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Originally Posted by dizzybint
I may be wrong here but wasnt Roosvelt and the US forced into the war when Germany declared war on them... and not until.... This isnt my words but what Ive read..
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It is true that the U.S. declaration of war upon Germany followed that of Germany upon the U.S., which occurred on December 11, 1941. This has led a lot of people to conclude that but for Hitler's ill-advised declaration of war in the United States, there would have been no war between the nations. This is wrong.
Between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the formal declaration or war, Secretary of War Stimson urged President Roosevelt to ask Congress for a declaration of war on Germany. Roosevelt decided to wait, not in order to avoid war but simply because he was confident that Germany would soon declare war, and he knew support for the war would be greater if he let Germany take the lead. Further, if you go back and look at newspaper editorials across the country from December 8th through 11th (the time period between the Japanese attack and the formal state of war between the U.S. and Germany) you will see repeated mentions of the fact that a state of war with Germany is imminent. In other words, the entire country knew that the Pearl Harbor attack signaled that the U.S. was about to be involved in both theaters of the war.
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When Churchill asked for more help the USA demanded all the UK’s gold, as much money as the UK could borrow and insisted that all available public and private assets be sold. The Americans demanded entry to Britain’s export markets and Britain had to hand over details of numerous new British inventions (including the jet engine). These were goodwill gifts which the USA demanded not in return for helping Britain in the war against Hitler (they didn’t) but simply to agree to sell arms to Britain.
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This is nonsense.
The UK needed arms. The UK needed to pay for them. They used gold. And they used credit. This is how purchases work.
The UK began spending its gold reserves on rearming long before the U.S. began shipping supplies. That's what one does when one needs things - it pays for them. In the case of Congress, it wanted payment for services and goods supplied. And you find this unusual? The United States was involved in the war for precisely the same reason that was the UK - each nation decided it was in its best interest to do so. Neither was involved out of the goodness of its heart. If you want to be taken seriously, you can lose the white hat UK vs. black hat U.S. routine.
Furthermore, Lend-Lease items were generally sold at 10% of their value. And you're disgruntled because they weren't free? The Anglo-American loan was set at a rate of 2% repayment. Do you know why it was not fully repaid until 2006? Because the UK only made the minimum payments, for at that rate they were profiting more by holding unto cash rather than paying above what they had to pay. No problem - their own self-interest at work. But I can imagine the hew and cry were the situations reversed.
I've noticed that the U.S. is typically reviled for expecting payment (gasp!) for Lend-Lease supplies. But the same is never extended to Canada, which had similar programs, and which like the U.S. floated quite a large loan to the economically-devastated postwar UK. This loan, like those from Washington, was not paid in full until the early 21st century. But whereas the U.S. is styled a predatory lender for having the audacity not to simply give stuff away, Canada never is. Nor should they be - but the point is, apparently there's only interest in reviling the U.S., so Canada gets a free pass (to the extent that the accusers are even aware that similar aid flowed from Ottawa).
Oh, and the technology nonsense you're claiming? That was not 'demanded' - the Tizard Mission was dispatched to the U.S. because the UK simply did not have the capacity (mostly due to financial reasons, and because their industrial capacity was already devoted to immediately pressing issues relating to the war) to develop certain technologies that they wanted to see used in the war. The atomic bomb was one. So what the UK did was transfer technology - mostly research - to the United States. The U.S. then spent billions and billions of dollars building nukes, which finally knocked Japan - with whom the UK was at war as well - out of the war, negating the need for the UK and others to join the U.S. in Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan in late 1945, which would have been extraordinarily costly for all involve. And this was a bad deal for the UK
how, precisely? Of course, it wasn't. Nor was it wrong. The UK had interests. The U.S. also had interests. The UK managed to use the U.S. to effectively give the UK the results of having the bomb, without the UK having to go through the expensive and resource-consuming process of making one itself. I don't say that begrudgingly - that's how states with interests behave. Yet you point the finger when it's the UK having to pry open its wallet, as though they were innocent and good and being victimized. And that's the nonsense, because they weren't any such thing. As with the U.S. (and Canada, and others), they were a state advancing its own interests.
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"In a nutshell, everything we got from America in World War II was free," says economic historian Professor Mark Harrison, of Warwick University.
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It's easy to cough and splutter at the thought of our closest ally suddenly demanding payment for equipment rather than sparing a billion or two as a gift. But the terms of the loan were extremely generous, with a fixed interest rate of 2% making it considerably less terrifying than a typical mortgage.
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Yet for Dr Tim Leunig, lecturer in economic history at the LSE, it's no surprise that the UK chose to keep this low-interest loan going rather than pay it off early. "Nobody pays off their student loan early, unless they are a nutter. Even if you've got the money to pay it off early, you should just put it in a bank and pocket the interest."
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