I finished recently my last book of 2014, The British War Machine by David Edgertron. It is the third book I have read which was mostly dedicated to the economic reality before and during WWII, covering the British Empire. The brilliant Wages of Destruction did an amazing job to analyse the German situation while the decent Freedom's Forge shows a partially good view of the economic framework of the USA. I hope to get decent works on the Japanese and Soviet realities.

There is a suprising amount of interesting details in the book, an understandably rather confusing picture about the politics concerning research and technology and a somewhat irritating focus on some after-war quirks of British Historiography. I will focus on the implication of the relative economic strenghs and weaknesses of the British empire compared to the other powers, especially Germany.

1) There is no doubt that Britain itself had a considerably higher GNP per capita and still a bigger one in absolute terms then the German empire. Overall productivity was higher, to a good degree due to the different structure of agriculture and the capital stock was far bigger with foreign investment playing a big role. Needlessy to say that Britain was for good reasons a net importer.

2) This high GNP was partly due to the effects of the empire and the deep intergration into international trade facilitated by the dominant role Britain played as a trading hub. The international acceptance of the pound sterling and the high credit made it the access to foreign capital and ressources in relative terms far easier.

3) The European trade was surprisingly important compared to the one with the USA. Scandinavian ships played the dominant part in it and came mostly over to the British side after the German conquests.

4) After the fall of France European trade was pretty much non-existent and shipping became quite streched as a higher amount had to cover much longer distances. As an reaction the British tried to cut down on bulky, low-value imports like timber and animal feed and pushed hard for high-value, finished imports to get as much bang for the buck as possible.

5) Shipping losses were severe in the first two years but the increasingly efficient imports, counter-measurements and vastly increased ship-building shaped the trend firmly into the Empires favour. (The German U-boat war was of course an efficient use of ressources for the German side, however hampered oversea trade is vastly better then having no oversea trade)

6) The high $ reserves of the Empire enabled them to tap very early into the big US production reserves and stimulated its mobilisation.

7) Lend-Lease became increasingly important after the first two war-years but was at first considerably less important then the credit given by the rest of the Empire.

8) The British government spent a surprising high amount of its GDP pre-war on rearmament and was not greatly outspent by Germany. Obviously Britain could ramp up the investments for productions in Britain and abroad far easier then Germany for the reasons mentioned before.

9) For similar reasons the war production itself tended rather naturally to be more efficient. An extreme example was of course the ability to import vast amounts of oil instead of having to get it from coal in hugely expansive plants with and inefficient conversion process.

10) The many land defeats in the first years were, as it is now well documented by recent works, not due to inferior and fewer machines but due to and inferior performance of the British army especially compared to the German one.

11) Much of the former advantages rested of course on the shoulders of the vast navy with its many long-lead investments in shipping and it's ability to cut overseat trade for its European enemies, protect it's own and force the neutrals to switch theirs to the Empire.

12) The military success of Japan was more dangerous then I thought for Britain due to it's big navy, strong military forces and the ability to disrupt and conquer vital ressources of the Empire.

13) The British way of war seemed pretty American in comparision with the German one, with far superior capital endowment per fighting man.


I will leave it at that for the time being, the party does not wait. Happy new year.