Introduction

In 1987, the economic historians Jeffrey Mills and Hugh Rockoff lamented that:

Their complaint was not unjustified. In the late 1980s, over 40 years after the end of the Second World War, knowledge of the economic dimension of the conflict had hardly been developed. Yet more than any other war, the Second World War was a conflict in which economic factors were decisive, and that impacted economies more strongly than any previous or later war. The German occupation forcibly included Denmark and the Netherlands in a multinational economic block geared towards waging total war.

Total war – a term with a long genesis and a somewhat vague meaning – is used here to describe the type of conflict that arose, depending on one's definition, in the 1860s, in 1914, in 1940 or even as late as in 1942. Whatever starting point is chosen, the epithet ‘total’ sets the wars of the early twentieth century apart from what had gone before; the wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by contrast, had been ‘limited’. The changeover from one kind of war to another marked the beginning of a phase in which war necessitated the complete mobilization of the productive capabilities of nations and peoples. Bound together by nationalism and strengthened by industrialization, societies had become willing and able to devote resources and lives to warfare that simply defied comparison with the expenditure on previous wars. War was no longer ‘a continuation of politics by different means’, as Von Clausewitz put it, but had become a life or death struggle between entire peoples. As had become evident in the First World War, especially after 1916, belligerents in a total war cannot and will not limit the resources they devote to their war effort without ultimately paying with defeat. At bottom line, outcomes on the battlefield were a result of the ability of a nation (or an alliance of nations) to churn out people and material, and to minimize competing civilian consumption.