Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Without the wartime opportunities the American population would presumably have done its patriotic duty with more or less enthusiasm. But can it be doubted that economic opportunism spurred on the war effort as much as raw desperation fired the Soviet population? Over the war more than half a million new businesses were started up in America. Like the Soviet overachievers, the new entrepreneurs were hailed as examples of economic individualism at work. But in wartime American workers really could become bosses overnight. The son of a Syrian immigrant, Tom Saffody, worked as a machinist at the start of the war for a Detroit company. During the course of his work he invented a machine for metal measurement in his home garage. He left his job, built a factory using secondhand piping welded together, and by 1943 ran a business with an annual turnover of 4.5 million dollars.47 The entrepreneurial ideal did not explain America’s wartime economic performance any more than socialist emulation explained that of the Soviet Union, but it would be wrong to ignore its motivating power entirely. Much of America’s economic effort was voluntary; it was therefore all the more important that it should be prosperous. ‘If you are going to try to go to war or prepare for war in a capitalist country,’ wrote Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s Secretary for War, with unusual frankness in his diary, ‘you have got to let business make money out of the process, or business won’t work.’48

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  By 1943 there existed a decisive disparity between the quantity of weapons and equipment available to the Allies and the output of their enemies, Italy, Germany and Japan: more than three to one in aircraft and tanks, four to one in heavy guns. Of the three Axis states only Germany had the economic resources, the depth of skilled manpower and technical expertise, and the industrial capacity to support a war effort on the scale of the Soviet Union and the United States. The German economy was regarded in the west as a formidable source of military power, which is why so much effort was devoted to destroying it from the air. On the success of the German war economy hinged the more general success of the Axis states.

  There is little doubt that throughout the war the German economy produced far fewer weapons than its raw resources of materials, manpower, scientific skill and factory floorspace could have made possible. The disparity between the two warring sides was always wider than the crude balance of resources. Indeed up to 1943 the much smaller British economy outproduced Germany and its new European empire in almost all major classes of weapon, while the Soviet Union, in 1942 temporarily reduced to an economy even smaller than Britain’s, produced half as much again as the German empire between 1942 and 1945, However much the statistics may mask differences in policy and circumstances, this is still a significant contrast. Had the situation been otherwise German fighting power might well have avoided the remorseless attrition which set in in 1944.

  The irony in all this is that no state so actively worked to prepare its economy for war as Germany did in the 1930s, nor saw so clearly the intimate connection between industrial and military might. The lessons of military defeat were not lost on Germany’s leaders. It was branded deep in the German public mind that blockade, hunger and material weakness sapped the will and ability to carry on fighting in 1918. The very idea of ‘total war’, a contest to the death between whole societies – armies, economies, peoples – was a German one, originally coined by General Erich Ludendorff to describe the bitter experiences of the Great War.49 Hitler, who had marched next to Ludendorff in November 1923 in the failed Nazi attempt to seize power in Munich, shared entirely the view that to win wars ‘the whole strength of the people’ – material, moral, military – had to be thrown into the scales.

  During the 1930s the sinews of the militarised economy gradually took shape. By 1939 Germany devoted almost a quarter of its national product, and more than a quarter of its entire industrial workforce to military production. From the mid-1930s the state sponsored a colossal programme of capital investment – more than two-thirds of all German industrial investment – to build a solid foundation of material resources on which to raise the later superstructure of military output. Across Germany sprang up the world’s largest aluminium industry; a new iron and steel complex, planned on a scale to eclipse Magnitogorsk, was built from scratch on the large ore-fields of Brunswick in central Germany; the chemical industry began to construct whole new plants for the synthetic production of oil and rubber, resources vital for mechanised warfare, but controlled on world markets in their natural form by Germany’s potential adversaries. By 1939 Germany possessed the kind of military-industrial complex that would characterise the two incipient super-powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, after 1945. Its productive potential was enormous, though reliant on the supply of raw materials and oil from outside German borders. To compensate Germany drew into its orbit the resources of central and eastern Europe, partly by conquest and occupation, as in the case of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, partly through aggressive trade treaties that gave Germany privileged access to raw maerials, as in the case of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania (and between 1939 and 1941, the Soviet Union). These regions, described by German economists as the ‘Great Economic Area’ (Grossraumwirtschaft), supplied coal, iron ore, machinery capacity, oil, bauxite, lignite (for synthetic oil production) and a host of other valuable resources. Hitler recognised that Germany would not win a future war if, as in 1914, she had to draw just on her own supplies.50

  On this foundation Hitler hoped to build a military power that could face the prospect of war in the 1940s with every chance of success. In 1938 he approved the weapons that would make Germany the first super-power: an air force of twelve thousand modern front-line aircraft; a huge new battlefleet to replace the one unceremoniously scuttled in Scapa Flow in 1919; a quantity of explosives almost three times that produced at the height of Germany’s war effort in 1918. The development of rockets, jets and new forms of nerve gas was well advanced. The army in 1939 evaluated the possibility of developing atomic weapons. The war that broke out in 1939 cut across all these preparations. Neither foundation nor superstructure was complete; despite the growth of state planning and control, the transformation of the German economy into the instrument of super-power status was slower than expected. If war had not started until the mid-1940s Germany might well have proved unstoppable. In 1939 the whole military-industrial complex was still in the throes of expensive and lengthy construction.

  When war broke out the economy was conscripted at once. Strict rationing was imposed on the population. Inessential businesses were closed down; those that could be converted to war purposes were ordered to do so. A world of shortages, queuing, ration coupons and a dreary, monotonous diet was imposed overnight. Life in Berlin, recalled an American correspondent in 1939, was ‘Spartan throughout’.51 An army of bureaucrats, military and civilian, descended on the German people, requisitioning cars and lorries, horses and tractors, issuing permits for travel, directing workers to the arms factories. Already by the summer of 1941 almost two-thirds of the industrial workforce laboured on military orders. (Even at the height of the German war effort in 1944 the proportion was not much greater.) It was a level of commitment to war production higher than the British in 1941, and higher than that of the United States throughout the war.52

  On any reasonable expectation Germany should have won substantial dividends from a mobilisation on this scale. By 1941 the economy was supplemented by the rich resources conquered in Belgium, France and Luxembourg, which gave Germany access to almost the whole European coal and steel industry, a large additional labour force and trainloads of looted machines and metals. Instead Germany’s industrial effort stagnated; 8,000 aircraft in 1939, 10,000 in 1940, only 11,000 in 1941. The output of weapons and equipment was not much greater after two years of war than it had been after one. A great chasm opened up between Hitler’s plans and the material reality. There were not many more tanks and aircraft available to attack the Soviet Union than Germany had used to defeat Britain and France, a factor that played an imp
ortant part in Soviet survival in the first critical six months of the Barbarossa campaign.

  There is no easy explanation of this paradox. Hitler’s Germany was an authoritarian single-party state, dominated by the personal dictatorship of a man who was not only head of state, head of the party but titular Supreme Commander-in-Chief as well. Hitler had all the powers necessary to order the weapons he wanted. It has sometimes been argued that he chose instead to launch short, limited wars to reduce the pressure on civilian living-standards by producing limited quantities of armaments; this political preference explains the so-called ‘peace-like war economy’, until Germany was forced to switch to a ‘total war’ economy in 1942. But this argument sits ill with Hitler’s own demands for enormous increases in output, formulated in the year from late 1938 until the winter of 1939/40. Nor does it fit with the statistical picture which shows a rapid conversion to the purposes of war on such a scale that by 1941 almost two-thirds of the industrial workforce was committed to wartime orders (only a very little less than in 1944) while living-standards fell further and faster between 1939 and 1941 than at any other time in the war. The German problem was not one of under-mobilisation but over-mobilisation, in a context where there was constant pressure on the supply of scarce materials and no single central planning agency, as there was in the Soviet Union. Hitler’s orders, though they shaped national policy, were refracted and distorted by a system that was poorly coordinated, uncooperative and obstructive. There was no straight line of command between Führer and factory and no single forum where issues of matching resources to output could be thrashed out and solved. In between there was a web of ministries, plenipotentiaries and party commissars, each with their own apparatus, ambitions and interests, producing more than the usual weight of bureaucratic inertia. Each branch planned and organised a great deal, but they did not plan together. At the end of the line was a business community most of whom remained wedded to entrepreneurial independence and resented the jumbled administration, the corrupt party hacks, and the endless form-filling, all of which stifled what voluntary efforts they might have made to transform the productive performance of the war economy.53

  No organisation was more guilty of limiting Germany’s war potential than the military. Answerable only to Hitler, the armed forces treated the German industrial economy as an annexe to the front-line. Military priorities dominated arms production, from the design and development of a weapon through to the final factory inspection. Military officials were posted to factories to monitor production. Changes to design and specification were made endlessly in response to every cry for improvement from the battlefield. Production schedules were set by military agencies; consultation with the industrialists and engineers who had to produce the goods was rare and one-sided.

  The military domination of production had mixed effects. There is no dispute that Germany developed weapons of very high quality, with a level of finish and attention to detail that astonished the Allies when they inspected crashed aircraft or captured guns. By the end of the war German designers had begun to develop many of the weapons that armed NATO a decade later. But the pursuit of advanced weaponry came at a price. Instead of a core of proven designs produced on standard lines, the German forces developed a bewildering array of projects. At one point in the war there were no fewer than 425 different aircraft models and variants in production.54 By the middle of the war the German army was equipped with 151 different makes of lorry, and 150 different motor-cycles.

  With such a variety it was difficult to produce in mass. In 1942 Hitler remarked how industrialists ‘were always complaining about this niggardly procedure – today an order for ten howitzers, tomorrow for two mortars and so on’.55 But this was the nub of a system in which the military dictated the selection and development of anything that promised battlefield dividends. It produced a situation where a proper sense of priority and evaluation was replaced with a chaos of demands and programmes. ‘Nobody would seriously believe’, complained a group of German engineers in 1944 based at the research centre in Rechlin, ‘that so much inadequacy, bungling, confusion, misplaced power, failure to recognise the truth and deviation from the reasonable could really exist.’56 As long as the military tail wagged the industrial dog, German war production remained inflexible, unrationalised and excessively bureaucratic.

  Not surprisingly the experience of mass-production in Germany was very different from that of the Soviet Union and United States. The German armed forces shared a widespread prejudice against ‘American’ production methods. Göring’s jibe that all America could produce was razor-blades was not an isolated belief. Mass-production was associated with cheap consumer goods and shoddy standards. The German military preferred to establish close links with smaller firms with traditions of skilled craftsmanship, which would be sensitive to frequent design changes and produce a sophisticated custom-built weapon. The great strengths of the German industrial economy had always been high quality, skilled workmanship, the conquest of technical complexity. German weapons were very good, but very expensive – in skilled manpower, time and materials.

  Nothing more clearly reveals these preferences than the story of the German car industry, which during the 1930s became the largest manufacturing sector in Germany. The major names – Adam Opel, Ford (in Cologne), Auto-Union, Daimler-Benz – slowly adopted American production methods. Hitler was an enthusiast for the motor-car, so much so that he dreamed of making cheap motoring available for the masses. In 1933 Hitler met the designer Ferdinand Porsche. He asked him to try to develop a low-priced family car ‘in which one could go for weekend trips … a car for the people’.57 The design that Porsche came up with was the prototype of one of the century’s most famous cars, the Volkswagen. In 1938 work was started at Fallersleben in the Brunswick countryside, not far from the vast new iron and steel complex at Saizgitter; around the Volkswagen plant was to be built one of the new model cities of the Third Reich, Wolfsburg. The factories were planned on a gigantic scale, together capable of turning out half a million cars a year, rising eventually to one and a half million. The central workshop boasted the largest metal press in the world, capable of punching out whole car bodies at a time. By the beginning of the war the installation of machine tools for the production of 200,000 cars was completed. Yet the contribution to the German war effort of the plant designed as one of the largest and most modern mass-production factories in the world was absurdly small. Only one-fifth of its capacity was ever utilised, for a hotch-potch of equipment from one and a half million camp stoves to army-issue footwarmers. Only a few thousand chassis were produced for a military version of the Volkswagen which the army took with great reluctance. Otto Hochne, who worked at Wolfsburg during the war, later recalled that ‘there seemed to be no plans at all’. The works were used haphazardly until they were bombed in 1943.58

  The rest of the industry suffered something of the same fate. Postwar estimates showed that barely 50 per cent of its capacity had been utilised during the war. The largest and most modern producer, Opel, almost disappeared entirely at the start of the war. Opel was owned by the American car giant General Motors, which did not endear it to the German authorities. The directors had clashed with the army in 1936 when they closed down a small army supplier; Wilhelm Opel had earned Hitler’s displeasure when he introduced his new small car at the 1937 Berlin Motor Show with the words ‘This, Herr Hitler, is our Volkswagen’. When war broke out in September the military authorities wanted to break the whole complex up and parcel its tools and workforce out among other smaller producers. There were no orders for war work and no mobilisation plan. The company resisted dispersal, but not until 1942 did it become a major producer after the authorities had dithered for almost three years over what it should make.59 During the war the productive performance of the Opel workforce dropped by almost half. The systematic conversion of the motorcycle, motor-car and tractor plants only began in 1942 and 1943.

  There was more to the problems of
the German war economy than the failure to mobilise the largest mass-producing industry in the country, but this was symptomatic of a productive system in which technical sophistication was routinely preferred to turning out large quantities of standard weapons. In the end it took Hitler to break the logjam. Prompted by complaints from industrial leaders, Hitler called military and civilian leaders together at Berchtesgaden in May 1941 and berated the soldiers for burdening industry with unnecessary technical demands. He demanded ‘more primitive, robust construction’ and the introduction of ‘crude mass-production’. The military took little notice. In December 1941 Hitler turned his request into an order, a Führer Decree on ‘Simplification and Increased Efficiency in Armaments Production’. Citing the success of the Soviet factories, he ordered German industry to embark on ‘mass-production on modern principles’ and insisted on putting industrialists in charge.60

  The real turning-point came a few months later when Hitler appointed as Minister of Armaments the young architect Albert Speer, a close courtier who indulged Hitler’s fascination for monumental architecture. He was only 36, a man with no military experience or close knowledge of industry but a sound organiser. He quickly built up a team of young managers and engineers, almost all of them in their thirties or early forties, most of them co-opted from German industry. German industrial resources were at last centrally planned, and in response to Hitler’s efficiency decree industrial rationalisation became the driving force of the new structure. A remarkable amount was achieved in three years. By 1944 the number of weapons had been reduced to a few chosen types; 42 aircraft models became five; 151 lorries gave way to just 23; a dozen anti-tank weapons were replaced by just one; and so on through the whole range of German weaponry.61 The shift to mass-production, though far from universal, brought an instant increase in efficiency. Weapons output trebled in three years; the productivity of German industrial manpower doubled, even though by 1944 one-third of the armaments workforce were foreign forced labourers. Large factories were expanded and small ones closed down. The Messerschmitt-109 fighter was produced at the rate of a thousand a month in three giant plants in 1944, where once 180 had been produced in seven smaller plants. Industrialists now revelled in the freedom to work without the constant fear of military interference.