Re: For the good of the game, I hope Wigan are Champions in : Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:41 pm
Offside Monkey wrote:
Weren't Germany forced to pay the other european countries monitary compensation following the war?
Not sure how this thread turned into a history lesson and I can't be mythered reading back through it, but long story short: The big winners from the second world war were Japan, Germany (both lost the traditional restrictions their economies had always had that held back the innate strength of their industries as a result of the war and both benefited massively from the spur to their economies their need to rebuild caused), the USA (the only country in the world with a booming economy and lots of money to spend in 1945) and the USSR (they got handed a global empire on a plate). The major losers of WWII were us (bye bye Empire and hello crushing debt to the US), France (empire loss again) and most of Eastern Europe (hello 50 years condemned to the Soviet yoke by the Americans). By far the best course of action Britain could have taken in purely selfish terms in 1939/1940 would have been to sit back and let the Nazis get on with it - fighting Germany instead utterly ruined us for decades. The history books usually gloss over most of that however...