Prepared By John Foster: Fill & Download for Free

Yes, and there are a couple of things now known that were never mentioned at the time. The most important of which is he asked the Chiefs of Staff what could be done to stop it. The head of the Navy Admiral Arleigh Burke said "We can bomb a hell out of them" and in case he received instructions to do so he ordered the sixth Fleet onto war footing. Not surprisingly, the Fleet commander asked against which enemy? To which the reply was. "You will be told when necessary, just bring the fleet to action stations."Naturally, such an assault would have been politically disastrous for the Western alliance but it is an indication of the US attitude that such preparations were made. However, to show what a dirty game politics is when the British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd went to visit his old friend John Foster Dulles the following exchange took place. Dulles was terminally ill in Walter Reed Army hospital at the time and he asked Lloyd, “Why didn't you just go on and tear the sonofabitch down? To which a suitably surprised Lloyd said, “But John, why did you not give us the nod" Dulles replied "Oh I couldn't do anything like that!"However, it was one of the best things that could have happened to Britain because it brought the politicians to their senses. The new Prime Minister Macmillan was a closet socialist and set about dismantling Britain's worldwide military commitments and its largely pointless Empire. Britain actually had three different types of nuclear bomber in service, half a dozen aircraft carriers and conscript army equipped with obsolescent weaponry left over from WW2.The remaining Empire which Britain's leading historian Correlli Barnett described as “A useless ragbag of territory” and “A strategic, political and economic liability” was unloaded in less than 10 years. They got out of Africa so fast that in most places they cheated the rising political class out of their obligatory war of independence. It was a case of - “Go home, white man!” To which the answer was “Fine, would in two years time be soon enough?”Getting rid of all these freed up money to tackle the appalling housing conditions in British cities and I have to admit I was a beneficiary of this. The construction industry in the 1960s was booming and as a trainee surveyor I could get work just about anywhere. By the 1950s Germany freed from costs of its own defence was making good the damage to its cities. Believe it or not, no real start was made on rebuilding Britain's bombed cities until the early 1960s full 15 years after the war. Around 1950 I can remember as a very small child travelling through the centre of Liverpool on a tram and repeatedly asking my father, “Where are the houses?” Because there seemed to be nothing but streets with open derelict sites everywhere.There are times when, despite the initial humiliation it is actually a good thing to lose a war and this was one of them.13 January afterthoughtI recall as a schoolboy in 1956 endless experts appeared on television saying the canal was absolutely vital to Britain because 90% of its oil passed through it. Without it oil would have to go round the Cape and that would require tankers of 50,000t(?) to be economic. Not only that, there were only three shipyards in the world who could build them that size. When the canal was closed in the 1970s tankers of 200,000 t + were built and guess what? It was actually cheaper to send them round the Cape!I have had a very cynical view of expert opinion ever since.

A lot of it came from Wall Street, most notably from John Foster Dulles who arranged the loans that unified five companies into the cartel called “I.G. Farben.” Farben was Hitler’s biggest booster and the biggest German shareholder at the time of its birth was Max Warburg, who would get melted down to zero.It’s worth mentioning however, that Warburg’s relatives in America initiated our Federal Reserve and ran Farben USA.It’s also probably worth noting that Dulles was cousin by marriage to Rockefeller and Farben was designed as a mirror of Standard Oil. Farben and Standard Oil held immense stock in each other, which explains why Farben’s HQ, housing 200,000 workers, was never touched by Allied bombers.

It didn't. It blamed Germany and her allies.It also didn't blame Germany for starting the war as such, but instead said that Germany should accept legal responsibility for the loss and damage caused by German troops to the countries they invaded. A subtle but important difference.Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles - the notorious 'war guilt clause' - was written by two Americans, John Foster Dulles and Norman Davis. They saw it as a technical clause establishing the legal basis for reparations, and did not expect it to be controversial. In 1940 Dulles commented that the infamy Article 231 had acquired was 'through accident, rather than design'.It was normal for the loser in a war to be forced to pay indemnities to the winner. Germany had done that to France in 1871 and to Russia in 1918, so it should have been no surprise that they in turn would be made to pay up if they lost in WW1. However, the Allies disagreed over the amount. Some wanted Germany to be punished harshly, in order to cripple their ability to fight another war any time soon. Others wanted milder treatment, that would leave the German economy intact as a potential trade partner.The compromise that was reached by the Allied diplomats was that Germany would be made to pay reparations rather than indemnities. That is, they would be ordered to compensate the Allies for the actual damage they caused, rather than being given an arbitrary fine as punishment.The only catch was that when France and Belgium in particular added up the total cost of four years of devastation and occupation, it far exceeded anything Germany could ever conceivably pay. They reluctantly agreed that they would have to settle for less - but they did insist that the total amount due should be listed in the Treaty, followed by the concession that Germany would only be expected to pay a certain proportion (40%, in fact - though in the event they actually paid less than half that) of the total.As far as the Allies were concerned, then, Article 231 was part of a compromise by which they offered Germany more lenient terms than some - such as French prime minister Clemenceau - had actually wanted. The angry German reaction took them by surprise.To most people on the winning side in 1918, the fact that Germany and her allies had started the war was self-evident and uncontroversial. Austria-Hungary, strongly backed and encouraged by Germany, had deliberately pursued a war with Serbia. When it became clear that Russia was not prepared to abandon Serbia, the Germans ignored or even deliberately sabotaged attempts to set up a peace conference where the Great Powers could negotiate or arbitrate a compromise solution, and instead forced the issue by declaring war on both Russia and France. Then they deliberately violated a treaty they themselves had signed - the German Chancellor dismissing it as 'just a scrap of paper' - in order to invade Belgium as well.The signing of the Treaty, 28 June 1919So why did Article 231 arouse such fury in Germany? I think a lot of it is because the German people never expected to lose the war. German armies had conquered Belgium, Poland, Serbia and Romania, and forced Russia into a humiliating surrender. As recently as spring 1918 German troops had advanced to within artillery range of Paris. The newspapers were full of stories of the triumph of German arms; the stories of their defeats were covered up (official military censorship prevented any German newspaper from publishing any casualty figures, for example.) For this reason, Germany's sudden surrender in November 1918 came as a huge shock to many Germans: they'd thought they were winning. They felt angry and deceived, and they wanted a scapegoat. Article 231 became a focus for that national rage; it seemed, in the atmosphere of the day, to be a deliberate humiliation rubbing salt in the wound.For that reason, the German government of the Weimar Republic era set up and funded an official government department, the Kriegsschuldreferat ('War Guilt Unit'), devoted solely to discrediting Article 231 and presenting the opposite viewpoint. Journalists and researchers who were willing to denounce the Versailles Treaty were paid subsidies from government funds - in some cases covertly. Documents exonerating Germany were published, those supporting the opposite point of view were suppressed, edited or censored.This campaign was remarkably successful - both in Germany itself and in many of the former allied countries, especially the United States, where it resonated with general feelings of alienation and discontent with the post-war world and a growing belief that the war had all been for nothing. The belief that the Treaty of Versailles was nothing but 'victor's justice' took firm hold.