Not exactly on the topic, but certainly related--and also linked to the Sunday Mail postings, some of which bring up the same argument.

Book just out: The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, by Peter Clarke. Reviewed in today's Wall St Journal.

Thesis is: " Britain's postwar problems were rooted in precisely those wartime commitments that had brought victory." Not a new idea, but sounds very well supported in this book. I didn't know, for instance, that the war "left India a creditor on a vast scale, with Britain owing it huge sums in the form of the sterling balances. London actually owed New Delhi some 1.3 billion pounds sterling (or $5.2 billion in 1945 dollars.)"

Nor just how FDR exploited the situation:   "In 1940, when Britain balked at surrendering nearly everything, Roosevelt summarily dispatched an American warship to Cape Town, South Africa to collect Britain's remaining gold reserves there."

Whether Churchill had a choice to do anything else but mortgage the UK to the hilt is not the question: it seems evident he had no choice. But the "partners" drove a hard bargain--it was by no means just the English-speaking peoples sticking together against the forces of darkness--as has been the general impression in some other presentations of the era.

If I can find the book for a good price, I will definitely buy it.