OCR Text |
Show iicozeveii woisln Lease Planes and Guns to England WASHINGTON President Roosevelt Tuesday night an- nounced a sweeping new plan for helping Great Britain under I which the United States government govern-ment would take over future British war orders and release the materials for use abroad on a lease or mortgage basis to be repaid in kind after the war. , Under the plan, planes and guns, for example, would be leased to the British. After the war, if they were still in good 'condition, 'the British would be expected to give them back. If they had been destroyed, the British would be obligated to furnish this country wi'th equivalent equiv-alent weapons. Tiie president likened it to a man lending a neighbor a hose to put out a fire in his house. In a long discussion of the pro. posal at his first press confer, ence since he returned from a Caribbean cruise, he said it was still in the exploratory stage and would require time to work out both here and in London. He did not go into details about the cost of the plan to the United States, except to say that" his counry had sufficient suffi-cient money to do it. Stressing that the best defense of the United States is to aid Great Britain, he declared em. piratically that his proposal would not take thi scountry nearer to actual participation in the war. The plan, or something like it, he said, would be presented to the new congress. But he said it involved no changes in the neu. trality act or the Johnson law which forbids loans to debt defaulting de-faulting nations. The president described his objective broadly as the elimination elimi-nation of teh dollar sign in connection con-nection with help for Britain and substitution of a gentleman's gentle-man's obligation. Refusing to be drawn into a discussion on where the title to the goods would be. he asserted that that was something for the lawyers to work out. Tne United States, he said, was not likely to get into war for legalistic reasons. |