Gold standard from peak to crisis (1901–1932)
Suspending gold payments to fund the war

As in previous major wars under the gold standard, the British government suspended the convertibility of Bank of England notes to gold in 1914 to fund military operations during World War I.[6] By the end of the war Britain was on a series of fiat currency regulations, which monetized Postal Money Orders and Treasury Notes. The government later called these notes banknotes, which are different from US Treasury notes. The United States government took similar measures. After the war, Germany, having lost much of its gold in reparations, could no longer produce gold Reichsmarks, and was forced to issue unbacked paper money, leading to hyperinflation in the 1920s.

Following Germany's example after the Franco-Prussian War of extracting reparations to facilitate a move to the gold standard, Japan gained the needed reserves after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Whether the gold standard provided a government sufficient bona fides when it sought to borrow abroad is debated.

For Japan, moving to gold was considered vital to gain access to Western capital markets.

Great Britain, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries left the gold standard in 1931.

Depression and World War II
Prolongation of the Great Depression

Some economic historians, such as UC Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen, blame the gold standard of the 1920s for prolonging the Great Depression.[9] Others including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernacke and Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman lay the blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve The gold standard limited the flexibility of central banks monetary policy by limiting their ability to expand the money supply, and thus their ability to lower interest rates. In the US, the Federal Reserve was required by law to have 40% gold backing of its Federal Reserve demand notes, and thus, could not expand the money supply beyond what was allowed by the gold reserves held in their vaults.

In the early 1930s, the Federal Reserve defended the fixed price of dollars in respect to the gold standard by raising interest rates, trying to increase the demand for dollars. Higher interest rates intensified the deflationary pressure on the dollar and reduced investment in U.S. banks. Commercial banks also converted Federal Reserve Notes to gold in 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve's gold reserves, and forcing a corresponding reduction in the amount of Federal Reserve Notes in circulation.This speculative attack on the dollar created a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew funds from U.S. banks to convert them into gold or other assets.

The forced contraction of the money supply caused by people removing funds from the banking system during the bank panics resulted in deflation; and even as nominal interest rates dropped, inflation-adjusted real interest rates remained high, rewarding those that held onto money instead of spending it, causing a further slowdown in the economy. Recovery in the United States was slower than in Britain, in part due to Congressional reluctance to abandon the gold standard and float the U.S. currency as Britain had done. It was not until 1933 when the United States finally decided to abandon the gold standard that the economy began to improve.

British hesitate to return to gold standard

During the 1939–1942 period, the UK depleted much of its gold stock in purchases of munitions and weaponry on a "cash and carry" basis from the U.S. and other nations.This depletion of the UK's reserve convinced Winston Churchill of the impracticality of returning to a pre-war style gold standard. To put it simply the war had bankrupted Britain. John Maynard Keynes, who had argued against such a gold standard, proposed to put the power to print money in the hands of the privately owned Bank of England. Keynes, in warning about the menaces of inflation, said "By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some". Quite possibly because of this, the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement established the International Monetary Fund and an international monetary system based on convertibility of the various national currencies into a U.S. dollar that was in turn convertible into gold. It also prevented countries from manipulating their currency's value to gain an edge in international trade.
Post-war international gold-dollar standard (1946–1971)
Main article: Bretton Woods system

After the Second World War, a system similar to a Gold Standard was established by the Bretton Woods Agreements. Under this system, many countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the U.S. dollar. The U.S. promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce. Implicitly, then, all currencies pegged to the dollar also had a fixed value in terms of gold. Under the regime of the French President Charles de Gaulle up to 1970, France reduced its dollar reserves, trading them for gold from the U.S. government, thereby reducing U.S. economic influence abroad. This, along with the fiscal strain of federal expenditures for the Vietnam War, led President Richard Nixon to end the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971, resulting in the system's breakdown, commonly known as the Nixon Shock.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Suspension_of_the_gold_standard