Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Caribbean in WW2 - Oil, Sugar and the French" video.

The Caribbean could have been a virtual US lake, from 1922. Arthur Balfour sent a letter to the French ambassador to the UK in 1922, which was openly published by the UK government, saying that, if it was up to the UK, they would cancel the debts owed it by the allies, and forego reparations from Germany, but, as the US was demanding debt repayment in cash, the UK had no choice but to demand repayment from it's allies, in cash. As an exercise, some time ago, I looked in to the market value of all the British colonies in the Caribbean circa 1920. Using the price per square mile that the US paid Denmark for the Virgin Islands in 1917, I found the value of all the British held islands, plus British Honduras, almost exactly equaled the entire UK war debt to the US, specifically equal to all the loan principle and about half of accrued interest. Coincidentally, the war debts owed by the other allies to the UK almost exactly equaled the UK's debt to the US. Hypothetically, if the UK had bartered it's West Indies colonies to the US, which would make the Caribbean approaches to the canal a virtual US lake, the UK could then cancel the debts owned it by all the other allies as it would be a wash with the cancellation of UK debts to the US. What a different world the interwar years would have been if all that debt had vanished. There was a lot of chatter about a US/UK land for debt swap in US newspapers at the time, but President Harding said no, Lloyd George said no, so that was the end of it.
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@Kirk00077 aircraft as large as a PBY could be embarked on seaplane tenders and carried close to their area of operation, then set into the water by a crane. Two of the ships at Pearl on December 7th were seaplane tenders: USS Tangier, a converted cargo ship, and USS Curtiss, the first purpose built USN seaplane tender.
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@tomhenry897 there had been several Liberty Bond drives during the war. The US government was in a hurry to pay down that debt, running annual budget surpluses of some 20%. Prohibition was the law in the US then, and rum production was a significant industry on some islands. While prohibition was the law on Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, it was not the law in the Philippines. The powers that be probably would have wanted to impose prohibition on the Caribbean territories due to their proximity to the US. That would reduce the economic value of the islands. Another thing is the US had a blatantly racist immigration policy at the time. The British islands have an overwhelmingly African descended population, on the order of 90%. As US colonies, residents of those islands would have free access to move to the US. On the other hand, British Honduras would have been a particular prize. After WWI, British Honduras conducted more trade with the US than with the UK, particularly exports of mahogany. The US conducted several military interventions in Central America during the teens and twenties, and British Honduras would have made an ideal base.
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