Today the British government made the final payment of the debt taken out at the end of WWII to the USA and Canada. The loans taken out in 1945 from the US and 1946 from Canada were to pay for equipment remainining in the UK after the war which was still needed and for food. Even with those loans rationing continued and was even extended to cover bread.
These payments put some of the current issues in the USA into perspective. The most obvious is to question how long it will take to repay the cost of the second Iraq War (Bush I made a small profit as the donations from other non-combatant countries for the Kuwait operation covered the actual costs). The second is to answer criticism of plans to introduce universal health care for Americans for it was precisely over the period the loans were taken out that the arrangement to introduce the National Health Service were being brought to fruition.
The financial arrangements for paying for the food and materiel from the USA changed as the war progressed. From September 1939 to March 1941 when "Lend Lease" came into operation, payments were made effectively from the reserves. The payments for lend lease ceased when the USA entered the war but the period to then was seen by a substantial number of British as a time when the USA was war profiteering, much the same as Halliburton is viewed now in relation to Iraq. From then the contributions were seen as part of the US contribution to the war effort, Again this was viewed somewhat less than American generosity than a rightful compensation for late entry and the far lower proportion of the population under arms.
Britain had long relied on food imports to feed its predominantly urban population. Grain from North America and foods from the Empire were an essential part of the diet. Much of this stopped when the dangers of the sea voyages meant that only the most basic of foodstuffs could be transported. This was the time when Spam became part of the British diet, with a warmed can even replacing the Sunday roast in many homes. Citrus fruit virtually disappeared, an orange or tangerine becoming a treat at the bottom of a Christmas stocking. Vitamin C for babies was provided by rose hips gathered in the countryside and converted into a syrup. Every spare patch of land was given over to food production with the London parks converted to fields and backyard "Anderson" air raid shelters (corrugated metal huts half buried) having the earth covering planted with vegetables.
The basically vegetable diet did have advantages in that the health of most improved. Meat was highly rationed. A MacDonalds burger would be the equivalent of a week or more allocation. An average modern American breakfast would easily use up the a week's butter and egg ration (even if you used the powdered egg imported from the USA to supplement it).
Unfamiliar with the hardships the ignorance of some GIs who started to arrive caused discontent for being "over paid, over fed, over sexed and over here". When payment for the equipment to be left to aid the reconstruction effort was demanded at the end of the war it therefore caused some consider it churlish, no matter that the price was 10 cents on the dollar and the loans were at 2% interest. Those with that opinion included the economist John Maynard Keynes. There were even proposals to relieve the debt by selling colonies like the Bahamas to America.
The memory of the wartime payments and the post war loans still make some bristle when the right (and others) refer to the later Marshall plan as "rescuing Europe after the War". Distrust played both ways as payments for the loans from WWI had been suspended during the Depression. Those have never been repaid and when the moratorium started in 1934 this stood at $4.4 billion (£866 million at the then current exchange rate) At today's exchange rates this figure represents around $76 bn if adjusted for inflation and $425 bn if adjusted for the increase in GDP. I should mention that the debts by other nations to Britain for this stood at £2.3 billion or over twice the debt owed by Britain. Norway got great kudos in the USA for not taking part in the moratorium and the contrast affected the sentiment when it came to the WWII debt.
While the debt for WWI is unserviced, the UK still maintains bonds issued to pay for the Napoleonic wars and before. These were at such low interest rates that it is far cheaper to continue to service them than take out new loans to repay them. This gets back to the problem for the US. The expenditure for Iraq is being paid by bills issued at the current rates of interest. These are now fixed term so they will have to be repaid by taking out new loans at the rates that will apply 5, 10 or 20 years from now.
Still it is worth remembering at a time when virtually all consumer goods were destined for export to pay off the war debt, the British government believed that a commitment to invest in the health of the population by providing universal health care was a top priority. The USA already spends about as great a proportion of its GDP in public money on health care that the UK uses for the NHS. Rather than universal coverage, in the USA that only pays for such things as Medicaid, Medicare, the VA and for public employees including members of Congress and the President.