The Economics of World War II (review)

This book affords a quantitative and analytical survey of the wartime economies of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. It compares the contribution of the respective economies to their war effort and touches on the condition of those economies in the immediate aftermath years. Each case also contains a brief treatment of how the wartime upheaval changed the relationships of government to the market system during the entire Cold War era.

Harrison contributes an overview chapter, as well as the chapter about the Soviet Union. The other contributors—all members of an international workgroup on the economic history of World War II, a body of experts formed in 1990—with their respective subjects in parentheses, are Werner Abelshauser (Germany), Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett (United Kingdom), Hugh Rockoff (United States), Vera Zamagni (Italy), and Akira Hara (Japan).

Each country’s general economic system, prewar economic development level, and mobilization policy are examined in relation to its role in the war effort, as well as the war’s economic, social, and political outcome. Existing interpretations of various wartime features of the economy and society are usually reviewed. The conclusion is that the individual Axis powers were at a great economic disadvantage vis-à-vis the Allied powers and the bloc of trading countries available to each group. The discrepancy increased explosively from 1942 onward, except at the eastern front. However, Harrison maintains that the war’s losers’ “won” the peace in the sense that they achieved domination of both the global industrial economy and the world trade in industrial products for the postwar era. He does not support this last generalization with statistics, but there can be no doubt that Japan, at least, is an adequate example.

Harrison’s chapter is of particular interest in view of the disintegration of the Soviet system since the end of the 1980s. He calls the Soviet Union “the defeated victor,” arguing that, in general, it was “the only one of the victors to suffer a significant, long-lasting economic setback from World War II” (293). To an important extent, this setback is linked with the heavy peacetime defense burden of the Cold War, the chief internal vehicle for which was a military-industrial complex tightly connected with the Communist Party and ethnic Russians. Furthermore, “the war entrenched a generation of leaders associated with the defense industry and defense issues—the “Brezhnev generation” (297).