I always assumed that the appelation "Great War" was coined after the war itself, or perhaps during the later stages.
But I have just learned that it in fact originated in a 1913 lecture by David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University, who declared:
"The Great War in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come. The bankers won't come up with the money needed for such a war, and industry won't support it, so statesmen simply won't be able to do it. There will be no Great War"
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Oh dear. The American bankers certainly did and certainly got their pound of flesh at the end !! (and more.)
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the 1917-18 war you mean?
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Yeah - 1917-1919 war - much the same in round two, they cleaned us out and our debt to them actually stopped the Great Depression in its tracks. Kerching !
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Look at a few war memorials. The Great War from all but an American angle, was from 1914 to 1919, not 1918 as later history has it. Find a war memorial that dates from 1919 with no later editing and that is what you'll find.
The reason is, on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, an armistice, ie an end to hostilities, came into effect. The treaty of Versailles was not signed until 1919, and that was the official end of the war. The really bad thing is folk knew the armistice was coming from about 10 days before, but still men were sent to their deaths.
It can also be argued that holding out for absurd reparations, far beyond any reasonable ability for the German state to pay them back directly lead to the economic conditions that lead to the rise of Hitler. As the French were the biggest party wanting the level of reparations, you could blame them for the second world war. Good for an argument in a pub if nothing else...
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Don't forget the outright greed of the Americans..They've done very well out of European wars - they even managed to to do quite well on the German side (Ford, GM etc) - factories very busy during the war and reparations afterwards...
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>> the outright greed of the Americans..
Come come Rob, they're just world-ruling capitalists like us in our days of glory. What's wrong with selling lethal weaponry to both sides in some stupid bloodbath? Just business innit. They're going to strangle each other if we won't sell them weapons. Same result, harder work, punters off to Asia, dig?
Tsk. Anyone would think there was ethics and that.
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I'm pretty sure they wrote a lot of war debt off. Not all of it as for other countries, however they were in a much worse state than us. Out of the money that we did/could have owed they wrote 90% off, that's not too bad.
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They emptied our gold reserves during early WW2 and we gave them real estate....which they still have. We were well bankrupted.
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Nothing comes for free and I'm sure avro, vickers, alvis etc weren't operating as charties then. We had to buy war equipment, which was very costly. They could have billed as for a far larger amount. Even if they'd given us everything down to the last boot, we'd have still been in a lot of debt.
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>> We were well bankrupted.
And now we're all starving to death along with all these dodgy immigrants who keep pouring in to starve with us (frightfully loyal of them, what?).
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Great War commemorations - R.P.
