After winning the Second World War, Britain rationed bread for the first time
Britain got through six years of war without ever rationing bread. It started in 1946, a year after victory. Winning had drained the country's wealth, American support stopped almost overnight, and the peace brought its own strange economics, in which victors went short while a beaten Germany was rebuilt.
Before American Lend-Lease aid began in 1941, Britain paid for American aircraft and ships out of its own assets, spending over 437 million pounds on aircraft alone, and Lend-Lease arrived just before its reserves ran dry. Some 55 percent of the British workforce went into war production. Then, weeks after Clement Attlee's Labour government took office in July 1945 with a landslide, Washington announced that Lend-Lease would end immediately. An American loan agreed in July 1946 steadied things, but it was meant for overseas spending rather than the welfare reforms and nationalisations Labour had promised, and its terms proved damaging for sterling. Bread rationing lasted from 1946 to 1948.
Across Western Europe, George Marshall's European Recovery Program sent 13 billion dollars for reconstruction between 1948 and 1952. The Soviet Union, which had lost roughly a quarter of its capital resources, turned the offer down. It took limited credits from Britain and Sweden, leaned on the countries it occupied in Central and Eastern Europe for equipment and raw goods, and poured effort into heavy industry. By 1953 Soviet steel output was double its 1940 level, even as many foods and consumer goods fell below late-1920s production.
Germany's treatment shifted dramatically. At first American policy offered almost no help beyond staving off starvation, and a 1946 plan called for destroying 1,500 factories to halve heavy industry compared with 1938. Britain and the United States also combed Germany for patents and scientific know-how worth around 10 billion dollars. Dismantling in the West finally ended in 1951.
Longer term, the war's victors tried to make another one impossible. The United Nations outlawed wars of aggression among its members, and Western Europe's battered powers pooled coal and steel in a community meant to tie France and West Germany together economically. That arrangement grew into the European Economic Community and eventually the European Union.
Source: Aftermath of World War II
