War economy

Philippe Le Billon describes a war economy as a "system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain the violence."

Some economists such as Seymour Melman argue, however, that the wasteful nature of much of military spending eventually can hurt technological progress.

"[4] Propaganda also played a large part in garnering support for topics ranging from tax initiatives to food conservation.

[5] In the case of World War II, the U.S. government took similar measures in increasing its control over the economy.

The Fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation across the English Channel before the Battle of Britain provided the sparks that were needed to begin the country's conversion to a wartime economy and the July 1940 passing of the Two-Ocean Navy Act.

[4] Because of the massive cooperation between government and private entities, it could be argued that the economic measures enacted prior to and during the Second World War helped lead the Allies to victory.

[7] The country has an annual military budget that is larger than those of India, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and France combined.

The Third Reich implemented a draft and built factories to supply its quickly expanding military.

The most important one, according to the historians Boldorf and Scherner, was France and "her highly developed economy... [being] one of the biggest in Europe.

For example, during the early months of the German occupation, Vichy France was forced to pay a "quartering" fee of twenty million Reichsmarks per day.

However, the German surrender to the Allies makes it difficult to tell what the Nazis' economic policies would have yielded in the long term.