The importance of civilian manufacturing and support services in a nation's capacity to fight a war first became apparent during the twenty-five years of the
French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars when the
United Kingdom was able to finance and, to a lesser extent, arm and supply the various coalitions which opposed France. Although Britain had a much smaller population than France, its global maritime trade and its
early industrialisation meant that its economy was much larger than that of France, which allowed Britain to offset the French manpower advantage. During the
American Civil War, the capacity of Northern factories and agriculture proved as decisive in winning the war as the skills of the generals of either side.
World War I During
World War I, the British
Shell Crisis of 1915 and the appointment of
David Lloyd George as
Minister of Munitions was a recognition that the whole economy would have to be geared for war if the Allies were to prevail on the
Western Front. The
United States home front during World War I saw the first ring World War II.
World War II A factor in Allied victory in
World War II was the ability of Allied nations to successfully and efficiently mobilize their civilian industries and domestic populations in order to turn out weapons and goods necessary for waging war. By contrast, mobilization of economic resources in
Nazi Germany was so inefficient that some early historians of the German economy concluded that the Nazi leadership must have had an intentional policy of favoring civilian over military production until late in the war. The British, by contrast, had already accomplished mobilization for total war by 1940, thereby increasing the output of weapons—especially
heavy bombers—vastly. This view was for example presented quite early by
John Kenneth Galbraith in
Fortune magazine in 1945 "The simple fact is that Germany should have never lost the war ...". According to
Adam Tooze this view was influenced by the post-war reports from
Albert Speer and
SS Wirtschaftsführer (economy leader) , which were not free from own interests. Tooze's alternative view is that Germany was extremely mobilising - already in 1939 there was a higher degree of mobilisation of women in Germany, for example, than Britain ever achieved during the whole war -, but the economy of Germany was simply not strong enough in comparison to the economies of the war opponents, especially with respect to the ever growing support coming from the USA. Slave labour and foreign labour in addition to women's labour could not change this. Hitler was early aware of this German weakness. He hoped, however, by a series of
Blitzkriegs to change the situation early enough in favour of Germany. This failed due to military defeats in Russia and the ongoing support provided by the US to Britain. During the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union, Soviet soldiers and civilians moved their industries out of reach of the advancing Germans (sometimes disassembling and reassembling entire factories) and began turning out vast numbers of
T-34 tanks,
Il-2 attack aircraft, and other weapons. ==See also==