5 - GNP and the defence burden

Summary

Gross national product

In World War II, once the powers of the Axis had failed to win the lightning victories upon which their success depended, the predominant factor was the scale of national resources deployed by each side. It was shown in chapter 1 that here the Allied powers vastly out-weighed the Axis. But the relative advantage of the Allies was much narrower on the eastern front than on the western front, or in the Mediterranean or Pacific theatres. One reason was that Germany, a rich, industrialised country with a large economy, committed the great bulk of her forces to the eastern front. There they confronted the Soviet Union, which was vast but poor. The other reason is that early German successes robbed the Soviet side of a substantial proportion of its prewar assets and output. The Soviet Union depended for its military success, therefore, more than the other Allies, upon the ability to mobilise a very high proportion of limited resources for combat.

In this chapter the book's main findings are presented: wartime GNP, employment and output per worker in different branches, the mobilisation of the workforce, the defence burden, the role of foreign supply. These findings are systematically compared with those of previous authorities (the official TsSU figures, and the later findings of Abram Bergson and Raymond Powell), together with the reasons for divergence (especially secrecy, statistical distortion, and index number problems).