Not willing - did - Lend Lease began in March 1941 and Congress voted for it. Both Wallace and Truman - Roosevelt's VPs supported it so if he had died early then is successor in the White House would have continued with it. US industry supported it too.
I noticed you didn't copy the second part of my post about an alternative result in the 1940 election. Very selective of you. You also ignore the fact that public opinion can quickly change and this has influences on political decisions. Anyway, I'm going to leave it here as I think I have made my point.
The lease lend equipment on its own was not going to win the war. If he knew what was good for Germany Hitler could have turned a blind to US support. What he did not need was US flesh and blood.
The British Empire did not have the manpower on its own to liberate Europe and defeat Germany. It would take the manpower as well as the industrial capacity of the USA to liberate Western Europe. There was little appetite in the US for getting involved in a European war, although a high proportion of Americans thought they would get involved eventually. Even with Roosevelt allowing the US to escort convoys half way across the Atlantic it took Pearl Harbour to anger Americans enough to commit the lives of their youth. Hitler was stupid enough to declare war on the USA.
If you read my argument - it didn't need it if Britain could hold Germany at bay and gradually strangle her. It might take much longer (perhaps a couple more years) but the result was still inevitable so long as the USA was prepared to be Britain's unattackable arsenal.
How was Britain going to "strangle" Germany when it controlled Europe with the USSR as a neutral supplier of raw materials?
In that scenario, there would be no direct British landing/presence in Western Europe. Where would the Russians (Soviets) have stopped their advance westward, Calais? Holding Germany at bay was not an alternative. The two big Axis mistakes were: 1) Germany not knocking Britain out of the war in 1940, and 2) The Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor. With Britain out of the war and the USA still on the fence, the Germans would have defeated the Russians.
Arriving late to the discussion. The original question put to Richard Evans is heavily loaded to a preset assumption and a poorly hidden agenda. The assumption is that Germany only lost the war because of Hitler. It is an assumption that flows from the post war narrative initiated by the failed Heer generals that they were close to winning the war and would have been victorious if they had driven straight for Moscow in 1941 and not been diverted north and south by Hitler. It is a narrative completely void of credibility from both a logical and historical perspective. It is flawed to a point of absurdity. Nevertheless, it remains the most often repeated "if only" narrative of the entire conflict. How? Why? Simple. It is pushed, encouraged, promoted and believed by those (then and now) who genuinely believe that the German Aryan was indeed a superior being and that their destiny to rule the world for a 1,000 years was cruelly snatched away from them by a drug addled lunatic from Austria. Cue the question. If one is to ask the question "could Germany have won the war" without agenda driven baggage, preconceived answers and assumptions, then a serious discussion could ensue. But, l suspect, the answers flowing from that discussion would not be the ones the Aryan and Heer sychophants want to read. Theoretically the Germans could have won the war. However, the inputs required to make such a result achievable are completely unrealistic. The Wehrmacht failed against the 'West' because it wasn't good enough to be victorious against Britain. The Heer failed against the Soviet Union because it wasn't good enough to beat the Red Army. Victory in Barbarossa required the Soviet Union to collapse after the initial onslaught. 'Kick the door down and the house will collapse' was not the refrain of a drug riddled lunatic, it was the military strategy of the so called professional German Army. Hitler was not the only deluded soul in Berlin at the time.
