A payment of $84 million last month by the British government to the U.S. Treasury completed its reimbursement of a $4.34 billion loan that America made to the United Kingdom at the end of World War II.

One of the pieces of messiness, particularly among allies, at the end of any war is the repayment of loans that have been made among them in the heat of trying to defeat the common enemy. At the end of World War I the United States was owed $10.4 billion, including $4 billion by the U.K. One argument says that a reason the United States waited from 1939, when World War II started in Europe, until 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, to join that global fray was resentment that loans it had made in the previous war had not been repaid.

Nonetheless, through Lend-Lease and other agreements, the United States loaned Britain, the Soviet Union and other allies $50 billion between 1941 and 1945 to help them fight World War II. The loan that the United Kingdom finished paying off on Dec. 29 was a postwar subvention of $4.34 billion at 2 percent, granted in 1945 after Lend-Lease itself had been ended by President Harry S. Truman. The loan was made to help a severely war-damaged Britain fend off imminent economic collapse. Repayment began in 1950 and was completed in 2006.

The British were glad to have the money in 1945, but at the same time were -- and remained -- a little annoyed at having to repay it. The British argument was that they had taken, to a large extent, the brunt of Hitler's assault in Europe, including ferocious bombing in the Blitz, while, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. homeland had remained largely untouched by Axis military action. The British did not seek U.S. charity, but would have considered a generous U.S. gesture to be appropriate.

That final payment went largely unnoticed in the U.K. or anywhere else. At the same time, there is some awareness in the U.K. that British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 has cost it $16 billion, as well as British military casualties, with no obvious return.

The U.S. approach to the 1945 loan that "a debt is a debt" may have some validity, but this time, with respect to the British, one has to wonder. In any case, the matter is finished now, 61 years later.