Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric
All I see here, hon, is defeatism in another guise.
In any struggle, or battle if you want a more combative image, the chance of defeat is always there ... but as the British have shown throughout their history, you can lose a helluva lot of battles, and still win the war. Conversely, you can win a lot of battles and still lose the war ... this latter is the German way  Although it sometimes crosses my mind that Germany lost the war, but seems to have won the peace. |
Seems to me Germany won the peace thru one thing .....hard work , rebuilding a country that had been bombed flat ,had lost over 1/2 its population , any piece of equipment worth a penny was shipped back east to Russia as 'reparations' ,and 90% of its female population aged over 12 yrs old in the eastern half of the country raped by the advancing Russian armies .
OK the Marshall plan did help in preventing famine ( it also did the same in other countries) and the fact that the UK and the US occupying powers also forbade the 'New Germany' from spending any of its budget on defense costs.
If anyone wants to know what helped the "German economic miracle" it was the mis-guided greed of British Govts and British businessmen .....yep the German Steel industry (Krupps etc.) had been bombed flat ....so what did the Brits do ...they sold/gave them brand new efficient steel plants which had been built in inefficient 60 year old British steel mills to create employment for British workers and then wondered why they couldn't compete ..... similar story with the British textile industry , how much modern state of the art equipment did companies like Bulloughs and Northrop sell overseas only to have the buyers turn round and bite the British textile manufactuers on the ass .