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The Germans went to war in 1939 in American trucks using American oil
So here’s the riddle. It should have been completely, economically, impossible for the Germans to re-arm themselves, virtually from scratch, and launch a new war with tanks, trucks and airplanes in 1939, less than 10 years on from the melt down on Wall Street.
To unravel this mystery we have to understand American involvement in Europe going back to WWI
Initially the carnage of the trenches in WWI was enabled by private American arms sales
The British and French could never have manufactured the millions of shells and ammunition they threw at each other in the trenches. They had to buy them from American weapons factories using loans from American individuals.
Britain’s First World War was in fact largely being financed by John Pierpont Morgan jr - JP Morgan – through his New York bank. On behalf of his client, the British government, JP Morgan raised mind-numbing loans from wealthy individuals across America, which were then spent buying weapons from American factories.
The Americans would have preferred to remain neutral during WWI and would have sold weapons to both sides had the British Navy not prevented all but a handful of ships ever reaching the Germans. Historian Adam Tooze has shown that, by 1916, the Americans were seriously considering building a new navy to bust their way through the British blockade so that they could lend cash to the Germans also and sell them American weapons.
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On the Somme - photo from Haig's papers, now in National Library of Scotland - possibly kept because it showed well equipped British soldiers engaged in what Haig called 'Winter Sports'
This terrible carnage in the trenches could have been over by Christmas 1916
One very significant reason the British and its allied armies tried to break through the German lines on the Somme and end the war in the second half of 1916 was that they were running desperately short of credit. At one point the Brits believed they had barely a few weeks of money left. They had to end the war soon, somehow. But the big push on the Somme achieved virtually nothing.
When, by the end of 1916, it became clear that Britain and France might NEVER be able to pay back American loans, President, Woodrow Wilson, threw himself into trying to negotiate peace in Europe.
Remarkably, he discovered he had an ally in the German Chancellor - Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg - who knew that his country was in a similar position as the British and French and could not go on raising the cash to fight for much longer. Hollweg joined Wilson’s calls for a negotiated peace. The whole terrible carnage in the trenches could [and should] have been over by Christmas 1916.
[READ: The Road Less Travelled (2021) by Philip Zelikow, former diplomat in the US State Department and now an historian]
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'The whole world belongs to the Americans' - Carl Siemens, 1929
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