The 90% discount also applied to that war material that the UK wished to retain after the war rather than return or destroy. Given our worldwide commitments that remained (e.g. fighting a communist insurgency in Greece) as well as occupying Germany, that wasn’t an insubstantial amount of materiel.
Ref loans and lend lease repayment
On the termination of Lend-Lease by President Truman in August 1945, Britain’s economic position was precarious and the eminent economist Lord Keynes was dispatched to Washington to negotiate further assistance from the United States. Keynes originally believed that he could obtain an interest free grant of £1500 million, but the Americans were less than agreeable. The negotiations dragged on from September to December, and finally a loan of $3700 million over fifty years at 2 per cent interest, plus a payment of $620 million to settle the Lend-Lease debt, was the best Keynes could extract. The negotiations are fully documented DBPO, srs. 1, vol. III; whilst the economic and political ramifications are covered in the final volume of Alan Bullock’s magisterial trilogy on the life and
career of Bevin, Ernest Bevin Foreign Secretary, 1945-1951, 1983, chs. 4 and 5.The best, and most incisive, account is undoubtedly in Bullock pp. 129-137. A broader, and more detailed, documentary record of the meeting is available in DBPO, srs. I, vol. II.
Tougher than Hitler’s offer of peace terms in `40?..
There was “reverse lend lease” but it didn’t apply to the “Bases for Destroyers” deal which preceded Lend-Lease.
So post-war, decades of U.S.A.F. nuclear airbases sited in Britain were a gift too?
No idea JAW but highly unlikely. My guess is land for those bases was leased and utilities were paid for - watery sewage, electricity, etc. the bases served mutual defense goals or they would not have been there,
Gee, and how sincere was that? Towards the end of the war, Ribbentrop had a little party in his office during which they brought in originals of every single peace treaty the Germans had signed. Which ones had they broken? Pretty much all of them. It is recorded that they found this hilarious. But then, the jig was up.
Hitler did seem pretty fixated on his ideological fantasy of Aryan racial destiny, & the Anglo-Saxons were def’
seen as ‘racial cousins’ - being on the positive end of his plan…
He always held out hope that a ‘regime change’ would get the Brits on-side…
Wonder when we’ll find out what really went down with the Hess mission in `41?..
At the same time his idea of peace terms (give me loads of stuff and a government which will roll over whenever I tell them to, and I won’t do something you all know I cant’ to anyway) wasn’t exactly convincing - even Halifax didn’t believe him by that stage. The sort of peace terms the UK might have accepted (German withdrawal from France and the Low Countries for starters) wouldn’t have been acceptable to Hitler.
So in pure financial terms, the UK might indeed have been better off accepting Hitler’s peace terms in 1940 - but the US loan was a one-off payment, and nobody had any trust that Hitler wouldn’t keep extracting cash in future. Brest-Litovsk was very much on people’s minds, and the way that the Germans went on to systematically plunder France by means of charging “occupation expenses” to their clearing account only showed they were right to do so.
The Australian military’s assessment of Indonesia’s capability to invade was that it was (and is) low, but there was a risk of becoming involved in another war in New Guinea, this time with the Indonesians, with whom we were already engaged in armed conflict. http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/confrontation.asp
The public perception of the risk of invasion and or conflict outside Australia was generally less confident in the face of the vast numerical superiority of the Indonesians. As someone I knew said around that time “Give every one of them just a broomstick and they’ll still beat us.” It was barely 20 years since Japan looked like invading us and the Australian public was generally still acutely aware that we were, and are, a small population in a very large land which is impossible to defend around the whole coastline at the same time. These were common perceptions, regardless of whether they were militarily correct.
The background, and why we encouraged America into Vietnam, is covered in the next link. In very brief terms, a central factor was Australian support in the 1950s and early 1960s for Dutch retention of West New Guinea in the face of Indonesian claims to it. Australia falsely assumed that Britain and America also supported Dutch retention. In 1961 Indonesia ordered a general mobilisation in pursuit of its previously stated aim of resolving the issue by a contest of power. America and Britain did not support Australia. America was seen as siding with the Indonesians. Our sense of vulnerability was reinforced by resumption of arms shipments to Indonesia by American and Britain. Australia sensed it was being abandoned by America and left to its own devices when faced with a hostile and much more populous neighbour which had already embarked on armed attacks against its other neighbours in pursuit of its own aims. The Australian solution was to re-engage America militarily in the region, which led to Australia encouraging American involvement in Vietnam.
http://www.vvaa.org.au/bross-2.pdf
I wasn’t aware at the time of the aspects covered in that link as I wasn’t even a teenager then, but I well recall the concern of adults about the risk of armed conflict with Indonesia which filtered down to us kids.
Strictly speaking it would have made the Germans winners however, because Poland would have been captured?
I Think I would call it even decent politics, if war is ment to be extent of politics … Bismarck - worthy … The war would have gone in history the same as the Franco-Prussian war. Bismarck knew that getting 2 and giving 1 back is still winning and winning peace as well. Not a chance it would have crossed Hitler mind though. War was not just the extent of politics to him…
I understand the position of Australia you are describing but don’t you think the USA had their own interests at stake there in the region?
One could argue that Germany did indeed win the war, although by losing it and having to wait a few decades.
Hitlers dream was to have a Europe dominated by Germany and today we have an economically sound Germany at the heart of Europe, a country with huge influence and no massive national debt.
Funny how things turn out in the end but I’m not comparing today’s Germany with the inherent evil that was a nazi regime.
One could argue that Germany did indeed win the war, although by losing it and having to wait a few decades.
Hitlers dream was to have a Europe dominated by Germany and today we have an economically sound Germany at the heart of Europe, a country with huge influence and no massive national debt.
Funny how things turn out in the end but I’m not comparing today’s Germany with the inherent evil that was a nazi regime.
I remember thinking in the 1970s and 80s that Japan had finally won the war in the Pacific. If both countries had only realised the best way for them to reach their objectives was economically , what a century it could have been.
Sorry I missed that at the time you posted months ago.
I probably wouldn’t have seen it but for Firefly rising from the dead and gracing us with his presence after a long absence during which he was sorely missed, and bringing this thread up again.
Yes, the US had its own interests in the region, which revolved primarily around containing communism which the US and the rest of the West mistakenly thought at the time was some unified risk rather than the Soviets and Chinese each pursuing their own interests and own versions of communism, and various communist satellites and independent communist movements pursuing their own, primarily nationalistic or or national liberation, movements and aims.
America got slowly involved in Vietnam for its own ill-judged and ill-defined purposes, but Australia vigorously encouraged that involvement in part to stop the domino theory which saw communism in North Vietnam coming south and joining with Indonesian communism on our border. America was, of course, already subscribing independently to the domino theory. So Australia got itself involved in Vietnam for its own ill-judged and ill-defined purposes so far as the Vietnam War was concerned, but for the very clear purpose of trying to anchor America in South East Asia to challenge the communist threat from China and others which both America and Australia recognised as threats to their interests.
Almost all Australians then and now think that we went into Vietnam to support America as some sort of lap dog which blindly follows America in the absurd hope that America will repay the debt if we get into trouble in the future. Realpolitik is that that won’t happen, in exactly the same way that Eisenhower suggested letting Australia sink without American assistance in an early assessment in WWII, which didn’t happen because America decided that we were the best base for its war against Japan (and thank Christ America did decide that!). So far as Vietnam was concerned, Australia wasn’t America’s lap dog but more like an energetic Judas goat that helped lead America into that awful conflict and solely for our own purposes.
One consequence is that in all uninformed quarters, being about 99.999 infinite % of the world’s population, America is seen as the sole and prime mover for involvement in Vietnam, when Australia was a small but significant mover in encouraging America into that conflict but is generally wrongly seen as just a timid follower of America into that conflict.
Yes, but at the time the economics were that the US and the West were intent on exploiting Japan on the basis of paying low prices for Japanese products and charging high prices to sell things to Japan. This was complicated by the trade barriers erected by various nations in naturally self-interested attempts to survive the 1930s Depression, along with the general economic collapse in all countries. The prospect of co-operation between nations for global good was well below zero.
Japan’s most positive contributions through WWII to global advancement were the destruction of European colonialism in Asia and the resultant self-determination of various countries and the emergence of strong independent economies in those countries.
The dark side of that picture was the emergence of dictatorships, military juntas, and corrupt governments in much of Asia, but that’s the way of much of that part of the world, regardless of significant elements in those countries which yearn and agitate bravely for better governments and societies.
Yeah of course by simply not invading Russia before defeating Britain.
Given that he failed the first time to defeat Britain, it’s hard to work out exactly how waiting an extra year at a time Britain was gaining in strength faster than Germany was would have helped…
Germany’s magnificent secret weapon program would have advanced to the point that it had nukes 'n shit.