A British Operation Bernhard.

First I'm not suggesting this would have been a good idea.


Suppose with war coming and knowing that funds were limited the British government started to print its own US Dollars just in case they were needed?
 

Deleted member 1487

First I'm not suggesting this would have been a good idea.


Suppose with war coming and knowing that funds were limited the British government started to print its own US Dollars just in case they were needed?
I doubt they'd be that insane. If the US ever got the slightest inclining the Brits were doing that they'd be screwed.
 
I doubt they'd be that insane. If the US ever got the slightest inclining the Brits were doing that they'd be screwed.
Given that the US persistently over estimated how many dollars the UK had access to (the US treasury refused to believe Churchill was actually presenting honest figures) I think it might work. The printed dollars would fill in the gap between what the US thought Britain had and what they actually had.

Though as you say its incredibly risky with catastrophic consequences if it ever leaked. But this was the generation that kept quiet about so many other wartime secrets, what's one more?
 
I don't know, really, but my impression would be that the amounts the British would need to be spending would, even back then, mostly not be in physically existing banknotes. That would have meant truckloads of paper.
Also, the real OTL German schemes included long procedures for money laundering, with agents carrying out the exchanges in small amounts in neutral countries, and with a very sizable loss of value (as is typical with money laundering, but in the Bernhard case, that was up to 50%). Even so, tens of boxes of counterfeit pounds were just dropped in a lake towards the end of the war.
 

Deleted member 1487

Given that the US persistently over estimated how many dollars the UK had access to (the US treasury refused to believe Churchill was actually presenting honest figures) I think it might work. The printed dollars would fill in the gap between what the US thought Britain had and what they actually had.

Though as you say its incredibly risky with catastrophic consequences if it ever leaked. But this was the generation that kept quiet about so many other wartime secrets, what's one more?
Depends on whether they did it right, if they screwed up in any way, and it would be easy to do so, the Germans never managed to fully counterfeit the dollar and the pound was apparently a lot easier to counterfeit due to how slack the Bank of England was in their anti-counterfeiting measures, then the US would know something was up and try and track down the source. They'd have to launder that money heavily through Switzerland at a minimum to hide the source rather than use it to pay the US directly, lest they be caught.
 
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