. So far, the United States, he said, had little more than passed the half-way mark towards maximum production. “We and the other United Nations need all the weapons all of us can produce,” he declared. “In relation to their available resources, Britain and Russia have up to now produced more weapons than we have, and they are continuing to produce to the limit, despite the fact that Russia is a battleground and Britain an offensive base.”

The President’s report said that at present about 35 per cent of lendlease exports were going to the United Kingdom, 35 per cent to Russia and 30 per cent to the Middle East, Australia and other areas, including China. The report added that aid to China had been limited-by the difficulty of transport, but that the development of other means of transportation would relieve this situation. Reciprocal lend-lease had become a very material and important aspect of our supply problem, the President stated, and this represented the most economical use of the United Nations’ war resources.