Societies at War

Even more than World War I, World War II depended on industrial productivity. The Axis countries remained at a disadvantage throughout the war despite their initial conquests, for the Allies consistently outproduced them. (See “Taking Measure: Wartime Production of the Major Powers, 1939–1945.”) For example, in 1942, Great Britain and Russia produced collectively nearly 50,000 aircraft while Germany produced around 15,000. Even as Germany occupied the Soviet industrial heartland and besieged many of its cities, the USSR increased its production of weapons. Both Japan and Germany made the most of their lower output, especially in the use of Blitzkrieg. The use of vast quantities of stolen resources and of millions of slave laborers also helped, but both Japan’s and Germany’s belief in their racial superiority prevented them from accurately assessing the capabilities of an enemy they held in contempt.

Allied governments were overwhelmingly successful in mobilizing civilians, especially women. In Germany and Italy, where government policy particularly exalted motherhood and kept women from good jobs, officials began to realize that women were desperately needed in the workforce. Nazis changed their propaganda to emphasize the need for everyone to take a job, but their messages were not effective enough to convince women to take the low-paid work offered them. In contrast, Soviet women constituted more than half their nation’s workforce by war’s end, and 800,000 volunteered for the military, even serving as pilots. As the Germans invaded, Soviet citizens moved entire factories eastward. In a dramatic about-face, the government encouraged devotion to the Russian Orthodox church as a way of boosting patriotism.

Even more than in World War I, civilians faced propaganda, censorship, and government regulation. People were glued to their radios for war news, but much of it was tightly controlled. The totalitarian powers often withheld news of military defeats and large casualty numbers in order to keep civilian support. Wartime films focused on aviation heroes and infantrymen as well as on the self-sacrificing workingwomen and wives on the home front. In most countries, it was simply taken for granted that civilians would not receive what they needed to survive in good health. Soviet children and old people were at the greatest risk, a high proportion of them among the one million residents who starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. Government specialists regulated the production and distribution of food, clothing, and household products, all of which were rationed and generally of lower quality than before the war. With governments standardizing such items as food, clothing, and entertainment, World War II furthered the development of mass society.

On both sides, propaganda and government policies promoted racial thinking. Since the early 1930s, the German government had published ugly caricatures of Jews and Slavs. Similarly, Allied propaganda during the war depicted Germans as perverts and the “Japs” as insectlike fanatics. The U.S. government forced citizens of Japanese origin into internment camps, while Muslims and minority ethnic groups in the Soviet Union were uprooted and relocated away from the front lines as potential Nazi collaborators. As in World War I, both sides drew colonized peoples into the war through forced labor and conscription into the armies. Some two million Indian men served the Allied cause, as did several hundred thousand Africans. As the Japanese swept through the Pacific and parts of East Asia, they, too, conscripted local men into their army.