The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (71 page)

Table 34. Aircraft Production of the Powers, 1939-1945
²⁵

For the simple fact was that even after the expansion of the German and Japanese empires, the economic and productive forces ranged upon each side were
much more disproportionate
than in the First World War. According to the rough approximations which we have already seen,
²⁸
the Greater Germany of 1938 had a share of the world’s manufacturing output and a “relative war potential” which were both about equal to that of Britain and France combined. It was probably inferior to the total resources and war potential of the British and French
empires
combined; but those lands had not been mobilized to Germany’s degree when war broke out, and, as discussed previously, the Allies were less than competent in the vital matter of operational expertise. Germany’s acquisitions of territory in 1939 and (especially) in 1940 put it decisively ahead of the isolated and somewhat mauled Power which Churchill took control of. France’s collapse and Italy’s entry into the conflict therefore left the British Empire facing an agglomeration of military force which, in terms of war potential, was probably twice as strong; militarily, the Berlin-Rome Axis was unassailable
on land, still inferior at sea, and about equal in the air—hence the British preference for fighting in North Africa rather than Europe. The German attack upon the USSR did not at first seem to change this balance, if only because of the disastrous casualties suffered by the Red Army, which were then compounded by the losses of Soviet territory and plant.

On the other hand, the decisive events of December 1941 entirely altered these balances: the Russian counterattack at Moscow showed that it would not fall to Blitzkrieg warfare; and the entry of Japan and the United States into what was now a global conflict brought together a “Grand Alliance” of enormous industrial-productive staying power. It could not
immediately
affect the course of the military campaigns, since Germany was still strong enough to renew its offensive in Russia during the summer of 1942, and Japan was enjoying its first six months of easy victories against the unprepared forces of the United States, the Dutch, and the British Empire. Yet all this could not obviate the fact that the Allies possessed
twice
the manufacturing strength (using the distorted 1938 figures, which downplay the U.S.’ share),
three
times the “war potential,” and
three
times the national income of the Axis powers, even when the French shares are added to Germany’s total.
²⁹
By 1942 and 1943, these figures of
potential
power were being exchanged into the hard currency of aircraft, guns, tanks, and ships; indeed, by 1943–1944 the United States alone was producing one ship a day and one aircraft every five minutes! What is more, the Allies were producing many newer
types
of weapons (Superfortresses, Mustangs, light fleet carriers), whereas the Axis powers could only produce advanced weapons (jet fighters, Type 23 U-boats) in relatively small quantities.

The best measure of this decisive shift in the balances comes from Wagenführ’s figures for the armaments-production totals of the major combatants (see
Table 35
).

Table 35. Armaments Production of the Powers, 1940–1943
³⁰
(billions of 1944 dollars)

Thus, in 1940 British armaments production was significantly behind Germany’s but still growing fast, so that it was slightly superior
by the following year—the last year in which the German economy was being operated at relative leisure. The twin military shocks of Stalingrad and North Africa, and Speer’s assumption of the economics ministry, led to an enormous boost in German arms production by 1943;
³¹
and Japan, too, more than doubled its output. Even so, the increases in combined British and Soviet production during those two years equaled the rise in Axis output (G.B./USSR, $10 billion increase, 1941–1943; cf. Axis, $9.8 billion increase), and kept them still superior in total armaments production. But the most staggering change came with the
more than eightfold
rise in American arms output between 1941 and 1943, which meant that by the latter year the Allied total was over three times that of its foes—thereby finally realizing that imbalance in “war potential” and national income which had existed em-bryonically at the very beginning. No matter how cleverly the Wehrmacht mounted its tactical counterattacks on both the western and eastern fronts until almost the last months of the war, it was to be ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer mass of Allied firepower. By 1945, the thousands of Anglo-American bombers pounding the Reich each day and the hundreds of Red Army divisions poised to blast through to Berlin and Vienna were all different manifestations of the same blunt fact. Once again, in a protracted and full-scale coalition war, the countries with the deepest purse had prevailed in the end.

This was also true of Japan’s own collapse in the Pacific war. It is now clear that the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 marked a watershed in the military history of the world, and one which throws into doubt the viability of mankind should a Great Power war with atomic weaponry ever be fought. Yet in the context of the 1945 campaigning, it was but one of a series of military tools which the United States then could employ to compel Japan to surrender. The successful American submarine campaign was threatening to starve Japan; the swarms of B-29 bombers were pounding its towns and cities to ashes (the Tokyo “fire raid” of March 9, 1945, caused approximately 185,000 casualties and destroyed 267,000 buildings); and the American planners and their allies were preparing for a massive invasion of the home islands. The mix of motives which, despite certain reservations, pushed toward the decision to drop the bomb—the wish to save Allied casualties, the desire to send a warning to Stalin, the need to justify the vast expenses of the atomic project—are still debated today;
³²
but the point being made here is that it was the United States alone which at this time had the productive and technological resources not only to wage two large-scale conventional wars but also to invest the scientists, raw materials, and money (about $2 billion) in the development of a new weapon which might or might not work. The devastation inflicted upon Hiroshima, together with Berlin’s fall into the hands of the Red
Army, not only symbolized the end of another war, it also marked the beginning of a new order in world affairs.

The outlines of that new order were already being described by American military planners even as the conflict was at its height. As one of their policy papers expressed it:

While historians might quibble at the claim that nothing of a comparable nature had occurred during the past fifteen hundred years, it was becoming clear that the global balance of power after the war would be totally different from that preceding it. Former Great Powers—France, Italy—were already eclipsed. The German bid for mastery in Europe was collapsing, as was Japan’s bid in the Far East and Pacific. Britain, despite Churchill, was fading. The bipolar world, forecast so often in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had at last arrived; the international order, in DePorte’s words, now moved “from one system to another.”
³⁴
Only the United States and the USSR counted, so it seemed; and of the two, the American “superpower” was vastly superior.

Simply because much of the rest of the world was either exhausted by the war or still in a stage of colonial “underdevelopment,” American power in 1945 was, for want of another term,
artificially
high, like, say, Britain’s in 1815. Nonetheless, the actual dimensions of its might were unprecedented in absolute terms. Stimulated by the vast surge in war expenditures, the country’s GNP measured in constant 1939 dollars rose from $88.6 billion (1939) to $135 billion (1945), and much higher ($220 billion) in current dollars. At last, the “slack” in the economy which the New Deal had failed to eradicate was fully taken up, and underutilized resources and manpower properly exploited: “During the war the size of the productive plant within the country grew by nearly 50 percent and the physical output of goods by more than 50 percent.”
³⁵
Indeed, in the years 1940 to 1944, industrial expansion in
the United States rose at a faster pace—over 15 percent a year—than at any period before or since. Although the greater part of this growth was caused by war production (which soared from 2 percent of total output in 1939 to 40 percent in 1943), nonwar goods also increased, so that the civilian sector of the economy was not encroached upon as in the other combatant nations. Its standard of living was higher than any other country’s, but so was its per capita productivity. Among the Great Powers, the United States was the only country which became richer—in fact, much richer—rather than poorer because of the war. At its conclusion, Washington possessed gold reserves of $20 billion, almost two-thirds of the world’s total of $33 billion.
³⁶
Again, “…  more than half the total manufacturing production of the world took place within the U.S.A., which, in fact, turned out a third of the world production of goods of all types.”
³⁷
This also made it by far the greatest exporter of goods at the war’s end, and even a few years later it supplied one-third of the world’s exports. Because of the massive expansion of its shipbuilding facilities, it now owned half of the world supply of shipping. Economically, the world was its oyster.

This economic power was reflected in the military strength of the United States, which at the end of the war controlled 12.5 million service personnel, including 7.5 million overseas. Although this total was naturally going to shrink in peacetime (by 1948, the army’s personnel was only one-ninth what it had been four years earlier), that merely reflected political choices, not real military potential. Given the early postwar assumptions about the limited overseas roles of the United States, a better indication of its strength lay in the tallies of its modern weaponry. By this stage, the U.S. Navy was unquestionably “second to none,” its fleet of 1,200 major warships (centered upon dozens of aircraft carriers rather than battleships) now being considerably larger than the Royal Navy’s, with no other significant maritime force existing. In both its carrier task forces and its Marine Corps divisions, the United States had amply demonstrated its capacity to project its power across the globe to any region accessible from the sea. Even more imposing was the American “command of the air”; the 2,000-plus heavy bombers which had pounded Hitler’s Europe and the 1,000 ultra-long-range B-29s which had reduced many Japanese cities to ashes were to be supplemented by even more powerful jet-propelled strategic bombers like the B-36. Above all, the United States possessed a monopoly of atomic bombs, which promised to unleash a devastation upon any future enemy as horrific as that which had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
³⁸
As later analyses have pointed out, American military power may actually have been less than it seemed (there were very few A-bombs in stock, and dropping them had large political implications), and it was difficult to use it to influence the conduct of a country as distant, inscrutable, and suspicious as the USSR; but the
image of ineffable superiority remained undisturbed until the Korean War, and was reinforced by the pleas of so many nations for American loans, weapons, and promises of military support.