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Originally posted by Vanguard
Just another item I found:
At the Imperial War Aims conference in 1917, the Kaiser wrote a note where he states the reparations that Germany would try to extract from the Allies, once the Central Powers were victorious.
These included:
$20 billion dollars each from the US and Britain
Fr30 billion from France
$10 billion from Italy
As well as large numbers of ships.
This is pure fantasy, of course. It is difficult to think of what pressure Germany could exert on the US to make it do anything. But these terms, among others, were what the OHL and the Kaiser intended to ask for, and what they would have imposed if they had been in a position to do so.
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You know, all this illustrates is that each of the parties fighting WWI except the US was fighting it for the wrong reasons. They were all fighting it for imperialism in one form or another. The victor was going to take away colonies or lands from the other: Germany wanted to became an Imperial power on the scale of the UK. The UK wanted to prevent that. France wanted back A-L. Austria wanted Serbia. Serbia wanted Bosnia. Etc.
Had any of them appreciated the cost in human lives and money that was WWI, I doubt that any would have started the war.
But the end of the war should have resulted in an opportunity to end Imperialism. Instead, Versailles and its companion treaties was just more of the same. France and the UK dismembered the German, Austrian and Ottoman empires, effectively taking the lands for themselves or their allies. They even took lands occupied by Germans.
Then they imposed reparations on Germany for "starting the war."
It is simply too bad that the US got sucked into this mess. Had the US stayed out of WWI, undoubtedly there would have been a truce. That should have been the proper end of the war. Instead we won it for France and England, and then let them rape Germany despite Wilson's 14 points.
We should not have gotten involved. It was a huge mistake.
