1 - From Foe to Friend

Summary

The Axis defeat in 1945 ushered in a lengthy American-dominated Allied military occupation in Germany and Japan, which started in a highly punitive mode. The occupation authorities focused on rooting out the purveyors of Nazism and ultranationalist Japanese ideology. The occupiers also sought to eliminate the military and to dismantle or severely restrict industrial capacity. The unintended consequences of these punitive measures were, however, momentous in the medium and long term. In their quest to eliminate the massive concentrations of economic power of monopolistic corporations, American trustbusters redefined the competitive landscape, mostly for the better. And the Allied ban on the aviation industry in both countries caused aeronautical engineers and managers to seek employment in other quarters, above all in the automobile industry. They and the companies they worked for swiftly applied to car manufacturing what they had learned about quality control and efficiency from supplying airplanes to the Luftwaffe and the Japanese military. The result was high-quality mass production, which soon extended to other industries. In Japan, moreover, teams of former aviation engineers and managers were hired by the Railway Ministry, where they applied their stubbornness and can-do attitude in developing the bullet train.