1941–1946 · Case 1 of 15
The Flying Tigers, the Burma Road, and the Hump airlift are already on this site's front record. What belongs here is the part of the alliance that most accounts skip: aid to China did not stop when the shooting did.
The United States extended Lend-Lease to China on 6 May 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor. Through the middle of the war the flow was thin. The Sixteenth Report to Congress on Lend-Lease Operations puts total shipments to China at $153,584,000 through 30 June 1944, a fraction of what went to Britain or the Soviet Union, held back by the same geography that made the Hump necessary in the first place. Everything had to come by air over the Himalayas or not at all.
What changed after Japan's surrender is the part worth recording. A State Department memorandum from Secretary of War Robert Patterson to Secretary of State James Byrnes, dated 18 February 1946, put the value of Lend-Lease aid extended to the Chinese Nationalist government since V-J Day, and proposed through the end of October 1946, at an estimated $839,950,223. Of that, $689,520,854 covered the window between V-J Day and 2 March 1946 alone. The United States kept supplying a wartime ally into peacetime, while that ally was already sliding into civil war, because the commitment had been made and nobody moved to cancel it.
The number is large enough to matter and specific enough to check, and it describes a choice America kept making after the strategic reason for making it, defeating Japan, had already been achieved.
Sources: Lend-Lease Act of 1941 (Pub. L. 77-11); Sixteenth Report to Congress on Lend-Lease Operations; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Vol. X, doc. 411 (Secretary of War to Secretary of State, 18 February 1946). The total program figure and China's overall wartime share are not restated here because published estimates for that broader number vary by source; the post-V-J Day figure above comes from a single dated primary document and is the one this entry relies on.