Generally speaking, all of the major combatants of the Second World War put in place laws and state oversight commissions to put a ceiling upon profits made by private firms (the Soviet Union being the notable exception- its command economy operated on a different level). Although wartime propaganda often emphasized the need of government and private industry to work together to defeat a common enemy, the relationship between private business and state regulators was often quite tense. Donald M. Nelson, the head of the US War Production Board (WPB) that coordinated industries and the allocation of resources, never enjoyed a confident relationship with either industry or the military. Truman made a political name for himself by chasing after wartime profiteers, real or imagined.

In the case of Germany, Speer brought a degree of rationalization to the wartime economy in 1942. Speer required industrial producers like Messerschmitt to match the Armaments Ministry's standard fixed price for military hardware. If the firms produced a product below that price, they were thus entitled to keep the difference as profit. While this scheme looks good on paper, in practice the standardized pricing was far from rational and homogenous in the polycratic Third Reich; the standardized price could be set either too high or low. Moreover, this scheme gave industrial firms an incentive to employ the SS slave labor to keep prices down.

Overall, the Second World War's main boon to industry was less financial, but rather a sundry list of non-fiscal advantages that made postwar industry more efficient. Although the relationship between state regulatory boards and industry was often tense at the upper echelons, at the lower levels of this relationship could be quite different. The war fostered strong bonds of personal connections between managerial elites from private and public sectors and allowed for a smoother relationship between industry and the state during the postwar years. In the US, this relationship is exemplified by Robert McNamara, who brought his wartime managerial experience (the Air Corps used his business school acumen to render its bombing and resupply more efficient) to Ford Motor Company. The war also created new entities that fostered a relationship between state and industry that hitherto had not existed like the RAND Corporation. In Japan, MITI's charter generation of bureaucrats came from its wartime economic planning agencies.

More importantly, the war provided the major industrial powers a trained workforce, new managerial techniques, and modern industrial plant. The skilled labor force was an asset for much of reconstruction efforts after the war. This human capital was one of the foundations for the economic reassurance of both Germany and Japan. This human capital could also be managerial. Like McNamara, George Dantzig employed statistical techniques to rationalize the US strategic bombing offensive. This experience led him to focus on fine-tuning his theories on linear programming (a mathematical means to minimize cost and raise efficiency) at the RAND Corporation. Even though the war destroyed a lot of industry, the growth in new industrial plant was dramatic.One index of Germany's industrial plant, the Gütegrad, showed that industries favored by wartime expenditures like machinery, vehicles, and mining grew significantly during the war. Not surprisingly, these sectors of the economy became the bedrock of West Germany's economic miracle of the 1950s. Although wartime profits certainly helped, these factors were over the long run much more important to the health of these firms because they rendered postwar industry far more efficient than before.

Sources

Gropman, Alan L. Mobilizing U.S. Industry in World War II. Washington, DC: National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996.

Harrison, Mark. The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Penguin, 2008.

Yamamura, Kozo. The Economic Emergence of Modern Japan. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.