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Chapter No.: 1
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Date:2/2/15
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In Britain and France economic observers followed what they could make
out of the drama in Nazi Germany with bated breath. Was an economic crisis
driving Hitler to war? Might economic concessions open the door to negoti-
ations? Was the regime fully in control? What was clear was that Germany
’s
hugely increased armaments effort in 1938 demanded an escalation of their
own efforts. After the Anschluss, the British Cabinet approved a dramatic
acceleration of air rearmament, calling for the production of up to 12,000 new
aircraft over the following two years.
20
Worries about the interference of
rearmament with
‘business as usual’ were put aside, although care was still
taken not to stray too far from economic orthodoxy: the Treasury repeatedly
rejected plans for economic planning mechanisms to coordinate the
expanded military production, and the Bank of England
’s calls for exchange
controls to protect sterling from the
financial pressures of rearmament also
fell on deaf ears. But Hitler was forcing the pace. The Prague coup of March
1939
led to a doubling of the size of the territorial army, the introduction of
conscription, and the establishment of a peacetime supply ministry to plan
and coordinate rearmament and cooperation between labour and industry on
industrial production. By the eve of the war in 1939, Chamberlain
’s conserva-
tive government had been forced to countenance an unprecedented array of
interventionist measures.
21
The French were more unwavering in their commitment to the orthodox-
ies of economic liberalism. In 1938, the Senate roundly rejected Blum
’s
suggestion that exchange controls accompany his new proposal for rearma-
ment, a defeat that led to the fall of what was left of the Popular Front
government. Blum
’s successor, the right-wing Édouard Deladier, called for
the doubling of France
’s defence spending in April, but his Minister of
Finance, Paul Reynaud, rejected any means of
financing it that were not in
line with the strict principles of
fiscal moderation and laissez-faire. In the face
of a general strike that broke out in November 1938, Reynaud insisted that
rearmament be accompanied by cutbacks in all non-military and social
spending, shifting the burden onto the backs of labour. Reynaud hoped that
rearmament could be
financed through the revenue of savings bonds. As
long as con
fidence in the French economy could be maintained, the willing-
ness of French savers to support the state would allow rearmament without
20
G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury,
1932–1939 (Edinburgh University
Press, 1979), p. 156.
21
Talbot Imlay, Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain
and France,
1938–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 299–354.
a d a m t o o z e a n d j a m e s r . m a r t i n
38
Comp. by: SSENDHAMIZHSELVAN
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in
flation. But, as in Germany, even if the domestic balance could be pre-
served, the foreign account posed a constant challenge. How was France
with its national economy devoted increasingly to armaments to pay for
imports, above all of American aircraft? By the summer of 1939, with
armaments spending surging ahead of revenue, the French state was without
a coherent strategy: it had neither the money to pay for, nor the institutional
mechanisms to coordinate, the industrial production needed to
fight and win
the coming European war.
22
By 1939 as war approached the macroeconomic balance of the major
combatants was quite unlike that in 1914. The conventions of the regular
international economy had long ago been abandoned. Germany, Japan, Italy,
France, Britain and the Soviet Union were unbalanced by government spend-
ing to a degree never seen before in peacetime. The one exception was the
USA, where military spending was less than 2 per cent of GDP and the
economy was still struggling to recover from the double-dip recession that
struck in 1937. When war
finally began in September 1939 there was on all sides
a wave of recrimination about inadequate preparation. Even in Nazi Germany
there were those who believed that more could have been done. And they
were, of course, right. But rather than appropriating these contemporary
arguments as our own, if we view the 1930s in longer-term perspective what
we should not underestimate is the novelty and drama of the situation created
by the collapse of the
first effort at comprehensive political and economic
stabilization in the wake of total war. Not only did the governments of the
world face the immediate problem of recovery from the Great Depression,
but they had to square that demand with the hypothetical of a total war, the
scale of which was only gradually becoming clear even to those who were
bent on unleashing it. That the result was a series of makeshift and more or
less unbalanced improvisations can hardly be surprising. The
financial effort
involved and the industrial, technological and strategic uncertainties that had
to be balanced posed new problems of modern government.
War mobilization
The outbreak of the war over Poland in September 1939 at least had the effect
of clarifying strategic positions. Britain and France were preparing for an
attritional, economic war. Unlike in 1914 they did not count on the offensive.
22
Imlay, Facing the Second World War, pp. 255
–98.
The economics of the war with Nazi Germany
39