Fish, Churchill had a political obligation to present the Lend-Lease Act in a positive historical light. At the time it enabled the UK to concentrate on developing a military answer to Hitler.
Irrespective of how the Act was intended on both sides of the Atlantic, the punitive repayment schedule left Britain unable to maintain it's position in World affairs post-WWII or its Colonial obligations. The time of Empire may have passed but when you have no cash to run it, the process tends to accelerate.
This has been acknowledged as a probable definite act on the part of the US as they realised that they now had the capacity dominate World trade. This can be demonstrated economically in the shift from Pounds Sterling as the International trade standard to the greenback.
As Skyryder has noted, the corporate movers and shakers in the US had definite strong Fascist leanings to the point of almost entering into a coup process. The majority of the Republican party had pro-Hitler, isolationism as a core value, though Wendell Wilkie did successfully undermine the political sway of this group throuhg 1940-41.
http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/53-index.html
The British Labour Government that took power in July 1945 did themselves no favours by insisting that bilateral bulk goods deals were out and insisted on trading in money only. The trade economists lost out to the banking economists at a time when World economic power was shifting away from the UK. With Europe in ruins there was no European trade to provide a bulwark against the shift.
From a more personal perspective, this meant that long serving professional military people like my grandfather were looking at receiving Government funded housing sometime in the mid-late 1950s. A great deal of people migration to other parts of the Commonwealth and the US left Britain without key expertise in many, many areas, purely because they couldn't cope with living with their families in a B&B situation for years on end.
There's little nuggets in this transcript
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/coppockj.htm
that show that the US made it an economic priority to establish high loan repayments for Great Britain. Remember that these are on top of WW1 loans that GB is STILL paying and because of the high interest rate is likely to never ever repay fully. This is despite the fact that GB was utterly without cash reserves at the end of WWII and this fact was known to the US and at no time was a deferred payment plan offered.
Instead top priority was given to the Marshal Plan and the reconstruction of Western Europe. Which was a damn fine Humanitarian and Economic idea, but it left "Allies" utterly in the lurch. Unlike WWI where the theatre of war was mostly Western Europe and the Colonial interests and therefore trade interests were largely untouched, WWII devastated the UK's main trade sphere in the Far East. Again this was not unknown to the US and was used to help establish the US as the main component of the Capitalist World, as it had been immediately post-WW1.
Originally Posted by Fish
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