This tendency will nothing but do be accentuated: thus, at the time of the offensives of 1944, the Allies have more than 50 ' 000 armoured tanks and 25 million men, whereas the 15 million men of Germany and Japan has only 20 ' 000 armoured tanks; and if the Japanese industrial production corresponds in 1942 to 30% of the American production, it accounts for of them nothing any more but 15% at the beginning of 1945. It is this material superiority which explains on the whole the final victory of the Allies.

Saving in war

In Germany and in Japan
Germany, by rearming in a way accelerated since 1933, had set up a true saving in war in full peace.  

In 1937, a four years plan had organized the reduction of the imports and the search for substitute products. Albert Speer, the architect of Hitler, who will have as from 1942 the responsibility for the Equipment and the Ammunition then, in 1943, of all the production of war, will make reach in Germany, in spite of the combined bombardments, a level of industrial production higher than that of 1939. The German military expenditure will pass from 35% of the GNP in 1940 to 65% in 1944. Japan, organized militarily since its intervention in China in 1931, created in 1938 the Council of planning, and the State took the manufacturing control of the companies of the weaponry.  

The saving in war, in Germany as in Japan, is also supported by the plundering of the conquered countries. Raw materials, products of all kinds, even whole production units, paid a negligible fraction of their value or requisitioned, are forwarded to Germany. For the only year 1943.9 million tons of cereals taken on the territories of the East is forwarded to Germany. This one uses also human resources of the defeated: the Todt organization, which before the hostilities built in fifteen months the line Siegfried (Westwall), employs, as from 1942, its 2 million workers (of which 80% are foreigners) to build the Atlantic Wall and launching bases of V1, to move and bury the aeronautical factories.  

In the United States
The coordination of the effort of war is ensured the United States by specialized agencies, depending directly on the presidency, and in Great Britain by a departmental committee. These authorities, equipped with vast powers, define priorities, organize the distribution of the raw materials and deal with the distribution and the rationing, moderated in the United States. More surprising is undoubtedly that these provisions, which reinforced considerably in the two countries the prerogatives of the executive, were not opposed to the continuation of a quasi normal political life: in 1944, a presidential election proceeded in the United States, and the opposition to the government remained allowed there. The industrial results were remarkable, singularly in the United States. Victory Program of January 1942 considered the production of 50 ' 000 planes per annum: since 1943, the American factories leave 86 ' 000 apparatuses and 100 ' 000 in 1944. In four years, the United States provides to their armies 320 000 guns, 90 ' 000 tanks, 1 200 warships.  

In the USSR
The leaders of the USSR, them, had to organize a saving in war in a private country of half of its resources (the occupied territories by the German troops at the end of 1941 provided 40% from the cereal resources and 65% of the industrial potential). However, the centralization of the decisions, a pitiless compression of consumption, the allied assistance and some spectacular operations, like the disassembling and the reassembly, in the east of the country, of 1 500 production units, make it possible the Soviet Union to produce in spring 1943 as many planes and tanks Germany.

The mobilization of the populations

To mobilize and distribute the material resources are not enough. It is also necessary to organize the mobilization of the men, which, until the beginning of 1943 appears less thorough in Germany than at the Allies.  

In Germany
The civil conscription remains limited a long time and concerns only 700 ' 000 people in 1942. The work of the women is requested still little. On February 13th, 1943, following the defeat of Stalingrad, Goebbels makes acclaim the “all-out war” and launches the general mobilization of the German population. Thus, a constrained decree the old women from 17 to 45 years to present to the office local work, but 500 ' 000 only of the 3 million women who go there will be employed, because of many exemptions. The ideology explains it partly: Hitler refused a long time the recourse to work female, likely to distract the German women their tasks from mothers and wives. If this policy is possible, it is because the German effort of war massively uses the man resources of the conquered countries. The prisoners of war were sent, as from 1942, in the German factories and campaigns. At the same time, Fritz Sauckel was named plenipotentiary general of the service of labor, and started to recruit workmen in the occupied countries, by the promise of good wages then by the constraint. These measurements provided to the economy of Reich more than 7 million workers in 1944.  

In the allied countries
The mobilization of the population to the service of the effort of war was particularly thorough. In the United States and in Great Britain, one initially had recourse to the unemployed then with the women: thus, the American working population will understand 36% women in 1945, whereas it counted only 25% in 1941 of them. In the USSR, a decree of February 1942 founds the total mobilization of the old women from 15 to 45 years. All these countries also called upon the women in the fighting units (fighter pilots or tank crew members in the Soviet army) and especially in the auxiliary services of the army (Lottas Finnish, Wacs of the North-American army).  

In the United States, the requirements in labor were also met by calling upon the Blacks, hitherto especially employed in agriculture: the number of Blacks working in industry doubled during the war. As in the case of the women, their participation in the effort of war will lead them to call into question their social inferiority.  

Propaganda and monitoring

The First World War, with its mutinies and its revolutions, had shown that it was necessary, so that the mobilization of the men was effective, the major acceptance of the imposed sacrifices. The belligerent States thus will set up, throughout the war, of the devices intended to maintain devotion their populations.  

The control of information
Services of propaganda are formed or intensified their activity. They control information (the Soviet press will thus announce the loss of Smolensk only one month after the event) and use all the modern means of communication, in particular film and the radio, to exhort with the effort. In the United States, one mobilizes to the heroes of cartoons, such Donald. In the USSR, the people, initially called to defend the revolution, are, as from December 1941, guest to support the “patriotic war”: international cease to be the anthem of the Union; the Greek Orthodox Church, symbol of the Russia old woman, is rehabilitated; propaganda excites the memory of the tsars defenders of holy Russia attacked by the Germanic invaders or Napoleon.  

The enrollment of youth
In the countries of the Axis, an special attention is paid to youth. Fascistic Italy and the Nazi Germany lay out youth organizations (Balillas and Hitlerjugend) who ensure a paramilitary formation and which, in Germany especially, will often offer to the army of the fanaticized teenagers. In Japan, the elementary school is reformed in 1941 in order to provide to youth a national training whose the soldiers tomorrow will need. The sentimental songs inspired of the tradition disappear with the profit from patriotic songs, and, as from 1943, the training with martial arts becomes obligatory on all the levels of the Japanese school system.  

Repression
The control of the opinions comprises a repressive shutter, aiming at the opponents declared or potential. In the United States, the population of Japanese origin (the “Nisei”) private of her goods and is gathered in camps. Repression is much more systematic in the countries of the Axis and in the USSR, where propaganda is accompanied by the terror of State: the populations suspected of being able to make common cause with the invader are off-set towards the east, thus the Germans of the Volga. In Japan, groups of monitoring are organized in each district in order to track the “bad citizens”. In Germany, the diffusion of information given by the foreign radios is liable to death, and the application of these measurements will become increasingly rigorous: 5 800 civilians will be carried out in Germany during the only year 1944. The Hitlerian system of terror is pressed on a showpiece: deportation in the concentration camps. Opened since 1933 (Dachau), entrusted to the S which makes the worst atrocities there, their number increases considerably during the war. Buchenwald and Mauthausen are little open before 1939; Auschwitz or Treblinka is it during the war.  

Factors of motivation
Propaganda and repression are not the only factors influencing the moral one of the back. In Great Britain and the USSR, the force of the national feeling, the not very enviable fate promised to the defeated, a fair distribution of the effort of war, the hope which the world according to war will be better also played a part. In Great Britain the will of Winston Churchill is added to it to prevent a too great deterioration of the standard of living. A modernization of the agriculture supported by the State, an effective system of rationing, the return to the full employment and the rises of wages make it possible to limit the fall of consumption to 16 % during the war. During the conflict, one will note even a certain improvement of the sanitary arrangement of the British population.  

However, the terror of State does not explain to it only the absence of revolt in the countries of the Axis. In Germany, the authorities try to limit the degradation of the material situation of the civilians: consumption does not decrease that by 24 % during the war, much less than during the first world war; use the systematic of the prisoners of war and the deportees then foreign workers, volunteers or required, in the German factories makes it possible to offer possibilities of promotion to the German workers, who escape the civil conscription a long time.