News coverage of the 60th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy has focused a lot of attention on the personal experiences of those who fought and sacrificed in those battles.
It would be useful if we gave similar attention to explaining how World War II shaped the economic and social world we live in today. Economic changes resulting from the war continue to influence the daily lives of people around the globe.
The war changed the productive capacity of the world’s most important nations at the time: Japan, France, Germany and Italy along with the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.
Only the United States emerged from the war with its economic potential enhanced, though some of the most devastated nations restored their industrial capacity in a remarkably short time. These economic effects came about because of the way events unfolded and the characteristics of the warring nations’ economies at the outset.
Our historical views tend to be very U.S.-centric. When President Bush, in a recent comparison between World War II and today’s war on terror, remarked that both had begun with a surprise attack, he probably had Pearl Harbor in mind as the start of World War II. Many Americans do. More accurately, Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of U.S. participation in a war that already had been raging in Europe for more than two years and in Asia for even longer.
By the time U.S. ground troops first met German forces, following Allied invasions of North Africa, the U.K. had been fighting Germany for more than three years. The Soviet Union had been engaged in bitter fighting for more than 18 months, losing more than 2 million Soviet soldiers in battle.
Our much-delayed entry into the war had economic effects. U.S. industry, mines and farms boomed under orders from the British (and from the French until the spring of 1940), but the United States did not lose any lives or property for two years. Nor, unfortunately, did we ramp up military spending enough to prepare us for our eventual entry, though defense appropriations did rise from Depression levels.
Geography also favored our nation. Nearly all the combatant European nations suffered vast destruction of housing, industry and infrastructure, as did Japan, China, and the Philippines. The United States, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil, participated in the war without experiencing any real damage to economic assets on our own territory. True, many U.S. ships were sunk within sight of the Eastern seacoast in 1942 and later, but no U.S. city or even factory was bombed to the ground.
Our nation also suffered fewer dead and wounded, relative to the size of our population, than did the other major combatants. We were a wealthy, highly industrialized nation, and we fought a capital-intensive war.
The battles by the United Kingdom and United States to keep sea lanes open in the face of German U-Boat attacks were bitter, but involved relatively few men. The same was true for the enemy. The U-Boat service lost a higher percentage of its members than nearly any other group in the war, but total deaths over six years were less than a third of what Germany lost in one ground battle at Stalingrad.
Allied bomber attacks on Axis countries similarly involved billions of dollars of equipment but only hundreds of thousands of men in contrast to the millions who struggled in ground combat, especially on Europe’s eastern front.
To acknowledge that the United States suffered many fewer casualties detracts nothing from the heroism and sacrifice of the many Americans who did fight. The United States bore nearly the entire burden in the Pacific, and the fighting at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa was as bad or worse than anything in the Normandy invasion.
The upshot, however, is that the United States emerged from the war with a larger population and labor force than when it started. Industrial capacity had mushroomed. Women had entered the labor force, and the number and level of skilled workers was much greater than before. We mourned the 400,000 deaths and many more wounded but, economically, we were a stronger nation in 1945 than when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
That was not true for any other major nation. The British, French, Germans, Italians, Japanese and Soviets all were weaker at the end of the war. The Soviet Union in particular had lost millions of men. Combined with the other tens of millions of Russians who died in four decades of violence between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the death of Stalin in 1953, the war losses skewed the age and sex structure of the Soviet labor force until the 1980s.
Huge amounts of output went to repair and replace war damage in Europe and Asia for 15 years after VJ Day. Corresponding production here went to consumers who enjoyed an unprecedented level of material prosperity that was not experienced anywhere else. The war shaped what nations produced and who worked for decades after it ended.
© 2004 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.