The reconstruction of Western Europe required the abolition of the command economy and the liberalisation of prices and wages the elimination of the dollar shortage to enable countries ravaged by war to import the capital goods necessary to rebuild their infrastructure and restock their factories the restoration of the European division of labour and international cooperation to resolve the German question and remobilise German industry (Milward 1987, Eichengreen 2007). By 1947, industrial production was back at pre-war levels in at least the victorious powers and the non-belligerent economies.Ĭontinued revival and the resumption of economic growth were held back by institutional and geopolitical factors rather than the lack of productive capacity. But the maintenance of wartime command-economy controls and warlike labour mobilisation swiftly eliminated these bottlenecks and avoided the acute shortages that might have fuelled social unrest and runaway inflation, as Europe had experienced at the end of WWI (Boltho 2001). Industrial production had been brought to a halt by the demolition of the transport infrastructure, in particular bridges and railway hubs. Power-generating capacity was also enlarged and needed little repair.

Even in Germany and Italy, the two main targets of Allied strategic bombing, industrial fixed capital grew by 20% and 30%, respectively, between 19. Despite the scale of material damage, industrial equipment and plants survived the war remarkably intact. Across Western Europe, the casualties of war were more than offset by natural population growth and post-war mass migration. There is consensus in the more recent historiography of post-war Europe that the foundations of economic life remained strong. The quarter-century that followed would be engraved in collective memory as the most remarkable era of macroeconomic stability and social progress in the history of the western world (Milward 1992) and as the ‘golden age of economic growth’ in Europe, both East and West (Crafts 2018). Most economies shattered by war returned to pre-war levels of output within five years. That a Europe more prosperous than ever would emerge from this apocalypse astonished the world. The enormous firepower of industrial warfare and aerial bombardment “brought physical destruction that few could have imagined and few imagined could be overcome in their lifetime” (Vonyó 2018). Millions of children across the continent would grow up without a father. After the war had ended in Europe, 12 million Germans were held as Allied prisoners of war, 2 million of them never to return home. Tens of millions more were displaced and haunted by the oppressions of war, men wearing the scars of battle and women scarred by the humiliation of abuse at the hands of the enemy or their own husbands returning from the torments of frontline service. The majority of the military casualties were citizens of the Soviet Union, China, Germany, and Japan, but the dead were mourned the world over (Weinberg 2005). The six years of carnage incinerated 60 million souls, among them 6 million Jews. The struggle of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for global supremacy exhausted the human and economic resources of much of Europe as well as East and Southeast Asia (Boldorf and Okazaki 2015).

The world war that began 80 years ago when the German armoured divisions crossed the Oder – and ended with a surrender act aboard a warship in Tokyo Bay – was the worst of all wars, ‘the War of the World’ that brought the ‘descent of the West’ (Ferguson 2006).

This column is a lead commentary in the Vo圎U Debate ' The Economics of the Second World War: Eighty Years On'

Ww2 aftermath today