Ring the bells, the Great War is finally over:
The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.
The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.
Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.
Reparations: Another transnational wealth redistribution scheme that didn’t have quite the intended consequences.
One of our shining moments after WWII is that we did not repeat that particular mistake.
Lord knows what would have happended had Ike & Marshall listened to those who advocated prostrating Germany & Japan.
Finding and reading some good books about Mr. Marshall is still on my to-do list.
…Along the same lines: The US Government didn’t pay it’s last bills from the Civil War until June, 2004. Mrs. Alberta Martin of Alabama married her husband – an infantryman with the 2nd Alabama – when he was 81 and she 21. She passed away on June 1st, 2004, still collecting his pension.
Mike
Ron
We didn’t collect reparations but we did hold the UK to pay its IOUs. Think the last payment was made 31 Dec 2006. They reneged on 4.4 billion from the Great War however. So what’s 40 billion among friends (adjusted to today’s dollars)? Ironic isn’t it? The victors pay each other back over 50 years whilst the losers get all the re-building for free.
I do remember reading about that, though I also recall reading that many of those dollars from the U.K. were essentially recycled U.S. dollars that we gave the U.K.
Still -all in all, we ought not have required it.
You learn something new everyday. I would have though that the WWI reparations were eliminated in the WWII treaty. Never even gave it a thought. Never saw it mentioned in all the reading I’ve done over the years.
Somewhere not too long ago, I saw something that noted that Finland had paid off its WWII reparations bill. (not being fond of the Soviets, they accepted help from Germany) And they did it early, with no penalty!
The effects of The Great War are still being felt in Flanders’ Fields. Every year they dig up more UXO (Un-eXploded Ordnance) and every so often someone does indeed die when their plow unearths and detonates a long-buried shell. The effects of this war upon history will reverberate through ages to come.
At first blush, reading Lex’s headline, I at first thought Mr. Buckles had passed away. I don’t look forward to that day, for when it comes, the memory will pass into being “just history,” and not worthy of knowing or understanding.
And so much should be (and should have been) learned.
In Flander’s Field, indeed.
Sigh.
They’ve been digging up our unex in Germany for over 50 years now. Unfortunately, the stuff gets unstable as it ages. The main man that was defusing the stuff recently retired.
Another issue: think of all the souveniers that the troops brought back from WW1 and 2. Some of it live. Picric acid was a common explosive in WW1 and some of it goes off now and again just sitting. Most people listened to the warnings about the stuff, but not all.
My Grandfather brought a 40mm shell back from France in 1919 and kept it in his trunk of memorabilia. He made a point of showing us the hole in the head where the explosive was removed when my younger brother started mouthing off about it.
Hmmm. . . .based on that, I must have had my explosive removed sometime in the past. Who’d a thunk?
QM, still lots of it left on the islands. Those of us who had a respect for ordnance (having the pleasure of working with it day in and day out) stayed out of many a cave, though it did take great restraint.
Daryl…apparently what was being paid wasn’t precisely the reparations, rather bonds that had been issued by the Weimar government to raise cash for reparations payments that it was making back in the day.
Hey!
You guys bankrupted the UK over two world wars.
You waited to see who was gonna win each time before you picked who you would sell your arms to.
If the Japs hadn’t bombed you and shown their true colours we would have fought them alone.
The Brits fight for justice and freedom. You fight for economic gain.
Sorry if the truth hurts.
Overpaid! Oversexed! and over here!
Yeah, we really twisted your arm to fight the Germans. I guess we twisted your arm to fight Napoleon as well.
What a shame us nasty, brutal, barnarian colonials never really appreciated Mad King George III.
GB ended up in wars because of its own imperial ambitions. WW1 was fought for stupid reasons. It never should have involved GB or France. Neither had a dog in the fight, yet alliance politics put a hook in your jaw. Your ancestors are too blame, not us.
Wilson got us into WW2 because he wanted to be regarded as a “great president.” It seems you have to get at least 100,000 troops killed before you can reach that mark. If Wilson had left things alone, GB, France, and Germany could have reached a negotiated settlement and prevented Hitler and WW2. But, alas….
Jim is just engaging in a form of therapy, QM. Reality injections are contraindicated.